A romance that war cannot silence

There's not a single false gesture in Frances Itani's "Deafening." Despite its subjects - war, romance, disability - it's a story of careful, measured emotion, bleached of all sentimentality. The publisher has positioned the novel as a debut in America, but Canadians have been reading Itani for decades, and every page of this story betrays the hands of a mature writer who knows exactly what she's doing.

The heroine, Grania O'Neill, was robbed of her hearing at the age of five by scarlet fever in the early 20th century. Itani narrates her life in a voice imbued with the cadences of the deaf girl's thoughts and sensibilities, a technique that submerges us in Grania's silent but vivid world, a place "divided into things that move and things that don't move."

Her parents are too burdened by guilt and too mired in hopes for a miracle to work with their daughter's obvious intelligence, but her grandmother remains determined to teach Grania to read. The process, so tactilely described here, involves studying simple pictures and words, feeling her grandmother's throat, and attending to the slight fluttering of others' lips. Everywhere, there are traps and tricks, puns and homonyms, silent k's and g's, nonsensical idioms, and worst of all, mustaches that camouflage the shape of speakers' words.

But "nothing will stop Grania," Itani writes. "When she is alone she stands on tiptoe on the stoop at the back, behind the laundry, and she watches her reflected mouth in the narrow window. Hetakesabite. She studies each word separately. She holds her voice as close to herself as she can. It is like pressing a pillow against her chest, the way the boy in the picture presses the book to his sailor suit."

Showing Grania pull herself into the world of language so deliberately and with such extraordinary concentration, Itani reinvests words with an arresting power most of us have forgotten. But she wields that power with quiet, remarkable effect.

After a brief stint in a regular public classroom being alternately ignored or pitied, Grania is sent away to a progressive school for the deaf, where she cries for two weeks and then resolves never to cry again. The training - in speech and sign language - is arduous, but Grania's grandmother provided a good foundation. "Her hands, to her surprise, and jerkily at first, begin to send ideas out," Itani writes. "Her face and body punctuate; her eyes receive. She is falling into, she is entering a new world. She is joining the larger conversation of hands."

Soon after she graduates, Grania meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man. I can't remember ever feeling so greedy for more details from a novel. Grania and Jim develop an intimacy intensified by their struggle to communicate with one other, and Itani's discipline as a narrator makes their courtship all the more striking.

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