Fiction Review
Amanda Tripp
Strip
by Andrew Binks
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2013
256 pp. $21.95
Frustrated with the uncertainty of his future with his dance company, John Rottam leaves the relative, if unpleasant security of a national tour, making a life-altering change during a stop in Montreal. This first rash decision, made in the name of love, sets the tone for John’s adventure in Andrew Binks’ Strip. We soon find John wrapped in a sheet, crumpled at the bottom of a staircase, taking mental stock of the choices and coincidences that have led him to this painful place. Andrew Binks’ second novel follows John on a circuitous route to self-realization, through humiliation, disappointment, love, finally, and occasionally, fleeting happiness. Part coming-of-age story, part fall from grace, John’s cultural and social exploration of his small town Quebec parallels his internal investigation of his own body and heart.
Strip artfully balances John’s personal journey with a keen examination of the dance world. For those of us who are not familiar with that world, the details are fascinating, shocking: readers more experienced in ballet will perhaps relate to Strip’s criticism of its challenges and heartbreaks, as well as the brief glory of its victories. When John’s dance career peters out, he finds work stripping in a fading burlesque club. Here too, Binks takes readers backstage, in a rare peek behind the curtain. The counterculture that John finds a temporary, and incredibly fraught, home in at the Chez Moritz seems impossible today, and is drawn with a kind of care and compassion that borders on tenderness – a nostalgia for a moment in that can never be in the same way again. It is perhaps not accidental then that Strip also catalogues John’s sexual maturation as a gay man: he must deal with his past, and try to find love and kindness in a very lonely place.
Binks’ greatest accomplishment with Strip is the subtlety of his secondary characters: even those who initially seem larger than life reveal themselves to be delicate and complex, sharply human and loveable in their familiar imperfections and neuroses. If John lacks some of this finesse, it is perhaps because he is a blanker canvas than they are: John is only now having the experiences that will make him as haunted and as travelled as the people he meets along the way.
Binks’ writing is both elegant and edgy – when John’s inner monologue becomes too heavy-handed, or his self-assessment too narcissistic, it is swiftly tempered by the impressive authenticity of the supporting cast, and the depth of the relationships John develops and describes. Binks also demonstrates real skill in his restraint with the plot and its resolution. Though Strip has elements of the quest narrative, a quest for self-love perhaps, it deftly avoids clichés by coming near them, and then veering wildly away, or engaging so closely and intimately with them that they become new and fascinating all over again. It avoids the danger of morality tale preaching by taking the chronic challenges of daily life head on, by offering no simple solution, no single turning point or misstep to regret. The novel is contemplative, but vigorous – John’s thoughtfulness is contagious, and though the novel remains ambivalent about hopes and dreams, success and power and love, it certainly celebrates humanity, and imperfections, and exploration, and the failures that make us better and kinder people.
