Fiction 1

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Letters in Canada 2001 Fiction 1 / NOREEN GOLFMAN Contemporary Canadian Fiction 2001 was, like my experience reading these works, all over the map. I read these books over most of the summer at various places: at home soaking in the tub, sitting on a favourite chaise in my St John=s garden, on planes between meetings or before and after funerals, in hotel rooms in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Fredericton, London, Madrid, in several indistinguishable Maple Leaf lounges, while waiting for friends in bars and cafés, and sometimes even at my desk. I can with few exceptions recall exactly where I was when I read the novels or short stories in this review essay, this being not so much a skill as an effect of the experience of either resisting or gleefully losing oneself in a work of fiction. And so it is that many of my notes contain memories and smells of these times and places, all but hidden to anyone else. Such is the necessarily unspoken truth of the reviewer=s reality. If my reading locales were varied, as dictated by other professional commitments or places that needed to be seen, my method of selection was only slightly less haphazard. Travel dictated the need to pack thin books. I am grateful to A Line Between the Skin and Billy Tinker for making carry-on luggage a realizable goal. Bedtime reading and reclining in the bathtub demanded manageable spines and relatively light fare, like a Dr. Swathmore or the amusingly tiny Small Apartments. Sitting in the garden or at my desk invited weightier novels with sturdy bindings, like a River Thieves or The Grim Pig. Generally, I kept deferring the texts in smaller print until I felt my aging eyes could handle them (Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers, Drowning in Fire). Often I judged a book by its cover and (heed, publishers) found myself drawn to pick up a Martin Sloane or a Strong Hollow simply because an elegantly understated design invited me both to respect and guess at the work within, not have its message telegraphed without cracking the spine. For the same reason, it took me a while to gain the courage to hold on to the extreme close-up photograph of a rabbit on The Insolent Boy, arguably the creepiest cover in the stack. So it is that while unsystematically lurching through thousands of words of new fiction I kept anticipating that artful themes and grandly unifying fiction 179 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 patterns would reveal themselves, that whole orders of meaning would emerge in neatly synthesized and helpful units. Such was never to be the case, a point itself worth mentioning, because although the world of fiction broadly divides between the straightforward story-tellers and the wandering experimentalists, for lack of a better word, everyone is still trying to tell a story by getting from one end of the cover to the other. This is true even of the fragments glibly collected as At Last There Is Nothing Left to Say by Canadian rock musician Matthew Good, a determinedly unconventional production in every way (included are photos, drawings, sidebars, glossaries), shape (measuring a wide 82 inches across), and form (polyphonic, intertextual, multimedia). Indeed, some of what falls between these covers can be found on Matthew Good=s official website (http://www.matthewgood.net/) where you will recognize the same edgy style, attitude, and iconoclastic sauciness. To wit: the normally fawning blurbs on the back cover announce: >Complete crap from beginning to end.= National Book Review Weekly; >... thoroughly boring and extremely hard to follow at the best of times.= Literary Journal. And so on. Good=s mad method recalls the brash outrageousness of The Real Frank Zappa Book, the late musician=s engagingly candid autobiography that followed a life from A to Z. Yes, there was only one Frank Zappa, but Good is aiming for something fresh and unnerving, as well, and when he is not ranting about the state of the world he is writing darkly provocative fiction, or making fiction of what surely must be a...