Hating Gladys

...Leona Gom's Hating Gladys divides its action over two locales... both in Canada: Kulane Lake, Yukon, and Vancouver. This novel's structure is further split across time: the first half details life at a wilderness lodge in the summer of 1965, and the second half spans the same months, May-August, 35 years later in Vancouver...

Gom is an accomplished writer with a dozen books of fiction and poetry to her credit; even without knowing this, a reader is likely to sense that she can safely surrender herself to the care of this solid storyteller. The narrative is sparse and clear, the settings naturalistic, the tone realistic, the pacing swift. Hating Gladys is in large part a mystery novel, and effectively plot-driven...

Gom's exploration of character makes this novel deeply compelling as it examines the cost of nurturing hatred, of clinging to, even defining ourselves by our scars and wounds. It details acts of betrayal and failures at compassion that leave us horribly sad. Lodge-owner Gladys is mean, she abuses her staff, and she kicks every creature that has the misfortune to cross her path. Yet the 1965 narrative contains enough mitigating information to humanize her, and Gladys keeps just shy of the label 'monster.' Thirty-five years later and as loathsome as ever, she emerges even more complex, self-aware yet out of control of her own power to alienate. Gladys remains both hateful and hating, a tragic figure who recognizes yet fails her own need for human connection. What a waste. Offsetting this fascinating failure is a cluster of women who befriend and support each other. They bring to the novel a promise of compassion and loyalty that sometimes astounds... These women at various times reach out, even take risks for each other. But their gestures are not universally successful, the women's motivations not altogether altruistic: like Gladys in her isolation, these women in community remain vulnerable and capable of hurting. Gom's novel is too intelligent to reduce any of these lives to cliché, and we're left pondering the relative merits of forgiveness and vengeance, of risking or withholding trust.

This book is such a great release... It's such a cathartic experience to have a character whom you can really loathe: racist, cheap, mean, cruel, you know, the whole gaunt. Gladys is everything. And one of the things that is wonderful and I think shows Gom's strength as a poet is that you have Gladys's voice, that corn-crick, nail-scratching-on-a-washboard voice of hers that stayed with me for weeks after I read this book. I could hear Gladys in my head. It's a really wonderful book about a character. [As for plot], this book has more twists than a lizard on hot cement, so this one can go. Hating Gladys shows what Leona Gom can do as a writer.

In Hating Gladys, West Coast author Leona Gom explores how two 16-year-old girls are unconsciously traumatized during a four-month term of summer employment at a lodge in Whitehorse. ... Lodge owners Charlie and Gladys Pratt, united only by their enmity for one another and their manipulation of their only child, Rodney, turn Gom's novel into a time bomb waiting to go off. ... Leona Gom wants readers to understand that forgiveness is preferable to revenge for the injustices we suffer from the deeds and words of others. The novelist in Gom prevents her from taking one track only and to the very last word the reader wonders in awe at both possibilities weighing the personal costs of revenge while keeping forgiveness in the background, hovering and close enought to touch, yet sadly unreachable.