Rhinestone Button

Gail Anderson-Dargatz, the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Cure for Death by Lightning and A Recipe for Bees, brings readers once again into the heart of rural Canada with A Rhinestone Button. As funny as it is tender, it is a novel full of true-to-life characters, natural wonder, and sweet surprises.

Despite growing up in the small farming town of Godsfinger, Alberta, Job Sunstrum was always a bit of an outsider. A thin young man with blond, curly hair, he loved baking and cooking, and certainly did not fit in with the rough-and-tumble farmboys around town. There wasn’t much understanding to be had at home on the family farm, either, where his domineering father and bully of a brother ran roughshod over his life. But even when Job takes over the farm after his father’s death and his brother’s departure to train as a pastor, his community remains his animals, and perhaps the church women with whom he shares his baking on Sundays. Lonely beyond belief, overwhelmed by religious guilt, and taut with fear at the thought of what life might have in store for him, Job can only turn to God and hope that someday, things will turn around: he will find a nice Christian woman to marry, and settle down to the farming life, as his father had before him. Only his synesthesia — his ability to see sounds as colours, and feel vibrations as solid forms — provides him with passing moments of solace, but it also reaffirms for him that he experiences the world in a way the other people of Godsfinger could not possibly understand. And that there is some sort of knowledge that everyone else shares, a certainty, that must have skipped him by.

Then one year, Job’s “tightly coiled” life begins to fall apart, and even the small sureties that got him through the days are torn away from him. His brother Jacob and his family return to live on the farm, pushing Job out of his home and into the hired hand’s cabin. His neighbour Will, the closest thing he has to a friend, is exposed to the town as gay and Job is consumed with guilt by association. The colours even disappear from sounds. Faced with change on every level and not knowing how to live outside the world he was brought up in, Job allows himself to be caught up in the Pentecostal drive of a preacher named Jack Divine, in hopes that clinging to his beliefs, proving his faith, and doing what others expect of him will make everything all right. But when his new-found religious fervour only accelerates his despair and his world continues to crumble, Job is surprised to find that true faith can be found in earthly experiences, and come from the most unlikely of sources. That a world without the familiar colours and shapes of sound is not half-heard, as he feared, but freed to break out in song.

Like Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s previous novels, A Rhinestone Button is a loving and magical portrait of small-town life that makes us question what we believe is real, and true. Just as sounds leap to Job’s eyes in vivid explosions of colour, the words on these pages are landmines of image and meaning, bringing the people and the landscape of Godsfinger to life in our own minds. We can hear the whistle of ducks’ wings as they fly overhead, and smell the warm grassy breath of curious cows as they cluster around our chairs. Characters break through the molds of what’s expected by their neighbours, and by us, and populate the towns of our imaginings. There’s Dithy Spitzer, the town oddball who patrols the streets with her water pistol and lectures people on safety, yet has an oracle’s ability to speak the truth; Darren, a messed-up, adultering husband haunted by the ghost of his father, whose past makes one wonder how he survived at all; Ed, Will’s ex-lover, who helps Job understand that being a good man is about more than who you have sex with; and of course Liv, a hippie waitress who doesn’t believe in God, but does believe, and ultimately leads Job to a new level of faith. And Gail Anderson-Dargatz brings her readers right along with him, on a synesthetic journey that reaffirms our faith in great stories, and great art.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz used to live on a farm near Millet, Alberta and now lives on Vancouver Island with her husband and their son. She is the author of The Miss Hereford Stories, and of the bestselling novels, The Cure for Death by Lightning — winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Award, the VanCity Book Prize and the Betty Trask Prize, and a Giller Prize finalist — and A Recipe for Bees — also a Giller Prize finalist and one of The Globe and Mail’s top books of 1998.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz grew up in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, and has lived with her husband on farms in snowy Alberta and in the temperate rain forest of Vancouver Island. Her mother, who also wrote, instilled literary confidence in Gail, so that by the age of eighteen, she knew she wanted to be the next Margaret Laurence, writing about Canadian farming women. “Laurence’s interest in them made me feel that their and my experience was important.” In her early twenties, the future author got a job as a reporter for the Salmon Arm Observer, but continued to enter her fiction in competitions. One submission caught the attention of the writer Jack Hodgins, who encouraged her to enrol in his course at the University of Victoria. She graduated from there with a B.A. in creative writing.

While a student she met Floyd Anderson-Dargatz, a farmer’s son who was studying anthropology; she eventually proposed to him. They combined their studies with farm work, and had customers on campus: “I delivered eggs to the philosophy department on my way to the creative writing department. We raised rabbits for local restaurants, and custom-raised pork and chicken to the tastes of a couple of instructors.” After their marriage, Floyd worked as a dairy herdsman while Gail wrote, but his severe illness — he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, from which he is still recovering — set them back.

The tide really turned for Gail’s literary career when she won first prize in the CBC Literary Competition for a story that would later become part of her first novel. When a Toronto literary agent took her on she already had a short story collection ready to go: The Miss Hereford Stories. Set in the 1960s in the fictional town of Likely, Alberta, (“what you call a half-horse town”) the book, with its cast of colourful eccentrics, was published in 1994 and nominated for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. The Cure for Death by Lightning, her first novel, followed two years later.

Now Anderson-Dargatz is successful enough to work full-time on her writing, and says, “Floyd and I survived real poverty and near homelessness during his illness, so I can’t begin to describe what this means to me. I pinch myself every day.” She employs Floyd to help her with research and publicity, interviews and travel, and he’s also the first person to read everything she writes. Living in a rural community, her circle of friends includes backhoe drivers, loggers and nurses. “I don't spend a lot of time with writers. I don't think it's healthy. What sort of stories are you going to get from other writers?”

Although she is influenced by Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, her mentor Jack Hodgins and favourite writers such as Toni Morrison, “my inspiration comes from the people and landscapes around me more than from other books.” Saturday Night magazine has said that the inclination to write about rural characters sets Anderson-Dargatz apart from many writers of her generation, who tend towards urban fiction. What does she find so fascinating about small-town and country life? “Once you step off the concrete, life stops being abstract and starts being very real, very immediate, very fundamental and very sensual.”

Her style has been called “Margaret Laurence meets Gabriel García Márquez” because she writes about magic, but she says the ghosts and premonitions come from family stories, which she carefully transcribes. “My father passed on the rich stories and legends about the region I grew up in, which he heard from the interior Salish natives he worked with.” Delighted as she is to be dubbed the next Margaret Laurence, she’s careful to remind people that she’s only at the beginning of her career.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz, the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Cure for Death by Lightning and A Recipe for Bees, brings readers once again into the heart of rural Canada with A Rhinestone Button. As funny as it is tender, it is a novel full of true-to-life characters, natural wonder, and sweet surprises.

Despite growing up in the small farming town of Godsfinger, Alberta, Job Sunstrum was always a bit of an outsider. A thin young man with blond, curly hair, he loved baking and cooking, and certainly did not fit in with the rough-and-tumble farmboys around town. There wasn’t much understanding to be had at home on the family farm, either, where his domineering father and bully of a brother ran roughshod over his life. But even when Job takes over the farm after his father’s death and his brother’s departure to train as a pastor, his community remains his animals, and perhaps the church women with whom he shares his baking on Sundays. Lonely beyond belief, overwhelmed by religious guilt, and taut with fear at the thought of what life might have in store for him, Job can only turn to God and hope that someday, things will turn around: he will find a nice Christian woman to marry, and settle down to the farming life, as his father had before him. Only his synesthesia — his ability to see sounds as colours, and feel vibrations as solid forms — provides him with passing moments of solace, but it also reaffirms for him that he experiences the world in a way the other people of Godsfinger could not possibly understand. And that there is some sort of knowledge that everyone else shares, a certainty, that must have skipped him by.

Then one year, Job’s “tightly coiled” life begins to fall apart, and even the small sureties that got him through the days are torn away from him. His brother Jacob and his family return to live on the farm, pushing Job out of his home and into the hired hand’s cabin. His neighbour Will, the closest thing he has to a friend, is exposed to the town as gay and Job is consumed with guilt by association. The colours even disappear from sounds. Faced with change on every level and not knowing how to live outside the world he was brought up in, Job allows himself to be caught up in the Pentecostal drive of a preacher named Jack Divine, in hopes that clinging to his beliefs, proving his faith, and doing what others expect of him will make everything all right. But when his new-found religious fervour only accelerates his despair and his world continues to crumble, Job is surprised to find that true faith can be found in earthly experiences, and come from the most unlikely of sources. That a world without the familiar colours and shapes of sound is not half-heard, as he feared, but freed to break out in song.

Like Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s previous novels, A Rhinestone Button is a loving and magical portrait of small-town life that makes us question what we believe is real, and true. Just as sounds leap to Job’s eyes in vivid explosions of colour, the words on these pages are landmines of image and meaning, bringing the people and the landscape of Godsfinger to life in our own minds. We can hear the whistle of ducks’ wings as they fly overhead, and smell the warm grassy breath of curious cows as they cluster around our chairs. Characters break through the molds of what’s expected by their neighbours, and by us, and populate the towns of our imaginings. There’s Dithy Spitzer, the town oddball who patrols the streets with her water pistol and lectures people on safety, yet has an oracle’s ability to speak the truth; Darren, a messed-up, adultering husband haunted by the ghost of his father, whose past makes one wonder how he survived at all; Ed, Will’s ex-lover, who helps Job understand that being a good man is about more than who you have sex with; and of course Liv, a hippie waitress who doesn’t believe in God, but does believe, and ultimately leads Job to a new level of faith. And Gail Anderson-Dargatz brings her readers right along with him, on a synesthetic journey that reaffirms our faith in great stories, and great art.

1. As a youth, Job just assumed that everyone saw colours in sounds as he did, but when he realized his experiences weren’t shared by his parents or Will, he hid his ability. But eventually, Job is able to open up about his synesthesia (to Jocelyn, to Liv…). What changed? Discuss Job’s synesthesia, and his loss of it, in relation to his worldview. Why do you think Job lost this ability? Does “because a duck smashed into his head” suffice, or is there something more to it?

2. The male characters of A Rhinestone Button all have or have had difficult relationships with their fathers, with the roots of the conflicts often going back generations. Darren’s father haunts him in the form of a ghost, and Abe haunts Job and Jacob in less obvious ways. The younger generation — Ben, Jason — are also being caught up in these cycles. In what different ways do the men of this novel act out against, or try to come to terms with, their fathers?

3. The relationship between Will and Ed is upsetting to Job, and condemned by Jacob, Will’s mother, and others in the town. How is the conflict between homosexuality and religion dealt with in this novel? In a wider sense, how does Anderson-Dargatz use all of her characters to explore traditional notions of masculinity and femininity?

4. The grain silos that dot the landscape of the Canadian Prairies are, for many of us, symbols of the farming life, and visuals of them being torn down to make room for suburbs have come to signify a sad passing of that way of life. But at the end of A Rhinestone Button, Job, Liv, Jason, Ben, Will and Jerry cheer as the silos hit the ground, and the novel ends with Liv’s “Hallelujah.” What does the passing of the farming life mean to these characters? To Job, in particular?

5. The epigraph for this novel is from the Book of Job, and Job Sunstrum seems to be molded from his biblical namesake: he fears God, shuns evil, and survives many tests as his life is cut out from under him. Discuss the parallels between the two stories. How does Anderson-Dargatz both support and subvert an allegorical reading of A Rhinestone Button?

6. The characters in this book have a remarkable ability to elude our attempts to pin them down. For instance, Lilith is a fairly unsympathetic character throughout the novel — she takes over Job’s home and kitchen, and even puts his cat in the dishwasher. But in chapter nineteen, when she breaks down and exposes her fears, Lilith seems to be recreated in Job’s eyes. Discuss the characters of this novel, and how they relate to one another one-on-one, versus how they are defined by the opinions of their neighbours.

7. Like many writers, Gail Anderson-Dargatz writes elements of her own life into her fiction, but unlike many writers she does not hesitate to talk about how her own experiences creep into her work. For instance, there are parallels between Job Sunstrum and Gail’s husband Floyd, who himself had mystical experiences and a crisis of faith in his youth. At the same time, the author stresses that while there are autobiographical elements to her work, this is fiction. How does hearing about an author’s own stories and experiences influence your reading? In what ways do you bring your own life into this novel, and others?

8. While dealing with weighty themes and personal hardships, A Rhinestone Button is very much a comic novel. Humour is also at times seen in light of its infectious, healing potential: when Liv laughs at the story of Lilith putting the cat in the dishwasher, Job finds himself laughing with her; Job’s laugh allows Lilith to see the humour in her mad dash from the traffic officer; during the junk party, the locals howl as out-of-towners pick up their broken-down appliances from the side of the road as developers tear up Job’s family farm. Discuss the role humour plays in Job’s survival, and in this novel.

9. Looking to understand his life and how to make decisions, Job looks for signs from God, and finds them — a duck flying across his line of sight, Carlson’s plane circling the house — and interprets his experiences, such as the fading of his synesthesia, as divine tests. He even puts off getting his truck’s starter fixed, because whether the motor turns over or not has become “useful for ascertaining God’s will.” As readers, we also look for signs, or symbols, that point us towards meaning — an abundance of ducks, the bull caught twice in the lake. Discuss the symbolism at play in A Rhinestone Button. Are there meanings that are elusive? How does Anderson-Dargatz both encourage and discourage allegorical and symbolism-based readings of her work? Consider also the playfulness of the scene in the pub’s washroom, where Job wonders how men can escape the lives set out by their fathers and sees an actual sign that reads “This doorknob is a bit sticky. It will open with fiddling.”

10. At the end of the novel, Job no longer attends church, but collects moments: “…it might be that God was found, not in a church or some hazy hereafter, but in the tart taste of a beer, in the warm hand of a lover, on the whistling wings of ducks flying low overhead.” What kind of faith has Job found? Are there ways in which this worldview is celebrated throughout A Rhinestone Button?

11. Everyone in Godsfinger puts up with Dithy Spitzer’s nutty behaviour and prophetic rants. What role does this water-pistol wielding, self-appointed safety officer play in the novel? Does Job’s (our) view of her change when he gives her a lift home and joins her for tea?

12. In A Rhinestone Button, Gail Anderson-Dargatz continues her exploration of farm marriages that began in A Recipe for Bees, through the characters of Jacob and Lilith especially. Jacob agrees to settle down at the family farm in Godsfinger because Lilith is tired of moving, although he is certainly no farmer. How does their relationship work in comparison to other farm marriages in Anderson-Dargatz’s fiction?