In dialogue, characters speak sparingly, without much affect. Hooper's approach to mise-en-scène conjures a Wes Anderson film: all static, locked-off tableaux or restless tracking shots. Nor, despite the presence of sentient animals, is it baldly allegorical, like Animal Farm or The Pilgrim's Progress. The style is most obviously reminiscent of a fable or storybook, but Etta and Otto and Russell and James is not aimed at children (fables aren't usually 300 pages long, either).
Repetition is often used in lieu of adverbs: We're told Otto "slept and slept" or "searched and searched " that his army battalion "walked and lifted and shuffled and marched and walked and lifted and marched." Not only does Hooper's omniscient narrator speak this way, her characters do, too: "I will make and make until you get back," Otto writes to Etta with regard to the stack of recipes she has left him. She has a rare passion for the word "and" as well as for list-making and enumerating, which, in combination, sometimes crosses the line into tweeness. The book's title offers a hint of Hooper's intentionally naive, conjunction-drunk style. That Etta's journey has a psychic or spiritual dimension is implied, in part, by the novel's magic-realist elements, the most magical of which is Etta's travelling companion, a talking coyote named James (the most fantastical is the total absence of biting insects when Etta sleeps, unsheltered, in Northern Ontario's wilderness in high summer). Her reason for doing so and Otto's for not trying to stop her, however, are for him to know and for us to find out.įrom here, we slip continuously between the present, in which Etta walks and Otto waits – he fills his time caring for his newly adopted guinea pig and building a menagerie of life-size papier-mâché animals – and the past, where we get an account of Etta and Otto's first meeting when she was a teacher and he her (slightly younger) pupil at the local school, and their epistolary courtship when Otto joins up to fight in the Second World War. I will try to remember to come back." Otto, like any loyal spouse, can finish 84-year-old Etta's sentences as well as her thoughts, so he quickly concludes she is headed for the Atlantic coast. I've never seen the water, so I've gone there. On page one, Otto wakes to find a note from Etta: "I've gone. Etta and Otto, the first two characters in the title of Emma Hooper's debut novel, are a childless, elderly couple from rural Saskatchewan.
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