by Lizzie McNeely

Despite being a book lover, the thought of book clubs turns me off. I tend to assume that they’re created by super moms to alleviate the guilt they suffer for spending an evening with their friends. The book serves as a cover; if self-edification is involved, then they aren’t slacking off. Secretly, though, the gathering is for socializing.

This is not the case with the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, a.k.a. the eccentric collective that populates Sean Dixon’s first novel, THE GIRLS WHO SAW EVERYTHING.

The members of this club live out literature with ferocity and passion. To fully experience Irving Layton’s poetry, for example, they abduct him from a geriatric centre, take him to a mountainside and crown him with a diadem of autumn leaves. Please, may I join?

We meet the Cabal as they’re beginning to immerse themselves in the oldest written narrative, The Epic of Gilgamesh. The girls don’t read the Penguin edition – they read the original off of ten stone Sumerian tablets. A delightfully quirky Quixotic adventure ensues: they brainwash via sex, follow a fitzbot robot across the Atlantic, get tangled up in the happenings of the Iraq War and a member gets scalped. Such risks and sacrifices are embraced by these literature lovers.

I am now going to make a slightly ridiculous, but justifiable comparison. Dixon’s book reminds me of the Baby-sitter’s Club series. Remember how there’d always be a second chapter that gives the back story of all the members? Same here. The equivalent of Kristy, the anal president, is found in Missy, president of the Cabal. Notes are methodically kept by members in The Book of Days, just like the BSC girls recorded thoughts in the club diary.

So it’s essentially a Baby-sitter’s Club book, but revved up on postmodern feminist and magic realist amphetamines. What a combo. Everyone’s favourite youth series made over with adult literary sensibilities. The bizarre events, zealous female characters and intertextual hauntings remind me of Jeanette Winterson and Aritha van Herk. Every chapter is filled with biff, bang, pow surprises! I love how the Cabal members live out loud, while engaging me intellectually. Dixon’s talent for revealing characters using details that delight in humanity’s quirks and coincidences reminds me of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. Suspend your disbelief and thrill in the oddities.

Perhaps we can create a Toronto branch of the Lacuna Cabal Book Club for Young Women at Under the Covers this Tuesday October 9th. Sean Dixon will be reading from THE GIRLS WHO SAW EVERYTHING at this She Does the City sponsored literary reading / slumber party boudoir night at the Gladstone from 7-10 pm. All in favour of crowning him with a diadem of autumn leaves, say aye.