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University of Toronto Quarterly 74.1 (2004/2005) 184-200



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Fiction

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I decided to make a move, this year, from reviewing fiction by newcomers to reading fiction by 'established' authors. What I enjoyed about the former assignment was the sense of freshness, of discovery, and its attendant freedom to read without a great deal of advance publicity, as it were. But even reading these 'established' writers, I was delighted to find a range of experience, everything from rereading novels I'd read and had already seen reviewed a number of times in newspapers or magazines, to discovering writers I should know and, to my shame, didn't. (And I call myself a Canadian literature specialist.) Even so, I tried to take each text as it came to me from my rather overloaded bedside reading table, attempting to smother the publishing 'buzz' I had already picked up about some of these books. I discovered that this is something I should attempt to do more often. As I review books for this annual volume, I am impressed anew by the preponderant role that publicity plays in my decisions inside a bookstore. A new readerly code, I've decided, should really be to pick up a book and start reading, rather than doing what I must confess I usually do, faced with a volume in a bookstore: 'Have I heard of this?' 'Did I read a review of this book?' and, shame, shame: 'Is this a book I should have read?' Literary puritanism dies hard. [End Page 184]

Lois Simmie's What I'm Trying to Say Is Goodbye makes for absorbing reading that has nothing to do with puritanical duty. She interweaves the narrative perspectives of Matthew Kelly, a former journalist living in Victoria who is battling alcoholism, and his teenaged grandson Sam, who is trapped on a north-island house that his fanatical stepfather is rapidly turning into a religious commune. Simmie manages to evoke the daily hell of a recovering alcoholic with the sort of frightening realism that brought to my mind actor Jon Voigt's depiction of the miserably sad drunk in the 1986 film Desert Bloom. In her closing acknowledgments, Simmie thanks editor Edna Alford for her 'bloodhound nose for sentimentality,' and it's easy to see that this is exactly the sort of material that, in less sure hands, could call forth easy tears and truisms. At times, when Simmie seems almost ready to tip over into sentimentality, she veers away. The plot can tend towards the over-dramatic; at the north-island homestead from hell, the evil stepfather's new girlfriend is not only a child abuser; she tries to run grandson Sam over when he tries to escape from the property. But, for the most part, though Simmie's two main baddies are indeed bad, she also manages to inject into this story a compelling portrait of a teenage boy's need for a life unfettered by religious intolerance. And there's where the real achievement of this book lies; in counterpointing the narratives of Matthew and Sam, Simmie reveals some deep resonances between an older adult's struggle with alcoholism and a teenager's crying need to rescue himself and his mother from another sort of addiction. Both scenes of hell are in turn set apart from the fire-and-brimstone versions of the apocalypse that the stepfather and his vicious girlfriend peddle. They have, ironically, no real understanding of what hell can be.

Douglas Coupland's new novel Hey Nostradamus! provides a revealing counterpoint to Simmie's novel. Like Simmie, Coupland is fascinated by the workings of intolerance in fundamentalist religions; it seems to be a topic on many artists' minds these days, for reasons that are all too apparent. What Coupland does, however, is construct a fictionalized version of the Columbine high school shootings, set on Vancouver's North Shore. He has four characters, involved in various ways in that catastrophic event, take turns as narrators: Cheryl, a student who has died in the gunfire and who is now in some mysterious sort of limbo...

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