Review of The Checkout Girl

The Checkout Girl

On the surface, this debut novel by Maritime-based writer Susan Zettell is a coming-of-age tale set against a backdrop of hockey, small-town living and swinging '70s. Underneath all that, it is an insightful and artful depiction of the tumultuous life of a downtrodden young woman, whose longing for "something more" is blocked by a lack of feminist options, a tragic childhood and an all-too-familiar uncertainty of what something more actually entails. Zetell's protagonist is Kathy Rausch, who bags groceries for a living in small-town Ontario but secretly dreams of making it big in any field that allows her to skate.

It is winter, 1970, and Kathy has just returned to her hometown of Varnum, Ont., from a stint in Vancouver with a no-goodnik named Doug. She is living in the basement of her old friend Penny, a once pure and nondescript goody-two shoes whose transformation into a teased, eye-lined and pleather-wearing bombshell landed her knocked up and dropped out. Penny's dope-dealing husband makes LSD in one of the university labs he maintains and grows pot among the peonies in a public planter. Also in the house is "Little Barry Bender," an engaged electrician who is little "everywhere," as Kathy learns first-hand from the pity sex she grants him to avoid sleeping alone. Kathy longs for more and on occasion gets it. Primarily, though, she gets more of the same -- the short end of the (hockey) stick. Zettell portrays her subtle frustration with ease and candour.

Kathy's love for the legendary Boston Bruin defenceman Bobby Orr has remained her one constant amid chaos the chaos of her life, and Zettell works wonders with her language every time No. 4 comes into the story. His finesse on the ice is a metaphor for the stability and grace that Kathy aspires to in her often frantic yet stagnant life filled with obstacles. It's no surprise Kathy finally musters some drive shortly after the Bruins, led by Orr, capture the Stanley Cup in 1970.

Published by the Winnipeg-based small press Signature Editions, the novel is filled with references to the era, including Trudeaumania and the FLQ crisis. It remains a mystery how Zettell pulls it all together. But she does it, and does it beautifully. For that, The Checkout Girl checks out.


The Winnipeg Free Press

More Reviews of this title

The Checkout Girl

The year is 1970, and the times they are a changing, as Bob Dylan said. And, for better or for worse, as the local industry struggles to keep its head above water, Varnum, Ontario is trying to adjust to the changing pace of the modern world.

University professors now buy LSD, middle-aged housewives have become hardcore feminists, and yet pregnant women still have to find a way to go to Montreal to get abortions.

The Checkout Girl is a realist novel, punchy and tender, where nothing is black or white, where disenchantment and pugnacity meet and mix. It is about acknowledging raw pleasures such as eating too many candies or spinning on a skating rink with a child in one¹s arms. It also deals with the silent hopes and unbearable longing of the youth for something hard to define, something new, something different.

Kathy Rausch has just come back to her native province after an unsatisfying commune experience in Vancouver. The 20-year-old checkout girl has no goals, no ambition... Except for an impossible dream. She wants to make her living on the ice, and not as a figure skater, but like Bobby Orr, her idol, the kid from Varnum who is now playing for the Boston Bruins. Skating like a man has never helped any woman Kathy knows find a job before, but there has to be a way to get a future on the ice, and Kathy waits for it to be revealed to her. How would she keep faith in herself if she gave up her dream? How would she stand sharing her room with a boa constrictor in the basement of a drug dealer's house, deal with her caring mother's concerns or bear the prevailing sexual pressure? Skating is central to Kathy's life; it helps her connect with her autistic younger sister. Skating is her way to let the steam out and just feeling her skates slide and grind on the ice gives her back a sense of humour. It is also a tribute to her father, a hockey fan, who died when she was a child. It can even be a cure against the most traumatic events of life.

Susan Zettell has already written about hockey and industrial Ontario in her short story collections. With The Checkout Girl, her first novel, she offers an uncompromising portrait of the beginning of the 1970s and paints stroke by stroke the crudeness, disillusions and small conquests of daily life.


The Link

The Checkout Girl

The Checkout Girl is the story of a young woman who works as a cashier, while dreaming of Bobby Orr and being a hockey player. The book is set in 1970 when such dreams, at least for women, were ridiculous and predictably, she has a rough time. Yet, in the end, she does manage to find a way to make a living from the ice and she survives, even thrives.

Zettell outlines some of the inspiration behind the book."The first fragment of the story occurred to me while I was playing hockey, or shinny really, on an outdoor rink in Ottawa," Zettell recalls. "I was part of a group of middle-aged women who formed a hockey team we called MAMMAH (Middle Aged Menopausal Mothers Attempt Hockey) to play shinny one night a week throughout the winter. I was terrified I¹d end up dead or at least with a concussion (which almost happened even with a helmet). But from the first night out, the skating, the exertion, the laughter and good-natured competitiveness, the sheer joy at playing outside in the dark in winter was exhilarating. I couldn't remember the last time I had had so much fun. So when I began to think about writing a novel in which a young woman was going through a sticky time in her life, I knew that hockey, but most particularly skating, some of it outdoors, would be at the heart of her life."


The Chronicle Herald

The Checkout Girl

Basketball, sailing, and hockey are sports that people play for the love of playing, if not for money, that rely as much on team dynamics as on the individual excellence of players. . . . Dedicated to all aspects of hockey from backyard rink construction to studying the techniques of her hero Bobby Orr, Kathy Rausch, the protagonist of The Checkout Girl by Susan Zettell, has trouble making hockey an important part of her life as a young woman in the 1970s. The desire to live a hockey life remains her anchor in a turbulent life tossed by the demands of problematic romances, an autistic sister, and unstable grocery store jobs made more unstable still by Kathy's commitment to unionize her sector.

. . .Varnum, the setting of Susan Zettell's Checkout Girl, is instantly recognizable as a small Ontario town of the 1970s. Kathy is intimate with its limited opportunities, the way it clutches respectable veneers while drifting toward seediness, the simultaneously rich and oppressive texture of its community, the wildly transformative consequences that follow from its inhabitants' smallest decisions. She has few outlets for her passion for skating and hockey even though she excels at them, and is clearly adrift in a world that has no sense of how to accommodate her. Her job as a checkout girl is a dead end and she endangers her chances of keeping even that by working towards unionization. She's attracted to her landlord even though his involvement in the drug trade endangers him, his wife and child, and herself, and her autistic younger sister is attached to her with a strength that makes them both vulnerable. Wave after wave of small-town catastrophe washes over Kathy, obscuring or eliminating most of her choices until the only options that remain at the ones she began with: skates, ice, hockey.

Within fiction, team sport commonly figures the twinned demands for personal excellence and the ability to work well within a collective; these three novels achieve remarkably distinct inflections of this well-established trend. The character of Zettell's Checkout Girl are compellingly realized and fully believable; its conflicts are complex with surprising and satisfying outcomes; its setting is finely drawn; its writing is rigorous, sophisticated, evocative, and clear. Kathy is sensual, flawed, resilient, thoughtful, and active, and no small part of her attractiveness is her volatile relationship with the town that sometimes abject and sometimes gingerly embraces her. Since her relationship with her sport is tenuous, Kathy is in a curiously piquant situation: a player without a team, almost without a game.


— Helene Staveley Canadian Literature

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