Love on the Killing Floor

Love on the Killing Floor is a rat's eye view of Toronto in the early nineties.  In our story the city has just been dragged into the cosmopolitan tempo it would beat its chest to a decade later, kicking and screaming.   The novel opens in the shadow of Paul Bernardo's Scarborough horrorfest and the race riots of '92.   Our protagonist is a bottom rung photographer for a small studio; a divorcee moving from party to party and woman to woman, a smug nihilist smack in his element.  With his narrator's voice he turns his observations towards the ethnicities he see's as flooding his Toronto, and rehashes arguments and gripes against the inevitable you're likely to have heard yourself from malcontents of every stripe.  The racial disharmony is easily the most prominent theme in the book, but one of the more interesting off-shoots of our narrator's wailing is his opposition to the Homer Simpsonization of white masculinity.

He sees media reflecting a flabby, bumbling, inelegant coward in his image while the "plight" of the "Other" is romanticized.  It's bitterness, but it's bitterness that makes those enlightened souls we swallow a little harder.  Trevor Clark very cleverly paints his narrator into a corner, quickly running out of faces and people he can stomach, and allows for his escape by way of Yolanda.  Yolanda is a black go-getter who thanks to our narrator's formidable boldness is seduced and enters into a relationship that finally lets him take his foot off the passive aggressive pedal.  She nips the sharper points of his swelling bigotry and acts as the part-catalyst for his getting his life together; getting a proper job and systematically dropping all of his old suspect acquaintances.

Love on the Killing Floor holds within its expertly bound pages about as many sex scenes as you could shake a prosthetic leg at, none of them exactly laden with allegory but entertaining enough and a very compelling blend of machismo and sensitivity.

The book is bound to make you a bit uncomfortable, it pushes a few buttons that don't usually get pushed anymore and any Toronto Readers will love hearing short stories about people who could live on low wages and still afford beer in bars and studio apartments.  You missed one hell of a recession son.

Can'tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine

Can'tLit is prefaced with a "Not your parent's short stories" rant about how Margaret Atwood is ruining Canadian Literature for everyone else.  The editor promises the grotesque, the avant guarde, the So-Hip-It'll-Make-your-Ears-Bleed sentimentality.  Work that finds its way onto Broken Pencil and by extension this book are meant to reside on the edge, where the cutting happens, and fuck you if you don't like it Gramps.

"Whoa" says I.

So I open it up in the middle as I am wont to do with Short story books with that tingling sensation that makes me feel like I should be wearing a seatbelt.  What does Can'tlit deliver me?

Nice stories, sad stories, stories about sex, stories about sad or even violent sex, but this hardened soul did no blushing.  You get the feeling that some of these writers are carrying some serious baggage, but never once do you think they are anything worse than the kind of hipsters who'd help you shovel your driveway if you looked at all fatigued.  I didn't feel grossed out and I didn't feel disturbed.  I felt welcomed, I felt witty, I felt good.

Dear Broken Pencil,

When I was 18 I read Naked Lunch by Burroughs, when I was twenty I read American Dream by Mailer, my grandparents have a copy of the Satyricon next to their Asterisk comics.  If you want to shock me with sex you had better dig real real deep into the tickle trunk because I have to believe when you've read about a guy strangling his wife, sodomizing his maid and then clunking up the stairs to chuck his wife's body out a window, there's no mountain of shock left to climb.

What we've got here is a failure to communicate.  Can'tlit is not a book that's clankering for a censorship debate, it's a collection of very good writers writing very good stories.  It was a pleasure to read and I really liked it.  It dug into some pretty unorthodox sexual dissertations, but always with one foot on the ground and usually tempered with a playful tongue in cheek.

In one story a flat chested preteen falls for a boy with moobs, in another Jesus buys hookers so he can have somebody to talk to, in yet another a gal tours around town in a car painted to resemble her lady bits (or somebody's lady bits).  These stories are too hip and too thoughtful to be shocking, and never does any writer do any shocking for shock's sake.

Therein lies the trick I guess.  I could probably describe some of the stories in such a way so as to make them seem grotesque, but the writers with no exceptions paint a good story behind even the worst descriptions and make the final product...palatable.

I read Can'tlit at a cottage and the lovely summer weather on the lake didn't hurt the ambiance one bit, so If you're making a late run North to enjoy the last bit of August, pick this one up.  May you have as good a time as I did.

Barney's Version

*I've been remiss in posting and I have the happy excuse of being very busy, nevertheless...


I ran into a copy of Barney's version as one of two dozen paperbacks I grabbed from the Canadian Federation of University Women's Georgetown chapter Book sale a year ago.  If there ever was an unbelievable mound of literature ripe for the picking this is it.  I grabbed the aforementioned novels, an armload of biographies and a good grocery bag full of kids books.  The sale is notoriously good and I'm staring down a thick Hemingway Biography my wife got me this year that I'm tackling this summer.

Richler follows his Narrator Barney Panofsky down his slow destruction at the hands of Alzheimer's, of love and love lost, the grandeur of the squalid West Bank in Paris and the sterility of Montreal during the referendum of '95.  All the while he gives a fantastic presentation and stanch defence of the sort of modern Judiasm that colours and frames his perception and makes you want to flush anything you've ever read of Saul Bellow.  It makes for a great read, an interesting and complicated love story, a mystery resolved, a snap shot of two disparate times and places and the best fiction on mental illness this side of The Sound and The Fury.

I've heard it said that if Richler is at times a misanthrope, he is a misanthrope for entirely the right reasons.  Barney has the added benefit of being hilarious in his flaying of friend and foe alike, and most importantly, his barbs are always deserved, or at least defensible.  I enjoyed every page of the book, and have every reason to believe you would to.  It's that rare marriage of patient allegory and palatable storytelling that sets the book and the author on the pedestal their ghosts enjoy now as much as they did in life.

Beatrice and Virgil: Horror by any other name

Yann Martel.  Yann Yann Yann.  I read Life of Pi.  In fact my entire family read it.  It was a mass Christmas gift from my Grandmother to each and every member of the family, which all in all constitutes a good third of the copies sold worldwide.  On behalf of the Beals, you're welcome.

Life of Pi was by most measures a very good book.  The prose was nice and the story was phenomenal, but enough has been said.  No matter any allegiance to the Can-Con gods or touchy feely all-the-children-of -the-world nonsense, his book smacked of pandering.  I'll happily let it slide because it got me thinking differently and I liked reading it.

So I pick up his letters to Stephen Harper and I scratch my head till it bleeds.  He takes a hand preaching to the choir and bangs a drum about the PM not giving him the time of day after he took the trouble to send him a book every week or so for a year.  Answering the letters of an activist (dare I say at this point narcissist) writer is a lose/lose proposition, Martel even admits as much, but he still made a cool fortune pestering him about PMO's penchant for form letters.  Again, Martel pours fuel on the impotent left's campfire and they swipe debit cards en mass in return.

So, some nine years and a requisite visit to the death camp museums after his last novel he unveils his artistic rendering of the Holocaust.  A story told through a selfsame narrator about his relationship with a collaborator and the latter's fragmented post modern play.  The play is about a donkey and a howler monkey (the title characters respectively) who have lived through "The horror" and spend the play trying to establish a context for talking about their torture.  If you're looking to feel sick to your stomach about the human capacity for meanness, this book twists the reader's guts as well as any other on the subject.  In this regard his misstep was drawing on the descriptions of physical torture and a series of horrible "Games for Gustave" questions that navigate ethical and spiritual minefields.  Nine tenths of the book is spent suggesting at the subject of the horrors, in the play and in the Old taxidermist playwright the narrator is so fascinated with. The last tenth is as gruesome a prose as you're likely to come across.  He trades his Beckett cap for a Freddy Kruger mask and the result, though heart-wrenching, abandons any possibility of covering new emotional ground on the matter.  His slip into the literal, both the shocking and the disgusting, and consciously abandons the context he set out to establish.  He either didn't have the forbearance to take it all the way home or was afraid of what following his thesis to a conclusion would mean.  

In the great tradition of CanLit condescension Martel walks us gently through his thesis, holding our hands and pointing out the attractions of the ride.  "This beast is called an elephant.  Yes, he does take up the entire room." Here's the biggest problem:  He purports to try something new in terms of writing about the holocaust.  That might have been a bold endeavour but he cuts his own efforts off at the knees by walking on egg shells the entire time.  The beginning of the novel is an explanation of the allegoric dance that is to follow.  Why does he telegraph his punches?  He wants to set up a pressure release valve.  He builds in a defence against the critic who will rightly ask what the fuck he knows about the Holocaust.  Every sentence is an apology to any B'nai Brith donor who happens to turn the book to a random page.  "I'm not even Jewish!" his protagonist proclaims after being kicked around by his publisher and right before giving up his original essay/artistic interpretation of the Holocaust.  No, he and his creator may not be, but if you want to talk about the Holocaust as a blight on humanity, how it needs to be looked at through different lenses, and about you're position as a gentile artist tackling the subject, you don't start by tripping over a disclaimer.  Asking pardon for drawing breath demeans your efforts and patronizes the reader, jewish or otherwise.  Nothing good came from it.

Men are from Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, Women are from Venus

The Conversation went like this.

"Say Honey, What would you do if you had Telekinesis?"

"You mean moving things with your mind?"

(Beaming) "Yeah!"

"Dishes"

"Dishes?  You have the most powerful weapon ever, and you're going to Bibbity Bobbity Boo?"

"Hmm."

"No wonder there aren't more women in politics.  I'd rob a bank in the first 20 minutes.  Then I'd tear the livers out of anybody who had a problem with it."

But now that I think about it, it's kind of nice.  My wife is nice.  A superhero comic about my wife would be about heroes solving infrastructure problems and conquering the meddlesome inefficiencies in review processes.  Being married to somebody who's not mad with hypothetical power is swell indeed.    

(Plus that means I wear the world conquering pants in this family, huzzah)

The Jade Peony: Canada has Read!

Another years worth of Canada Reads in the bag.  The Jade Peony is about a Chinese family in Vancouver during the dirty thirties and forties.

It breaks down into three stories seen through the eyes of the younger siblings of a less than nuclear family.  Each story has an ending that's sort of heartbreaking, you get to watch people get squeezed pretty tight by the community, and though the reader is left with a certain fondness for the overall Chinatown of the author's imagination, the pressure points get rubbed raw.  

I guess there's something to be said for universality, but I thought two of the three crisis were tired.  I won't spoil it, but in terms of plot it's about as close to an episode of Chinese Picket Fences as I've ever wanted to be.  The plot is really just a vehicle for the author to paint a picture of the community and the history of the place.  That doesn't mean there isn't some great characters peopling this book, and lovely descriptions of the time and the place.  I didn't know the first thing about Chinatown, and now I am led to believe I do, such is the veneer of authenticity on these stories.

If I was a betting man, I'd put this book making it deep into the playoffs.  It's not the worst of this year's crop of novels, but it's not really anything special either.

  

The Long Slide by James Grainger

In Two Naught Naught Four *ECW published a selection of short stories by James Grainger. The Long Slide.

The year is 2010.  I'm looking for something I can't find in Chapters... but can still find on Chapters.Ca (that's here for anyone feeling thoughtful).  You know, really digging.  

That means the last of my gift card scratch went straight to Grainger's pocket and in four to six weeks the package arrived.

In a half dozen stories you can lick in a sitting each, Grainger took a bite out of his twenties, chewed it over good and used his readers as a spittoon.  Equal parts self-loathing and arrogant.  I liked it.   

It's pieces of love through different spectrums of neurosis.  Filial, romantic and other.   Maybe all his characters sit in the director chair beside you and give the "Get a load of these guys" nudge, but you get a naked shot of some real neutral human beings. 

His first story, the title track, is pure Salinger minus all that classy stuff.  If you've ever spent a summer day that turned into night hanging out North of Bloor you're bound to be able feel your way around his character, you'll know his swagger even if you don't like it.    

The Government of Spiders is a love affair gone bananas.  It's about the mental illness and the straws that break backs.  It plays as the most bizarre allegory for procrastination I've come across.

A Confusion of Islands should be read aloud to anybody who can't get After the Goldrush out of their heads.  A road trip to put road trips to rest.  

The book is arranged in ascending order of the responsibilities of the protagonist, from tongue-in-cheek hedonism (picture cruel intentions in the College St. Set.) right up to single-parent widowhood. All of his characters are done the first leg of the race, and they aren't moving until somebody tells them their score.  The sort of Spiritual fermentation that grows furious buried under student debt.  This is the book I'm going to push on my friends when I see them.  

*ECW is the subpop of Toronto Lit, or so a handful of black-rimmed Devil-may-care head shots would have me believe.