Savage Love<\/i> 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<\/i>. 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<\/i>, a historical novel about a young French woman in the 16th\u00a0century 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<\/i> and now, Glover has published an essay collection, Attack of the Copula Spiders<\/i>, on the craft, and a spattering of short stories. His most recent collection of short fiction, Savage Love<\/i>, is well worth the wait.<\/p>\n 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 <\/i>is, in my view (and without hyperbole) a master-class in the short fiction form.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n If Freud’s right and life’s all about eros <\/i>and thanatos<\/i>, sex and a lust for death, then Glover’s collection can also be called a master-class in the human condition. Consider, for example, \u201cTristiana,\u201d 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. The collection’s at its weakest in the smaller stories, grouped together under the heading \u201cIntermezzo Microstories.\u201d An ‘intermezzo’ is a composition that comes between other dramatic entities, a sort of brief reprieve, and Glover rolls out several tales ranging from a paragraph to a few pages. They’re nice, competent examples of flash fiction, but compared to the larger, meatier stories they come between, the microstories feel like filler, as does the collection’s prelude. The irony here, of course, is that were Glover’s longer stories weaker, these smaller works would shine brighter. As it stands, they’re the part of the collection fickle readers might be tempted to skip.<\/p>\n Periodically a foreign writer called upon to judge a Canadian literary award makes a snide remark about the state of Canadian literary fiction (see Glendinning, Victoria, who judged the Giller in 2009). The past couple years saw Gary Shteyngart, a Russian American recently named to the New Yorker<\/i>‘s Best 20 Under 40 list, volley the accusation that Canadian writers don’t take risks because they all want grants from the Canadian government. He later retracted the statement, or gestured towards retraction, saying he was drunk when he wrote the comment and mentioning his love for Mordecai Richler’s work.<\/p>\n Fair play on Shteyngart’s part: Richler is one of our finest, and who hasn’t fallen prey to ill-advised drunken trash talking? While I don’t think his comments are completely accurate, I do think that the trajectory of Canadian fiction \u2013 our \u201ccanon,\u201d so to speak \u2013 tends towards subtle writers who focus on internal struggle, on the subtle and the quietly sublime, versus fiction the likes of which Shteyngart writes, where a lot of external things explode, where the dirty ‘P’ word, ‘plot,’ takes center stage.<\/p>\n Maybe that’s why Glover hasn’t caught on the way Munro or Gallant or some of Canada’s other mighty writers of fiction have: he’s (maybe) too much everything<\/i>. His characters are rudely alive; when their stories climax, they howl and bang on walls. Which is not to say that Canada doesn’t produce writers who tell stories that fit that bill \u2013 they just seem rarer, less common.<\/p>\n Or maybe I just haven’t been paying enough attention to what’s out there, to the novels and story collections lining Canada’s shelves. Maybe, to continue the euphemistic way I’ve been talking about Glover’s work, I haven’t been sleeping around enough with contemporary Canadian fiction. Whether I’m hard up for CanLit or not, Glover deserves a wider and more diverse readership than I suspect he has.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2293,"parent":93,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1758","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1758"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2217,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1758\/revisions\/2217"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nby Douglas Glover
\nFredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2014
\n264pp, $29.95
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\nThe more contemporary \u201cPointless, Incessant Barking in the Night\u201d is another classic meditation on disturbed, and disturbingly credible, love. The piece starts in media res<\/i>, with the narrator visiting his emotionally damaged neighbour, Geills, after her most recent suicide attempt. In a few pages, their relationship accelerates; the narrator leaves his wife and embarks on what can only be described as addictive psycho-sexual self-implosion. And through it all, ah, Glover’s style, lovely to parse and heart-stopping to read. Our narrator takes Geills from behind, “both lost in some private erotic dementia, submitting not to one another but the moment, the act itself, submitting to submission, willing the universal catastrophe,” at last culminating in what might be the most philosophically complex description of ejaculation to grace the annals of Canadian fiction, the “ancient conversations of tiny one-celled creatures in her gut and the hysterical cheeping of my sperm driving themselves toward her womb.”Gross and wonderful.<\/p>\n