The more contemporary “Pointless, Incessant Barking in the Night” is another classic meditation on disturbed, and disturbingly credible, love. The piece starts in media res, 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.
The collection’s at its weakest in the smaller stories, grouped together under the heading “Intermezzo Microstories.” 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.
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‘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.
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 – our “canon,” so to speak – 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.
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. 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 – they just seem rarer, less common.
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.
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