Overtime [9781771967280]

Overview

Nine individual stories that come together to create an intimate portrait of a small community, showcasing Maitland's gift for particularizing and elevating the familial banal.

Axel Connor, a fifty-something businessman and beer league goalie, living in a small town, has recently become caregiver to his aging, eternally-dissatisfied mother, Mable, who suffers from early Alzheimer's disease. Mable, asked in the afternoon to sign a birthday card for a resident in her building, discovers she can no longer write her name. In despair, she contacts a suicide hotline and triggers a wellness check visit from local police who then alert Axel. Through the evening, Axel interacts with, observes, or thinks of many people—his mother, members of his hockey team, his sister, his wife and their two sons, the two police officers, a little boy and his mother, a recently deceased ex-friend, hospital staff—but who are these other people outside the roles they play in Axel's story? In Overtime, Colette Maitland tracks an ensemble of characters, their stresses, triumphs, failures, desires, creating an intimate portrait of their small community.