Monkey droppings - Two for a Chilly September Morn

The shelf monkey has been very, very lax on blog updates and reviews of late.

The monkey apologizes.

The monkey has good reasons, however; some selfish, some not.

The monkey will remain mum on that for the time being.

But in the meantime, the monkey throws you a couple of quickies, to mask his abject shame.

Bad monkey. BAD MONKEY! BAD MONKEY!

Seven Good Reasons Not to be Good
John Gould (2010)

What if Zane isn't actually good at all? What if he's just clever - clever enough to give his compulsion a purpose? You got a big ugly sweater from your mother-in-law for Christmas. It's yellow, the yellow of a smoker's fingers, and festooned with quasi-floral patters in lime green and salmon. It's stippled like a plucked chicken. You wear the hideous thing to your mother-in-law's once and then you donate it to the Sally Ann. Sure, it'll keep some poor soul warm on a winter's night, but that isn't going to get you into heaven, is it? You're just ditching the damn thing.

In 2003, John Gould published kilter: 55 fictions, a lovely collection of micro-stories that went on to become a surprise nominee for the Giller Prize. It was a sterling set of tales, and I'm not saying that because I was the only reviewer in mainstream media to review it, for the Winnipeg Free Press. I liked the spasm of attention I garnered for such a selfless act (got my heartily sideburned mug on the teevee and everything), but the stories certainly stand up to closer scrutiny.

Now, seven years later, Gould finally resurfaces with his debut novel Seven Good Reasons Not to be Good. Does it fulfill the promise of kilter? Well, that depends. Anyone searching for a direct repeat of his incisively concise narratives will be sorely disappointed. Anyone who enjoys a good story well-told will be well-satisfied.

Seven Good Reasons concerns Matt, a film critic (or "kritik" - "way cooler, way kooler than your average hack") on the horns of several dilemmas. His wife is cuckolding him with a female barista. His father (the Dadinator) is on his merry way to dementia, obsessed with crop circles and alien visitations. And his best friend Zane, the one constant he could always depend on, has decided to stop fighting and let his AIDs-related death overtake him. Matt has decided, now that he's newly-fired (no spoilers here, but the reasons are delicious), to visit Zane and stop him from embracing death. So he hops a flight to Toronto, starts up a hotel affair with a comely elevator companion, and decidedly does his best not to confront his problems.

There is a lot going on in Seven Good Reasons; novels about the travails of the mid-life crisis often do. There is an abundance of the hopeful fool in Matt, a man not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and a character firmly in the mold of the mid-life heroes of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Such novels are about the search for self, and possibly of meaning in a meaningless world, and Gould manoeuvres the oft-traversed paths with wit and grace. The humour is at once broad yet subtle, combined with a gentle depth of character that recalls Miriam Toews at her best.

Seven Good Reasons Not to be Good is not a game-changer; there are no elaborate flourishes of poetic license, none of that standard 'CanLit that is good for you' falderal. Rather, it is an insightful and humourous examination of human foibles, placed within a plot that always entertains and oftentimes zigs where a zag was expected.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES

The World More Full of Weeping
Robert J. Wiersema (2009)

For breakfast on the morning of the day he disappeared, Brian Page ate most of two scrambled eggs, three pieces of bacon, and almost two slices of multigrain toast. After he was gone, his father, Jeff Page, kept remembering the remaining triangle of hardening bread on its plate on the kitchen counter, the outline of Brian's bite sharp, a bright curve against the right angle.

I am not previously acquainted with Robert Wiersema's novel Before I Wake, despite suffering many people's admonishment for this oversight. After reading his sterling novella The World More Full of Weeping, I plan to rectify this horrific mistake posthaste.

Weeping is a tiny, almost perfect pearl of a story - a story of family loss tinged with elements of magic realism Stephen King might have written in his prime.

Brian Page has gone missing. The locals are not concerned, not at first; boys do have a habit of disappearing, especially when there is an inviting forest just adjunct to the backyard. But his father Jeff is not so sure; there are hints that he once disappeared himself, memories that refuse to surface, something to do with the woods and its mysteries. And if Brian has fallen prey to the same lure, he may never return.

I don't want to give too much away; the story is short, precise, and nary a word wasted with an economy of prose that should be taught in schools (I should take the course, definitely, oh yes indeedy do). Wiersema crafts an evocative yarn of tragedy and magic, very similiar in tone to the recent Tim Lebbon piece The Thief of Broken Toys (also great, and also a ChiZine release, my new favourite publisher). Wiersema also proves himself an expert creator of place, erecting a whole town from very few pieces (the process chronicled in the companion piece Places & Names).

The World More Full of Weeping is a gem, a mood piece for a cold autumn's eve that will make you shiver even as you smile, and lament even as you wish it were true.

VERDICT: MONKEY LOVES

All This Town Remembers by Sean Johnston - thoughts

Who, in the end, owns grief? Is it an intimate, personal experience, or can it be co-opted by the community at large? And when does the act of grieving become an exercise in selfishness?

Sean Johnston does not pretend to be able to answer these questions. But if the Saskatchewan native’s moody debut novel All This Town Remembers is any indication, Johnston lays admirable claim to appreciating the underpinnings of such sorrow.

The town in question is Asquith, Saskatchewan, where the citizenry is abuzz at the arrival of a CBC film crew. The subject of the film is Joey Fallow, a high-school hockey star whose death twenty years earlier has become a defining moment in the town’s identity.

Less than impressed with the excitement is Adam Stieb, Joey’s teammate and best friend. Recuperating from a workplace accident, Adam views himself as “the man with the broken brain,” with a memory “full of gaps like air.”

Adam’s life is one of chronological challenge; “there was no rhyme or reason to what he remembered, and the things he did know…were either more important to him than they should be, or he was too cold to them.”

What Adam does clearly remember is the accident that took Joey’s life. The town’s elevation of Joey to local icon somehow rankles Adam, and he sets about alienating his neighbours with his distaste for what he sees as “endless celebrations of the one dead boy.”

Johnston, 2003 winner of the Relit Award for short fiction for his collection A Day Does Not Go By, displays a true aptitude for creating muted poetry from the mundanity of prairie life. Sentences such as “Her hair smelled to him of beer and bruises” pepper the plot with memorable imagery, yet never overwhelm with pretension.

Johnston is not overtly concerned in deeply examining the despair a single devastating event can immediately inflict upon a mass community. Such an exploration already exists in Russell Banks’ emotionally resonant novel The Sweet Hereafter, a spiritual cousin to All This Town Remembers in both setting and atmosphere.

What more interests Johnston is the effect of time upon such memories, whereby the incident becomes less an occasion of grief, and more a part of the public consciousness. It evolves into something that nourishes the community, but such an evolution denies those immediately affected by the initial event any sense of ownership of their own emotions.

It is this clash between private mourning and public adulation that drives Adam (and Johnston) to try and better define what the memory of Joey’s death should mean. But memory is slippery, especially in Adam’s instance, and cannot be inherently trusted; “To imagine, you revise—it’s the same as anything and begins innocent enough—but you think of yourself as more than you were.”

Johnston has delivered a haunting celebration of the nuances and vagaries of memory, and a cautious examination of small-town insecurities. In it’s own subdued fashion, All This Town Remembers heralds the arrival of a sterling new voice in Canadian prairie fiction.

First printed in The Winnipeg Free Press, November 5, 2006.