Fiction Review
Savage Love
by Douglas Glover
Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2014
264pp, $29.95
I’ve been writing and reading in Canada for over a decade, and while I don’t claim to be an expert on our national literature, it is rare that a writer as good as Douglas Glover slides past my radar. A couple of years back, an American writer friend asked me if I’d ever read his stuff. In fact I hadn’t, and my American friend loaned me a book of Glover’s stories, Bad News of the Heart. Cue stunned realization that I’d been missing out on one of Canada’s finest short story writers. Cue my thesis: despite winning the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 2003, for Elle, a historical novel about a young French woman in the 16th century marooned on the Isle of Demons, Glover doesn’t have a particularly high profile in Canada. Or, more accurately: his profile doesn’t quite match his talents. Between the aforementioned Elle and now, Glover has published an essay collection, Attack of the Copula Spiders, on the craft, and a spattering of short stories. His most recent collection of short fiction, Savage Love, is well worth the wait.
Reviewing books in Canada can be an awkward gig: everyone knows everyone, nobody wants to step on anybody’s toes. I’ve reviewed books I’ve hated and felt obligated to wrap a bow around any criticism and call it ice cream. Thank God I don’t have to do that here. Savage Love is, in my view (and without hyperbole) a master-class in the short fiction form.
The collection’s structure is kind of a head-scratcher, opening with a prelude before splitting off into sections named after musical and theatrical forms (Fugues, Intermezzo Microstories, and The Comedies). The title gestures towards the collection’s thematic bent: here love hurts, bites, caresses, kills, maims, and even in death, holds on tightly. I’ve heard writers called confident before and wondered how such a thing can be worth saying. Doesn’t the act of writing, and expecting others to take the time to read that writing, suggest a strong belief in oneself / one’s work? If that’s the case, Glover’s got serious cajones. I can’t think of another collection this audacious, this willing to alienate its readership by taking us to the edge of our comfort levels. He’s at home writing about disparate historical times, fraught domesticity, dental hygienists, horoscope-makers, whores, neurotics, soldiers, and folks generally caught in rough places. Yet in spite of its varied, and at times gruesome, subject matter, Glover’s attention to the molecules that make up life on this brutal globe ensure that his work is endlessly compelling.
If Freud’s right and life’s all about eros and thanatos, sex and a lust for death, then Glover’s collection can also be called a master-class in the human condition. Consider, for example, “Tristiana,” a disturbing historical narrative about a Confederate deserter and a mute girl crippled by frost bite. Their journey’s right out of Tarantino, the pair of them slaughtering anything with a pulse that crosses their path. If you’re thinking ‘that’s a tough sell,’ you’re right: seemingly immoral criminals don’t often make for sympathetic leads, unless the author’s name is Nabokov or Capote. Here, though, the weird approximation of love that the deserter builds with his mute, crippled companion is, well, a gruffer take on the ‘lolita’ narrative. Moreover, despite his shortcomings, the chap’s got a heavy heart and a life-philosophy one might call justifiable nihilistic: “Why does the world insist? he thought. He lived in a slaughterous universe under a doleful sign of dream from which he did not wish to awaken, for that seemed like death to him. You stop, you die, he thought.” And yet, by the story’s end, one gets the sense that he’s revised his position, that in his old age (Glover leapfrogs a few decades) he’s found, if not a cure for his malaise, a balm to soothe his emotional bruises.
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