We are Already Ghosts

by Kit Dobson

The Briscoe-MacDougall family retire to their lakeside cabin each summer. This annual vacation is at time to unwind and refresh, a time to relax away from the hustle and bustle of city life.

We are Already Ghosts joins the Briscoe-MacDougalls in the summer of 1996 and returns to them at five-year intervals. William, Clare, Helen, Michael, John, Doug, Mike, Jéanne, Françoise, Celeste, Daphne, Benjamin, and Mackenzie the dog live, grow up, and grow old as the world changes in small ways and in devastating ones. The shock of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan tear across the globe; the Great Recession steals jobs, savings, and houses; and the politics of colonial Canada come evermore into focus. Marriages are made and marriages fall apart, babies are born, lives end, careers are made and broken, the trash gets taken to the dump, the trees bud and then they lose their leaves. The cabin remains and the family returns, year after year.

Impeccably written, crisp, and direct, We are Already Ghosts is a turn-of-the-millennium family epic that documents and challenges Canadian life. Author Kit Dobson writes in conversation with the literary tradition, creating a narratively complex, compelling, and smart novel that is a pleasure to read yet lingers in the mind long after the covers are closed.

Genres: Canada

232 pages, Hardcover

Published May 15, 2024

About the author

Kit Dobson is an associate professor of Canadian literature at Calgary’s Mount Royal University. He is the author of Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (WLU Press, 2009), and co-author, with Smaro Kamboureli, of Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (WLU Press, 2012).

Reviews

[Paul Sutter]

WE ARE ALREADY GHOSTS is an impressive fiction debut by Kit Dobson. It is reminiscent of the movie Same Time Next Year, where a couple met at the same place every year. The difference in this book is the fact the family comes back to the same lakeside cabin every five years, to catch up on life, and all the changes that arise in half a decade.
It follows the lives of the Briscoe-MacDougall families, first seen at the cabin in the summer of 1996. Then we see the remaining members of the clans in 2001, 2006, and 2011. Times do change people, and we see the reactions to the world around them, and the events that have shaped their lives as much as the world itself.
There is time for reflection and recollection of life to date, the ups and downs, along with the changes, the maturity of many and the fragility of others. There is a great spirit of family, those who are growing into the world, and those who are realizing their best days may be behind them, and that those days may be numbered.
Family members like Michael, Celeste, Daphne, John, Doug, and others, even their dog Mackenzie, get to bask in the beauty of the landscape around them, while they reminisce about everything under the sun. There are great moments that cause elation such as weddings, but there are also those moments that tear families apart, unions broken, but spirits still strong. What we see in the characters is both maturity and growth, coming to an understanding of just how life and the world is playing out, whether one fully appreciates it or not.
While the characters look inwardly often at themselves, they also show concern and emotional attachments to family and those around them, creating a greater sense of community. The book will cause many readers to reflect on their own lives, how they fit into the grand scheme of things, looking inwardly, at the victories and defeats that define life itself.
WE ARE ALREADY GHOSTS is a haunting book in many ways, but it showcases the human spirit just as profoundly.

[Lucy Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not unlike the elegiac nature of the film On Golden Pond, Kit Dobson’s We Are Already Ghosts provides glimpses into a family saga that unfolds around the touchstone of a shared summer cabin. The reader is introduced to multiple generations of the Briscoe-MacDougall clan who gather together each summer. It is at the cabin where the rhythms of life and the passage of the seasons are rendered with both incisive focus and fluidity. There is a strong sense of continuity to the family unit even as its members evolve, age and face death. And it is the ephemeral nature of their time together, as it is skillfully juxtaposed against the durability of the land, trees and water, that reveals the connection between the Canadian landscape and our sense of identity. A lyrical and quite elegant paean. Recommended. (Please see full review forthcoming, @The Miramichi Reader)

[Tamara Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoughtful novel which meanders in a beautiful and reflective way.

[Jo Beyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

the passage of time in a family. a reminder to reflect on the past and future. lovely.

[Alberta Views Magazine]

Kit Dobson is a writer of many talents. Besides the literary scholarship you’d expect from a University of Calgary English professor, he’s the author of two remarkable non-fiction books, Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada (2017) and Field Notes on Listening (2022), both of which deal, in very different ways, with how we experience place, home and continuity. His first novel, We Are Already Ghosts, shares that concern, but approaches it from that oldest of human activities—storytelling.

The action of the book occurs among the members of an extended upper-middle-class family as they spend a series of summers at their cabin in central Alberta. Imagine the various divisions that naturally occur in such a group—the older generation and the younger one, the separate nuclear families that make up the larger group, men and women, blood relatives and the relatives by marriage. At this point you may be thinking of Chekhov, or perhaps of On Golden Pond. But where stage plays by their nature deal with the relationships between characters, Dobson is just as interested in the interior lives of his characters—most of what happens in the book happens inside the head of one character or another....

Review by Alex Rettie
Full review at https://albertaviews.ca/we-are-alread...