Canadian Writers Abroad

The Damages by Genevieve Scott (Verve Books, 2024)
Reviewed by Jane Christmas

I don’t think I’ve ever come across a character for whom I initially felt sympathy only to retract it, and then cautiously offer it again. In Ros Fisher, we aren’t sure whether we’re being played or whether she’s the real deal. Even at the end of Genevieve Scott’s propulsive The Damages (Verve Books) you’re tempted to line up the characters in order to determine at whose feet the guilt should truly fall. Grey areas abound.

We meet unreliable narrator Ros as she’s being driven back to Creighton University in Ontario after the Christmas break by her older, philandering dad. He’s trying to impress her with his new Jag; she’s pretending to be asleep, “not because I didn’t like my dad, but because I didn’t really know how to sustain a conversation with him for three hours.” (p. 15)

It’s 1997, and Ros, 18, is figuring out life, but good luck with that because her free-range upbringing has turned her into a self-obsessed, self-doubting pleaser; a social vampire who presents a curated version of herself while sussing out traits and attitudes to adopt from her better-adjusted peers, such as campus hunk Dutch, cool sophisticate Sue, or the other worldly inmates in her residence.

Her roommate Megan is the antithesis of Ros, the Felix to Ros’s Oscar. Megan is solid and uncool. She attends classes, does her homework, sorts her laundry, gets up early for her part-time job, and keeps her room tidy. In public, Ros tells others, ‘We’re not close’ (p. 62); in private she benefits from Megan’s kindness, generosity, and love of show tunes.

When the storm shuts down the university, those students unable to go home turn Alice Cole Hall (aka AlCo Hall) into party central. The administration establishes a buddy system, and Ros doesn’t waste a moment manipulating then ditching her buddy Megan at a bar one night. The following day, Megan is missing.

It’s no spoiler to say that Megan is found safe but traumatised and not ready to talk about what happened. As tense as this part of the story is—you’re certain Megan will be found dead—the action suddenly pivots to the students who turn on Ros for her dereliction of buddy duty. Her pariah status results in her being asked to leave the university.

I sympathised with Ros at first, but my opinion quickly changed. She doesn’t pass on phone messages; she doesn’t raise the alarm that Megan hasn’t return to the dorm room, nor is she particularly jarred by the occurrence. She withholds possible clues from the police, and when Megan is found and quits university to deal with her trauma, Ros promises to call, but never does. Zero empathy in the tank. Are we dealing with a sociopath?

Fast forward to summer, 2020. It’s full pandemic and #MeToo, and former roommate Megan is ready to drop her secret, alleging an assault committed by Dutch—now going by his real name Lukas—who is Ros’s ex, father of their child, and a successful young-adult author. 

This multi-layered page-turner is about so much more than sexual assault. Parenting; gas-lighting and scapegoating; mothers who aren’t maternal; being intimidated by authority and peers; the grey areas of zero-tolerance policies; guilt; lies planted in children, these all get an airing.

As the novel flips between two time periods (and two locales — Southern Ontario and Orange County), guilt has been metastasising in Ros. She can’t forget or forgive herself for what happened in 1997, largely due to Lukas’s ongoing womanising. Who to believe — her Machiavellian ex or her ex roommate?

Ros may not be an entirely likeable character, but that might be because we catch ourselves in her reflection. Scott has created an engrossing and resonant commentary on our times.

Genevieve Scott’s first novel Catch My Drift (Goose Lane) was published in 2018, and her short fiction has appeared in literary journals in Canada and the UK. She grew up in Toronto, studied at the University of British Columbia (MFA) and the London School of Economics (MSc), and now lives in Irvine, California, where she teaches writing at Laguna College of Art and Design. Scott also teaches in the limited-residency MFA in fiction program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She mentors at-risk teens through the LA-based non-profit WriteGirl. The Damages was published by RandomHouse in 2023.

Further Reading

• Genevieve Scott
• Jane Christmas
• Verve Books
• Genevieve Scott on The Next Chapter
• Brett Josef Grubisic reviews The Damages in the Toronto Star (August 4, 2023)
• Goose Lane interview with Genevieve Scott
• Genevieve Scott on rethinking campus lessons on consent, Opinion, The Globe and Mail (September 15-16, 2023).