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  • The Virtue of Boredom
  • Cynthia Cravens (bio)
The Canal. Lee Rourke. Melville House Publishing. http://mhpbooks.com. 200 pages; paper, $14.95.

A novel whose epigraph is Martin Heidegger's "We are suspended in dread" would seem to be giving itself a great deal to live up to. Lee Rourke's The Canal, an engaging and disturbing story of a man coming to terms with boredom and the people who seem to challenge his peaceful conception of it, literally sits the unnamed narrator down in the middle of a busy, oblivious, and constantly moving populace to establish its central premise: most people—office workers, dog walkers, gangs of youth, soccer fans—mindlessly fill their lives with pointless activity and entertainment, erroneously trying to snuff out their boredom, unaware of its ultimate and liberating power. Boredom compels us, says the narrator, to do things. Boredom, he insists, is good.

This treatise on boredom begins with the narrator's decision to one day walk to the canal instead of walking to work. There he sits, for the entire day, cataloguing the activities of workers in the office building across the canal from the park bench where he lingers, the detritus that floats by, the incongruous grace of coots and swans diving below the filthy water to retrieve, usually, nothing, and the inconsiderate habits of walkers and bicyclists sharing the walkway. Here he watches the world go by, "saying nothing, doing nothing, thinking nothing," but idly wondering about the absence of the canal dredgers whose neglect is palpable, even quantifiable in the number of bottles, cartons, snack bags, bits of wood, and thick sludge carried by the current.

One day, as it goes in most effective parables, a mysterious woman sits next to him on his bench, saying nothing, staring steadfastly ahead, ignoring him. The pattern continues for a couple of days until she finally strikes up a conversation, confessing an intimate and troubling lie she had once told a boyfriend yet refusing to tell the narrator her name. Such is the beginning of a whirlwind camaraderie—not quite a romance, not quite an erotic tryst, but something more along the lines of a desperate fix, compelling the narrator to question whether he's even capable of being in love, and compelling the woman to confess a dark, bizarre secret that will tangle up the narrator in her quest for redemption.

Although the first half of this novel consistently and convincingly argues for a re-evaluation of boredom, at times likening it to desire, at other times linking it to either the absence of or increase in violence, and ultimately suggesting its contribution to happiness, the novel seems only able to maintain that position while the two main characters are sitting on the bench. In the second half, once the two of them are in motion, or active even in a small way, the philosophical underpinnings become less clear; or rather, what seemed to be the underpinning for the narrator seems to lose some of its force, appearing to be contradicted by the dramatic events of the finale.

There are two main thrusts to the story that culminate in the final scene: the first is the threat of escalating violence represented by a rowdy gang of youths carousing the area— bored, and the second is the absence of the dredgers and the narrator's growing anxiety over the filth of the canal, an anxiety brought to a head after the gang of youths tosses a wrecked motor scooter into the water. The gang has already beaten the narrator once after he tried to defend the woman from what could have become an assault on their bench, so he's loath to call attention to himself again. But he has an epiphany in the aftermath of the beating, concluding that "most acts of violence are caused by those who are truly bored. And as our world becomes increasingly boring...our world will become increasingly more violent. It is an impulse that controls us. It is an impulse we cannot ignore."

At first this seems an irreconcilable notion with the assertion in the novel's prologue that boredom is the ideal condition, that it should...

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