{"id":230,"date":"2011-05-19T10:24:15","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T10:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/?page_id=230"},"modified":"2011-09-25T01:18:51","modified_gmt":"2011-09-25T01:18:51","slug":"andrew-macdonald","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/writings\/reviews\/andrew-macdonald\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew MacDonald"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fiction Reviews<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Andrew MacDonald<\/h6>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Divinity Gene<\/em><\/p>\n

by Matthew J. Trafford<\/p>\n

Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011<\/p>\n

192 pp.\u00a0 $22.95<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Distillery Songs<\/em><\/p>\n

by Mike Spry<\/p>\n

London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2011<\/p>\n

160 pp. $19.95<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In her stint as guest-judge for The Giller Prize, British writer Victoria Glendinning railed against Canadian literature for being too boring, too regional, too . . . Canadian. In her eyes, we Canucks lack imagination, a willingness to take risks. See, for example, this excerpt from a piece in The Globe:<\/em><\/p>\n

It seems in Canada that you only have to write a novel to get grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and from your provincial Arts Council, who are also thanked. Complaints were once voiced that most shortlisted Giller novels emanated from just three big-name publishers, all owned by Bertelsmann, and that virtually every winner lived in the Toronto area. Now, many of the submitted authors, and their rugged subject matter, hail from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland. That\u2019s maybe because small publishers too are now subsidised, and they proliferate. If you want to get your novel published, be Canadian.<\/p>\n

Though one can concede that maybe, just maybe, Ms. Glendinning has a point, it\u2019s also clear she hasn\u2019t read Matthew J. Trafford or Mike Spry. The Divinity Gene<\/em>, Trafford\u2019s debut collection, is a wicked fusion of Italo Calvino and the kind of funky grist you\u2019d find in McSweeney\u2019s, while Spry\u2019s own debut collection, Distillery Songs<\/em>, is a welcome knee to the groin of anyone who says that Canadian\u2019s can\u2019t be funny, subversive, or over-the-top.<\/p>\n

The stories in The Divinity Gene<\/em> tend to go one of two ways. Either they\u2019re intensely creative pieces \u2013 a dance club run by angels demands of its patrons an odd sort of bartering, the son of a fisherman watches as dad slices open a mermaid \u2013 that challenge perception, or more conventionally realist stories where character trumps concept.<\/p>\n

While the cover blurbs praise The Divinity Gene<\/em>\u2019s imagination, this reader found the glitzier pieces at times lacking. Take iFaust, for example. Here a new app for iPhones lets its users sell their souls for material ends. Once our justly-warped minds regain their natural shape, we start to consider the lives in the story. The problem, I suspect, has to do with length, lay-out, and what Trafford chooses to dwell on; (too) much of the story deals with the glamour of the Faustian narrative trajectory, at the cost of actually getting to know the characters.<\/p>\n

Another story, \u201cThe Grimpils,\u201d offers a plot almost as absurd as the story\u2019s title: the call of a mysterious writer draws friends and family of our main characters to Paris, where, it turns out, they\u2019ve somehow been assimilated into an odd kind of cult. They become, to use Trafford\u2019s term, \u2018grimpils,\u2019 a play on the word \u2018pilgrim.\u2019<\/p>\n

The story never quite transcends its conceit. When Canadian Richard visits the American embassy for answers, his plea for help sounds almost comical. \u201cWe\u2019re here to talk to you about a very serious situation,\u201d he explains, and he\u2019s right: if someone close to me flew to Paris, heeding the siren-song of some writer, and became a weird nihilistic fanatic, I\u2019d be concerned, too. But the sense of loss swirling at the story\u2019s core gets lost in what feels like a running joke, while the seemingly superfluous inclusion of footnotes gives the impression that what we\u2019re reading is actually some kind of science experiment.<\/p>\n

Again, the story is strongest when Trafford focuses on the emotional cores of his characters and limits the time we spend vacationing in Absurd-istan. The shared grief of Richard and co. is heartbreaking enough to almost transcend the story\u2019s silly conceit, and the ending, I have to admit, arrives with surprising power.<\/p>\n

Stronger are more subtle stories like \u201cThoracic Exam,\u201d which brilliantly uses a medical exam as a narrative frame, and \u201cForgetting Helen,\u201d where our narrator, who has literally spent his entire life in a library, might have found his Helen of Troy roaming the stacks. In both cases, Trafford never loses sight of what this reader considers the most important part of story-telling: making me care, truly, about the people he\u2019s created.<\/p>\n

To my eye, two stories stand out from the others as evidence that Trafford can tell one hell of a story.<\/p>\n

\u201cPast Perfect\u201d follows its queer lead as he struggles to comprehend his partner\u2019s descent into dementia. There are no otherworldly creatures, no supernatural occurrences, no blinding pyrotechnics, just a man who loves another man who is dying, their relationship masterfully captured with a subtlety often at odds with the rest of the collection.<\/p>\n

Impressively, Trafford manages to do something similar with \u201cThe Divinity Gene,\u201d the story that probably first got the author noticed when it appeared in the brilliant Darwin\u2019s Bastards<\/em>, a collection of Canadian speculative fiction published by the same folks who put out Trafford\u2019s debut.<\/p>\n

The conceit isn\u2019t entirely unfamiliar: some intrepid scientist breaks down Jesus\u2019 DNA, spawning an entire race of Christs who behave in weirdly opaque ways. The story takes its time, developing into a surprising meditation on grief, spirituality, and humanity. Surprising, I say, because a lesser writer might milk the Christ-resurrection angle to gimmick proportions. Not Trafford. Once he\u2019s got logistics out of the way, his attention shifts from Godliness to base humanity, where the inner struggles of Maciej, the man who cracks the \u2018Divinity Gene,\u2019 force the reader to ask big questions about faith and the capacity to hurt and hurt others.<\/p>\n

The story anchors the collection and proves that, when he isn\u2019t playing mad scientist, Trafford can work wondrous, heartfelt alchemy, a skill he shares with Chris Adrian, an American writer known for playfully bending reality. Like Adrian, recently named one of the New Yorker\u2019s best writers under 40, Trafford juggles humour, sadness, and an often delicious sense of the surreal. The result, fictions that play to either mind or heart but rarely both, suggest that Trafford has the potential to become a force in Canada\u2019s literary world. He just needs to slow down and listen to his characters, first and foremost.<\/p>\n

Like The Divinity Gene<\/em>, poet Mike Spry\u2019s fiction debut, Distillery Songs<\/em>, collects stories that complicate our understanding of reality and fantasy. His stories more readily embrace the whimsical that Trafford\u2019s, while at the same time lacking Trafford\u2019s expansive subject matter.<\/p>\n

Most of Spry\u2019s stories operate in the first person, in an almost juvenile voice rich in cuss-words and puns. It\u2019s a style all Spry\u2019s own, an extension of the sound he cultivated in his entertaining poetry collection Jack<\/em>. The back cover calls Spry a \u2018pop-cultured version of Charles Bukowski,\u2019 an apt summation of the seedy things one will find in Distillery Songs<\/em>. The comparison might also function as a kind of litmus test for readers approaching the collection: if you can\u2019t stand Bukowski, there\u2019s a chance Spry\u2019s collection will turn you off.<\/p>\n

Take, for example, this snippet: \u201cOkay, there\u2019s a goddamn dead hooker named Crystal or Shelley or Raven or something duct-taped to my couch.\u201d Who could blame a reader for being put off by this chestnut, the first few lines in \u201cEmulsification,\u201d an otherwise solid story? Or when the narrator of \u201cThe Crest\u201d starts the story off by announcing, \u201cI once killed a two-fingered mitten salesman from Cleveland for half-fucking my wife?\u201d How, one wonders, how does someone \u2018half-fuck\u2019 someone else?<\/p>\n

In Spry\u2019s weaker stories, it\u2019s true, the voice and snappy tone become liabilities. \u201cJesus of Thunderbay,\u201d his take on modern-day Christendom, is more monologue than story, while a voice rich in contractions, coupled with iffy blue-collar idiom, gives the impression that its narrator is a simulacrum, a caricature of a caricature. \u201cNorthernmost Pilot,\u201d meanwhile, relies on the novelty of having anthropomorphic animals as main characters to carry a dental-floss thin plot. In short, the piece revolves around a boy who comes home from school and finds his mother in bed with the vice principal. Said boy eventually finds comfort in the arms of his neighbour\u2019s daughter. The catch: they\u2019re all animals. Does the bestial twist have any thematic weight? Not really. The story could have progressed unencumbered whether its leads were human or horse, a sign that, with this story anyway, Spry places the gag above all else.<\/p>\n

The trick with reading Spry is to learn to look past to gags, the\u00a0 gross-out humour, to find the meaty, nutrient-rich goo within his stories, and, happily, the rest of the collection is strong enough to overshadow its occasional missteps. Despite having an entire page of the word \u2018pickle\u2019 repeated over and over again, \u201cGolden\u201d is a heady exploration of self-loathing and trauma. \u201cThe Crest,\u201d too, focuses on the down and out to palatable effect.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Journey Prize-finalist \u201cFive Pounds Short and Apologies to Nelson Algren,\u201d the collection\u2019s lead story, features an alcoholic monkey owner who just can\u2019t get his life together. A ridiculous premise? Yes ma\u2019am, but Spry makes his sordid tale work by making man and monkey sympathetic figures in possession of the breadth of human emotion. We\u2019ve all been friends with that monkey, in one form or another, and that recognition is a testament to Spry\u2019s abilities as a storyteller.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true, Trafford and Spry share a proclivity to push the envelope a bit too far: Trafford, with bold concepts and wonderfully creative conceits, sometimes loses himself to the idea, while Spry, a gifted linguist with a finely-tuned comic ear, can alienate with slapstick humour and the periodic need to shock his readers.<\/p>\n

But when they\u2019re on, they\u2019re on, and the ingenuity on display in both collections is worth the price of admission. I hesitate to draw the potential card and suggest that Trafford and Spry could<\/em> become major Canadian writers, if only because The Divinity Gene<\/em> and Distillery Songs<\/em> are strong fictional debuts that don\u2019t deserve to be tethered to the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fiction Reviews Andrew MacDonald \u00a0 The Divinity Gene by Matthew J. Trafford Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011 192 pp.\u00a0 $22.95 \u00a0 Distillery Songs by Mike Spry London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2011 160 pp. $19.95   In her stint as guest-judge for The Giller Prize, British writer Victoria Glendinning railed against Canadian literature for being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":77,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-230","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":711,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/230\/revisions\/711"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}