Yolandi

Yolandi is the novel’s first-person narrator and a writer whose sharp self-scrutiny is inseparable from her efforts to care for her family. She moves among roles that do not settle into a single identity: sister to Elfrieda Von Riesen, daughter of Lottie, mother to Nora and Will, and a woman reckoning with divorce, desire, and grief. Her voice turns these conflicts into stories, jokes, and plans, but narration cannot make her sister’s crisis controllable. The gap between the wish to help and the limits of help gives her character its central tension.

Identity and Self-Assessment

Yolandi describes herself in her forties as soon to be divorced and as someone who had left her husband for reasons she had once considered valid. In the same painful inventory, she calls herself an indiscriminate lover, a daughter who nags Lottie about clichés, a sister unable to find the words that might save Elfrieda Von Riesen, and a writer who has made dubious claims about knowing ocean freighters and being a death tourist. The list gathers private judgments and family responsibilities until they become difficult to separate: she does not merely fear failing her sister but treats that possible failure as evidence against her whole self.

That self-accusation breaks through in a garage, where an ordinary problem with Lottie’s car becomes the occasion for a much larger collapse. Yolandi walks three blocks to Jason’s garage after he has suggested she come before it closes at nine. She recognizes Jason from their first year at the University of Manitoba: he was in her CanLit class, borrowed her notes, and paid her with pot. Their group had called him Sad Jason after his girlfriend left him and he could not concentrate. Now he recognizes her by her name and remarks, “It’s not like there’s a plethora of them around.” The encounter returns Yolandi to a younger version of herself, but instead of offering a neat reunion with that past, it sharpens her awareness of the selves she has accumulated since.

She weeps until Jason awkwardly approaches and puts his greasy arms around her. His reassurance, “hey, it’s okay, don’t cry. It’s just a car,” names the immediate cause while exposing how little the car explains. The scene’s disproportion is important: Yolandi’s grief and shame arrive through a small, practical mishap, and Jason answers with a gesture of physical comfort rather than an interpretation of her life. For a moment, care consists simply of staying beside someone who is crying.

A Writer’s Voice and the Measure of Grief

Yolandi’s writing makes room for comic digression even as it circles bereavement. In one passage she closes with a Jane Austen allusion, then adds a postscript about a hill in Toronto and the former reach of Lake Ontario. The lake once extended much farther; when an ice dam melted about 13,000 years ago, its water drained away, and Davenport follows the route of an ancient shoreline. Yolandi entertains a fanciful possibility about the word “davenport,” then turns from the changing landscape to the pace at which continents move and to grief, which can pass quickly or seem to last forever.

The digression is more than a display of her wit or curiosity. It gives her a way to approach grief indirectly, by setting human loss beside geological change and uncertain measures of time. Even the postscript’s small uncertainty about whether continents move closer together or farther apart matters less to her than the pace itself. Yolandi can make a question out of what she cannot settle; the movement of the prose lets her think beside sorrow without pretending to resolve it.

Elfrieda Von Riesen and the Limits of Rescue

At Elfrieda Von Riesen’s hospital room, Yolandi enters a scene already shaped by effort and exhaustion. Lottie sits outside near the nurses’ desk, trying to muster cheerfulness and catch her breath. Inside, the room contains two single beds, one empty, two small desks, a high barred window, and a small crucifix above the door. Elfrieda lies motionless, facing the wall. Yolandi sits beside her and places a hand on her bony hip; Elfrieda murmurs a greeting and asks whether it is Swivelhead. The childhood nickname briefly carries their intimacy into the stark hospital room, though it does not make Elfrieda turn toward her.

Yolandi gives her sister news: Nic has left for Spain, Lottie is outside, and Tina’s condition has worsened to the point that she needs surgery. She asks how Elfrieda feels and receives no answer. When Yolandi asks whether Nic knows about her wish to go to Switzerland, Elfrieda slowly turns and shakes her head. The gesture discloses a consequential silence between spouses and makes clear that Yolandi is holding information Elfrieda has not shared with Nic. The scene leaves her with knowledge but no easy authority over what should happen next.

After the family sings in Elfrieda’s room, Yolandi tells her it is time to fight. Elfrieda replies that she has been fighting for thirty years. Yolandi asks whether that means her sister is leaving her to fight alone, but Elfrieda does not answer. The exchange exposes the mismatch between Yolandi’s urgent, present-tense appeal and the long duration of Elfrieda’s suffering. Yolandi does not withdraw from the conversation; she takes her sister’s hand and says she has a plan. The plan is an attempt to turn love into something actionable, even though the scene has already shown that encouragement cannot dictate what another person can endure.

Plans, Family, and Courage

Yolandi’s proposed plan is for Elfrieda Von Riesen to stay with her in Toronto after leaving the hospital. She tells Lottie that she will be home all the time and that Nora will be there often, making the offer a change of setting and company rather than a demand that Elfrieda perform recovery on anyone else’s terms. Yolandi suggests renting a piano if her sister wants to play and even getting a boat. The concrete possibilities give the invitation shape, while her assurance that there would be no pressure acknowledges how little can be guaranteed. She presents it as worth trying, not as a cure.

Lottie’s talk of bravery prompts Yolandi to ask how brave, exactly. Lottie answers by invoking Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Yolandi then makes the proposal for Toronto. The sequence links the question of courage to a practical act of hospitality: instead of offering a grand theory of bravery, Yolandi imagines a home where her sister might stay, with music and ordinary shared time available if wanted. The proposal is significant as an expression of commitment, whether or not it can alter Elfrieda’s despair.

Yolandi’s maternal relationship with Nora also appears through small gestures that register how unsettled she is. After Dan tells her that Nic had tried to call, Yolandi hands her phone to Nora and asks her to hold it, adding, “I don’t want it.” On their walk back to the apartment, Nora carries both tennis rackets and the balls while Yolandi holds her daughter’s free hand. Yolandi hears what seems like the subway rumbling beneath them, then realizes it is her thoughts colliding as they try to rearrange themselves. The physical details hold together what her mind cannot: Nora bears the equipment, and Yolandi keeps hold of her hand.

Humor, Memory, and Continuing

A family memory offers another measure of Yolandi’s bond with Lottie. As a child, Yolandi once went to school with one of her mother’s pantyhose pulled over her face. Lottie whispered, “Swivelhead, attempt to be cool.” Yolandi says that she still summons those words often and understands them as part of what Lottie was trying to tell her in the hospital. The remembered phrase is comic and corrective at once: family humor can puncture an impulsive performance without erasing affection. Yolandi also says she has stopped pranking the hospital, allowing the old joke to sit beside the present crisis rather than turn it into a joke.

When Lottie recovers, she, Yolandi, and Nora travel to New York to see Will and Zoe and visit the Museum of Modern Art. At a Marina Abramović exhibition, visitors hesitate at a narrow doorway where two naked performers stand facing one another. Lottie approaches in her purple cords and windbreaker, turns sideways to pass, pauses between the performers, and smiles and nods to each. Yolandi is part of the family group witnessing this deliberate passage. The scene does not make illness or fear disappear; instead, it shows Lottie moving through a constriction with composure, in a moment that the family shares.

Across these scenes, Yolandi repeatedly tries to make connection tangible: a hand on her sister’s hip, a hand taken in return, an offer of a room in Toronto, a hand held by Nora on the walk home. Her characteristic movement is from self-reproach toward an act of care, though no act guarantees the outcome she wants. Her writing preserves both sides of that movement. It gives grief images and measures—the shrinking lake, the uncertain pace of continents—while leaving grief unresolved. Yolandi’s significance lies not in mastering the crisis but in continuing to speak, propose, remember, and stay beside the people she loves.