Ruth Rakoff’s debut novel Untethered follows the lives of twin sisters, Petal and Rose Wolffe, between Canada and Israel. As the novel progresses, the tethered twins become untethered, and this untethering of Rakoff’s themes and style propels her narrative. Petal describes her relationship with her sister: “Responsible Petal looking out for flighty Rose …. except when I was the untethered one.” As their names and the book’s cover suggest, petals separate from the rose, the part from the whole. By the end of the novel when Rose dies, Petal is consoled by one of her closest supporters: “Normally people try to hold on in grief, not untether.” Rakoff explores boundaries between normal and abnormal behaviour.
The novel begins with Petal completing her doctorate at NYU: “Liberation from months of built-up stress had left Petal with a tension-release migraine that throbbed so hard behind her left eye she knew she was about to vomit.” Hyphenated adjectives and regurgitation underscore the physical and psychological untethering in the novel. Her “good-news migraine” initiates the paradoxical nature of fictional characters and throbbing narration.


“Rakoff explores boundaries between normal and abnormal behaviour.”
Her friend Benjamin greets her with a bottle of champagne and a bouquet of flowers. “Dr. Wolffe, I presume?” On the one hand, her surname invokes Virginia Woolf, and Petal is “the anti-Mrs. Dalloway;” on the other hand, it belongs to the fauna family that interacts with the floral.
Rakoff’s prose is tethered, not only in hyphenation, but also in parallel clauses that thrust her fiction forward: “She pulled on her jeans, sniffed the armpits of the closest T-shirt, brushed the night off her teeth, and headed out to meet Benjamin.” She and Benjamin are as close to each other as she is to her sister, for the novelist creates an intensity among her interrelated characters. Benjamin cajoles “a good-natured, character-worthy response from Petal.” They smoke together and walk together. “Petal and Benjamin would often invent thematic motifs to give direction to their wanderings.” Similarly, Rakoff invents themes to accompany her wanderings between Israel and Canada, between characters and episodes, and between liberal and orthodox Jews. Although Benjamin has produced plays that garner rave reviews and a couple of highbrow novels that make it to bestseller lists, he is filled with demons and self-doubt. One of Rakoff’s strengths is her lively dialogue, which would lend itself to a Netflix series in the vein of Shtisel.
In the midst of New York’s springtime hum and buzz, Petal’s phone vibrates with a call summoning her to her sister in Toronto. Rakoff’s prose pulses once again: “Petal carried a heavy existential load made up of the sum of her parts, but her fraught relationship with her sister, her sense of responsibility to her, her resentment toward her, and her complicated feelings of betrayal and abandonment were all overridden by her inexplicable love for, need of, and yearning to be needed by Rosie. They were bound together.” Petal bound and unbound is at the centre of Untethered.
This binding and bonding are also biographical, for Rakoff’s late brother makes a cameo appearance: “David Rakoff was reading.” A member of a gifted family, Rakoff delineates her interesting characters with great clarity and conviction, as she covers generations from European Yiddish backgrounds to contemporary Hebrew settings in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and kibbutzim. Beyond these particulars she strives for universal resonance: “This feeling, likely grief not homelessness, shifted the tectonic plates of her universe, leaving a gaping crevice in her soul as long as the San Andreas Fault and as deep as the Grand Canyon.” This stretch captures the gap between Petal’s tethering and untethering.
In this rhythm of union and division Petal marries and divorces: “Eventually, their new home, a living metaphor of the two solitudes that coexisted on a porous Jaffa-Tel Aviv border, became a mirror of the lives they lived separately together.” Untethered is a mirror that reveals and reflects much, and is therefore a crowd pleaser, but what is missing is the mystery of metaphor in which meaning remains concealed. Everything is spelled out to capture the essence of trauma, for Rakoff empathizes with her characters’ precarious situations, and her emotional impact saves society. Petal assists survivors’ families in Israel. “The desk in her classroom accumulated a pile of pebbles with paintings of flowers, on each one a single petal of a flower painted reverentially in a different colour than the rest. The stones, left anonymously with the best of intentions by people whom Petal had helped in some way or another, became a morphing edifice honouring her courage and capability. Responsible, reliable, steady-as-a-rock Petal.” Untethered navigates between the solidity of a rock and the fragility of flowers. Rakoff’s reverence accumulates with the best of intentions as she honours her protagonist’s metamorphosis and hyphenated hybridity.
Ruth Rakoff is a writer and director of a non-profit organization with a Bachelors of Arts in English Literature from the University of Toronto. She is grateful for the privilege of writing and making art. Born in Montreal, Rakoff published her first book, a memoir titled When My World Was Very Small, in 2010. Rakoff weaves personal experience into fictional characters and narratives in Untethered, her first novel. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.
- Publisher : Cormorant Books (Sept. 9 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1770867015
- ISBN-13 : 978-1770867017
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.