Author Author

by Bob MacKenzie

The woman enters the restaurant tentatively, hesitant, looking carefully around. She is early and not at all certain the person she is to meet has arrived yet. She has never met him, has no idea what he looks like, how he is dressed.

I am that person and this is my first impression of Cynthia Holz. As she moves uncertainly in a direction away from me, I wave. She smiles and comes to sit at my booth. In a twist reminiscent of her novel, she apologises for being early. The interview has begun.

Cynthia Holz is a pleasant, attractive woman in her mid-forties. My first impression is not that she is quite tall, which she is, or that she is bright and intelligent, which she is, but that there is a calm centre, a quiet confidence to this woman. What was to have been an interview seems more like a pleasant conversation with an old friend.

The liner notes use the word "funny" in describing Holz' novel, Onlyville. While I have noticed that some scenes are written with wit and humour, in my reading of the book I did not find it funny. I ask the author what she had intended.

Holz' describes the novel as having "funny passages, black humour, and satirical elements" but is quick to point out that a publicist and not she wrote the liner notes.

"I don't think Anna's situation is at all humorous, but some events are humorous. I didn't write this as a funny book, and yet there is humour in it; there is satire in it. It saves the book from being heavy and ponderous, easier I think for the reader to digest the more serious sections."

Like W. O. Mitchell, Cynthia Holz views her reader as a partner in the work, putting as much into it as she does. This, she believes, contributes to the impression of some readers that Onlyville is funny and others that it is not.

"Reader response has very little to do with me and what I have put in there. It has to do with the readers' personal tolerance for pain and what they think is funny. I do think though, that I have an eye for the absurd and the overblown, for the satirical."

Asked the obligatory question about the degree to which her book is autobiography, Holz makes it clear the character Anna is not her.

"I deliberately made Anna older so she would be out of phase with the sixties and seventies, not quite as caught up in those times as I was. I wanted Anna to be out of phase with things. That emphasizes her aloneness.

"Very little in the book ever happened to me. Because I moved to Canada at about the same time as Anna leaves her lover Sal in the book, interviewers often ask if I also left a lover. Anna left her lover to move to Onlyville. She was running away. I was posted to Canada on assignment as a journalist for Business Week. It was a career move.

"Anna is more passive than I ever was. I feel very empathetic toward her, but I also feel empathetic toward Sal and Helene. There are aspects of myself in all of them, but none of them are me. They are characters in a novel. The town is fictional. The island is a compilation of islands I have known.

"I was interested in the process of change: why some people change and some don't. And I wanted to map a woman's psyche over a long period of time."

When I read Onlyville, my impression was that most of the characters, and especially Anna, were ruled by people and events outside themselves and had little control over their own lives. Holz says that, rather, this is the story of Anna's growing control over her own life.

"For me, Anna does exert some sort of control. And that's what motivates her, what moves her forward. She stood up and said 'I'm going to go off on my own and follow my own fate.'

"In the beginning Anna didn't have an awareness of self, and she develops that. She had to break it, take a step to break that loop. At the same time, I deliberately left the ending open."

Early in our conversation, Holz had expressed quite emphatically that she does not like labels. In recent times, when a woman writes a book about a woman central character, a certain community tends to claim and label it as a "women's book". Since I do not perceive Onlyville as a book which should be so narrowly defined, I ask Holz about the risk that this label might become attached to her book.

"That she is a woman is just one of the factors that is affecting this person. I am writing about the human condition, about the layers and intricacies and complexities of human behaviour. And I'm not taking sides.

"I'm just as interested in Sal. I wanted to do a moving book. I wanted to make people care about how difficult it is to change, about the resistance we all have to change. Sal doesn't have the courage to change.

"There is the surface story. If they read it just for that, they're missing my book. I wanted to write the most complex character I could. It's about the complexity of making decisions. I think an aware reader will get that, will feel the complexity.

"I wanted to evoke emotion, but I wanted to do it without getting melodramatic. There's a lot of loss going on, a lot of pain.

"I have a love/hate relationship with the reader," she tells me, "with trusting the reader to stay with me, with trusting the reader to understand."

I ask Holz about the writing of the novel, about her process as an author. She tells me that from the beginning she had planned the three part structure of the novel, but that it was not written in sequence as published.

"I wrote the middle part first, about the events in Anna's early life. I thought it would be the beginning, but then I realized it needed something else. Then I wrote the first chapters and they set up and supported the chapters that became Part Two."

I note that there are patterns throughout the book, repeated characters and events that evoke the sense that the story is a cycle that repeats itself. Holz tells me she is "very aware of the lyricism" in Onlyville.

"The patterns were very conscious. The patterns often dictated the characters or the situation."

Onlyville seems to me a very Canadian story. I ask Holz if, as a former New Yorker living in Toronto, she feels she is an American or a Canadian writer. She smiles, then tells me that both as a writer and as an individual, she feels very much Canadian.

"I think of Canada as my spiritual home. I crossed the border and the feeling overwhelmed me. I thought, 'this is where I belong'. I don't have anyone in the States anymore. I have a father in Florida. I have a brother in New Hampshire. That's all.

"All my friends are here. My writing career is here. I am totally unknown as a writer in the United States. This is where my readers and writing colleagues are. I'm part of the Canadian literary scene."

It seems only minutes, but I am on my second cup of coffee and more than an hour has passed since I began my conversation with Cynthia Holz. She has come straight to the restaurant from her train and has not let anyone know she is in town yet. Later in the evening she will be reading from her novel and has to prepare for that. Ending as pleasantly as it began, the interview is over.