Back Flip, by Anne Denoon (Porcupine's Quill, $24.95, 323pages, ISBN: 0889842388), follows an Altmanesque cast of characters in the Toronto art scene over several months in 1967. There is Bruno the neophyte gallery owner, Max the established gallery owner, Jane, Bruno's sexually liberated new assistant and Eddie the brash young artist whose painting Back Flip is the object of intrigue. Then there's Jerry the pseudo connoisseur, his flirtatious and adventurous wife Eleanor, Tom the already famous Canadian artist, Win, the older woman artist whose work has yet to be recognized, Bob the once promising artist reduced to substitute teaching and failure, Howard, the smarmy art critic, and other assorted artists and hangers on. Denoon does a remarkable job of mixing and matching her creations. Some situations are reminiscent of British bedroom farces like the Patrick Pearse Motel, as assignations go wrong, and flirtatious behaviors and sexual innuendoes are misinterpreted. Bruno gives Eddie a show and when it appears Eddie's painting, Back Flip, already reserved for purchase by Jerry, will become very valuable, Bruno squirrels it away. There is a forgery, a painting is vandalized, there are at least two deaths, while the pretentious art community is wickedly satirized in an entertaining manner. There is an epilogue set in 2000, and it is one of the few epilogues in recent history that works, as we are told the fates of all the major characters. Understandably, no one takes credit for the cover art featuring a beautiful photo of downtown Toronto by Boris Spremo; unfortunately someone forgot to proof the cover art and the author's name is completely unreadable, which must really thrill her after the years she spent writing this excellent novel.
Tempting Faith DiNapoli, by Lisa Gabriele (Doubleday Canada, $29.95, 291pages, ISBN: 0385658214), has received a lot of attention and was excerpted in the National Post. The problem is that it is a routine coming of age story and coming of age stories are a dime a dozen. In fact, with minor variations this is the same story as the recently reviewed Heave, by Christy Ann Conlin, and The Sudden Weight of Snow, by Laisha Rosnau, the difference being that Faith DiNapoli grows up in Dogpatch, ON, rather than Dogpatch, NS, or Dogpatch, BC. The story is completely predictable. Faith comes from a poor, dysfunctional catholic family, and as a teenager learns to smoke, drink excessively, do drugs, steal and have lots of sex, as well as developing reasonable doubts about The Church, whose dispensing of guilt (after four children her mother had an abortion and had her tubes tied) has made her mother's life intolerable. Faith's own inability to escape The Church threatens to destroy her life also. There is a tragedy near the end, after which there are hints of a new beginning for Faith. The writing is sprightly and occasionally humorous, as when Faith's low-life brother Mattie and his even lower-life girlfriend Trelly have third trimester church wedding. Trelly's thank you speech at the reception ends with "Oh my God, the baby just fucken kicked just now." Faith's younger sister Hope brings a date to the wedding who, her mother believes is a boy, but is actually a girl. There is too much of the self-absorbed whiner in Faith, so much so that one longs to say to her "Smarten up! Your life isn't half as a bad as you think it is." Actually, Faith's mother Nancy is the more interesting character and could herself be the basis for a novel.
It is highly questionable whether Recurring Fictions, by Wendy McGrath (University of Alberta Press, $16.95, 158 pages, ISBN:0888643896), is indeed a novel. The author is a poet (Common Place Ecstasies), and judging from the poetic prose found here, a very good one. I believe the format could be called Postcard Fiction: very brief passages, flashing back and forth in time, looking in on several generations of one family from immigrants arriving in the 1800s to present day. There is really no plot, little characterization, very little happens and there is limited sense of place, though as an old Edmontonian I remember the Santa Rosa Grocery. The language is lush: describing a new plastic wading pool ". . . the water just tasted warm and smelled like a brand new doll." It is the lack of plot that is most troubling. Here is yet another author, and apparently a publisher, who seem to think that a banal family history is of interest to readers. Other than in the language there appears to be no imagination involved, just flashes of memory and autobiography that could apply to any of thousands of immigrant families and their offspring. There is also the pretentious poetic trick of leaving spaces instead of using punctuation, something that definitely does not belong in a novel.
Porcupines and China Dolls, by Robert Arthur Alexie (Stoddart, $32.95, 286 pages, ISBN: 0773733051), is a very, very ambitious novel that deals with the lifetimes of trauma caused by child abuse in residential schools. But it is so much more. The title refers to how native children saw themselves after they had been sheared and sanitized to the standards of the white world. James Nathan and his best friend Jake Noland were both sexually abused while at residential school in the far north, a secret they keep buried deep inside them. James sums up the situation while staring at his peacefully sleeping girlfriend "You're lucky. You don't carry the dreams I carry. . . guaranteed to keep you in apathy æn self-pity for the rest æa your life. Or in booze. Or both, if you're lucky." Another abused friend commits suicide which brings Jake and another man to disclose what happened to them and eventually James also confesses. The culprit is brought to justice. There is a healing session after which both their lives slowly improve. Each finds love and cuts back on the drinking and partying, and James begins painting seriously, something he has always wanted to do. There is a lot of wry (rye) humor, as early on we are taken on a day long tour of a native saloon while James drinks to obliterate the memories of his horrible childhood. With its caustic and sometimes hilarious asides, it is probably the best description of the native bar scene ever written. The story occasionally lapses into melodrama, too many people cry too often, but on the whole the novel is timely and succeeds both as a tough-minded story and as an insight into the destruction wreaked on native peoples by the residential school system.
The jacket copy for Icarus, by Louise Young (Thomas Allen Publishers, $29.95, 223 pages, ISBN: 0919028497), tells us it is a story about a search for the legendary Lost Lemon Mine. However, the mine is never named in the text, while a one- or two-page summary of the legend would have truly benefited the novel. Eight unlikable people get up an expedition to the Rocky Mountains of Southern Alberta after Icarus, the least obnoxious of three brothers (the other two are Gibson and Laird) finds a treasure map inside a book at a secondhand bookstore. A black man and his girlfriend are invited along, as is a tenderfoot lawyer and his wife who have put up the money for the expedition; the eighth person is Gibson's wife, Ana. It takes nearly 100 pages to set up the expedition, much of which is unnecessary. The best writing advice I ever had came from one of Young's mentors, Lawrence Russell, "Don't explain, just begin." How I wish Young had followed that advice. As the expedition draws nearer to the gold, what could have been a wonderful Twilight Zone-like situation develops as they cross into what might be called a native Happy Hunting Ground, where spirits from the past camp and hunt on the valley floor, invisible to all the interlopers except Icarus, and later some of the others. The Indian spirit elders who orchestrate the events appear to be on hallucinogens so it unintentionally comes down to a contest between the druggies and the rednecks, where the druggies are all wise and the rednecks are all dumb. The men in the expedition quarrel incessantly, and are all-round jerks. The women are whiny invertebrates. After they stumble on the gold, the scenario degenerates into a bland Blair Witch Project. Young can't resist showing off her academic language which is out of place in a quasi adventure like this. Eg: corvine instead of crow like, and sometimes one needs a translator for the pretentious: "Lattices of complex paradigms blister Icarus's bloodshot corneas."
W. P. Kinsella is attending the National Scrabble Championships in San Diego.
