What to Read: Practical Jean by Trevor Cole Is Glorious Satire

After the protracted death of her mother to cancer and her inability to ameliorate her mother's suffering, Jean Horemarsh resolves to relieve each of her middle-aged friends from the pain and indignity of aging. Her experience with death has taught her that "to leave old age to chance [is] to open your arms to the dragon's fire, to let the flames lick at will," and the only kindly remedy to her friends' impending infirmities is to kill them herself, immediately. She's ashamed of having been a taker for so long; now she wants to be a giver. Having euthanized her toys as a little girl in the manner of her veterinarian mother - from whom she also acquires a resistance to gore - Jean develops such a fantastically warped notion of mercy and practicality that with each murder (delightful! twisted!) you want her to stop as much as you want her to get away with it. Oh that Jean. So well-meaning.

Since the book's protagonist is female, and a serial murderer to boot, there will inevitably be feminist mouthpieces extolling the book for its gender this, or eviscerating the book for its gender that, none of which I'd normally give a fig about were it not for the author's dig at the vapidity of contemporary feminism. When her discouraged husband Milt hesitatingly observes Jean's hardness (and she is hard on him especially), her indignant response is Cole's caricature of hoary feminist ideology, straight from the armchair:

"Whenever a woman wasn't nurturing, the way a fantasy mother might be, or pliant like a prostitute, she was automatically hard. There was no middle ground for a woman... If she was practical, then she was hard. This was as good a reason as any why women needed women friends."

Zing! Practical Jean heckles the knee-jerk cliché of the whore/nun dichotomy, as well as claims to female specialness and its precious sisterhood in a central character that epitomizes the harmful best friend and lousy wife. Milt is not on her to-kill list because she fell out of love with him years ago; he's neglected, neutered, and not important enough to Jean to spare him the vexation of senescence as she does for Dorothy, Adele, and Natalie, the "true friends" and recipients of her extreme compassion. Like Milt, certain undeserving friends will never benefit from Jean's final gift, and these parts constitute some of the book's greatest satire: in denying some and granting others, it creates within her "a sense of right and wrong, of exclusion and belonging." In other words, Jean's value system is a carnivalesque meritocracy that parodies modern morals, and yet she's on to something. Sure, her methods are dubious, but her reasoning is judicious. She puts her "practical resources" to use, resources that she had been told all her life were "shamefully absent, but were in fact there," in order to selflessly exempt her pals from the heinous certainty of decrepitude.

You will understand Jean. You will probably even adore Jean like I did. But I've had my fill of friends like that, so you can have her. 

Trevor Cole. Practical Jean. McClelland & Stewart: Toronto. 2010.
pps. 110; 145; 187; 30