Within the first few pages of her new novel Girls Fall Down (Coach House Books, 300 pages, $20.95) Maggie Helwig clears the air regarding novels and airborne toxic events. Just after a schoolgirl smells something rose-scented and collapses in a Toronto subway car, Alex, a medical photographer, converses with a friend on airborne toxic events. “That’s from a book, right?” Alex asks.

“Also…Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s multivalent,” his friend responds.

Funny as it is, there’s no need for Helwig to ironically distance her work from Don DeLillo’s White Noise. She quite capably makes free-floating dread and anxiety her own. After all, in the 22 years since DeLillo’s novel, we’ve been gifted the ability to fret over 500 channels and an internet’s worth of airborne toxic events. Someone’s got to take up the slack.

Helwig’s plot grows organically and startlingly from that first incident on the subway and we follow Alex as he makes contact again with Susie, a complicated ex and a sociology grad student working among Toronto’s homeless population. As Alex volunteers to help Susie track down her schizophrenic brother, their story intertwines with that of a city coping passive-aggressively — this is Toronto, remember — with a potential plague. It’s only in this intertwining that Girls Fall Down presents any symptoms. Alex and Susie’s past is framed too nostalgically and, until the story takes off, the characters can seem bereft of motivating conflict.

While the book sorts out those early problems, the girls keep falling and Helwig keeps our attention. “After one girl has fallen, the rest are explicable; they have a template, a precedent,” Helwig explains. Where DeLillo’s take on information-age paranoia teased, jarred and tormented the reader with cadences taken from newscasts and commercials, Helwig’s prose is smooth, almost soothing, as it unpacks what it means to be ill in the 21st century. “Because our bodies are permeable to the world,” she writes, “and ash and poison are moving in the air, and we have to persist like this, in anxiety and longing, on high alert.”

For a story with these concerns, there’s probably no better setting than Toronto. Not only does a line like “Towards morning; a girl fell down at Yonge and Eglinton, and the sun rose on the hazmat squad” resonate, the city’s psychic architecture begs for atmospheric catastrophe. “It is a city that burrows, tunnels, turns underground,” Helwig argues with unnerving detail on the first page. “It has built a strata of malls and pathways and inhabited spaces like layers in an archeological dig, a body below the earth, flowing with light. People turn to buried places, to successive levels of basements, lowered courtyards, gardens under glass.”

Even though Girls Fall Down never proffers the easy closure of an outright catastrophe, there’s enough gravity to Helwig’s writing for the aftershocks to be felt.

Email us at: LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM or send your questions to EYEWEEKLY.COM
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1