Shouts from the Gutter

By Chris Walter

Gofuckyerself Press, p. 232, $16.00

Review by Matthew Firth

Vancouver’s Chris Walter is my new anti-lit hero and it only took one book. Picture Joey Shithead pounding on an old Underwood typewriter and you’ve got a comparable image of Walter. Shouts from the Gutter is exactly that: a collection of brash, in-yer-face tales of the downtrodden. Punks, junkies, thieves, crack whores, street survivors, murderers, damaged working class folks – every story in this book screams from the page.

Walter’s turf, for the most part, is Vancouver’s drug-drenched downtown eastside. But he also mines his punk past in Winnipeg. And not everything is autobiographical. There are third person stories set in Vancouver and other parts of BC. When he shifts from first-person narratives to third, the move is seamless. Walter’s style is not always minimalist. He plunks suitable detail into his stories, authenticating his first-hand understanding of Vancouver’s druggie street scenes. Walter is also a humorous writer. The stories are often peppered with funny dialogue or an unusual simile to make the reader smirk. And, like good punk songs, the stories are short – every story (there are 34 in the book, though no contents page, so I had to count ‘em) is between four and eight pages. I never tired reading his stuff, as Walter infuses enough variety into this hefty book to keep the reader chugging along with him.

Often characters in Walter’s stories think they have the world by the nuts, only to find out they’re about to be shafted yet again. “Motel 99” is a good example. A man breaks out of prison and is on the run in a shitbox ’82 Camero infested with roaches. He decides to hide out in a remote motel, only to be foiled by its codgy old owner. Likewise, “Of Rabbits and Rock Stars” is a funny story about a drunken Halloween party and a very wasted Benny who picks up the wrong guest dressed up as a rabbit.

“One of Us” is a surreal story about clowns that has Walter flexing his imagination, envisioning clowns as a sorry lot of mistreated souls. “Flowers” tells the story of a girl whose web business selling crusty panties to pervs runs off the rails when a nutjob from Red Deer stalks her looking to do more than sniff used gitch.

“Henry Rollins is a Fag” is a hilarious poke at earnest hardcore fans. While “Banana Cream Pie” is a tragic/comedic story of a different sort of Henry, a homeless man whose simple dream of a piece of pie is dashed amidst the harsh realities of life on the street.

Story after story, Walter delivers tough, compassionate, intelligent and humorous short fiction. Shouts from the Gutter reveals the talents of a writer with the balls to do it his way.

At the Copa

By Marisa Labozzetta

Guernica Editions, $20.00

Review by Jeffrey Griffiths

Before I opened At the Copa I scanned the blurb on the back. I didn’t really want to know anything ahead of time, though my eyes picked up: sexual turmoil, sexual panic, sexual satisfaction and Italian-American – in that order.

With that, I started in expecting ten explicit stories, which I’m fine with if the writing is strong and I’m prompted to use my mind once and a while. What I discovered were intelligent accounts of lives that had somehow honed themselves down to mundane days of routine and small concerns. People that moved through their years, unhappy, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled.

Labozzetta has caught the feeling of being trapped in one’s own reality. She moves through the voices of men, a five-year-old child, middle-aged and elderly women with ease, giving a lucid picture of each character. She also shows how sexual tension becomes the gauge, the catalyst for the issues of the characters, often perceived as the problem. If you think about it, what’s the first thing that stops if you or your partner is unhappy?

This book isn’t hard-hitting, if that’s what you’re after; no slaps in the face but what it does do is gnaw at your soul, making you stand back and do a personal assessment.

A few of the stories let the protagonist come out a notch or two ahead but for most nothing really changes, they’ve attempted a diversion and failed, searched the wrong corner. None of the stories really have a concrete end, no big revelations, just a possibility.

In “The Tooth Healer”, Ira, a dentist in New England, is pressured by a patient to go and see an evangelist who heals crooked teeth and cavities, and changes the colour of fillings. With sheer faith in the Lord and ten dollars in the basket he performs oral miracles. Ira ends up in the parking lot madly kissing a woman with bad teeth. He arrives home in time to wait for his miserable wife Colleen to apply creams and lotions, jot notes for her poetry group and do anything else she can to stall coming to bed, all because, Ira figures, in hopes he falls asleep. The end of the story leaves Ira promising himself he won’t pet, paw at, or try to wake Colleen so maybe in the morning she’ll want to hug him.

I know guys that live like Ira, spending half their time thinking about their existence and the other half hiding it. Pour a few drinks in them and they’re spilling their guts. Trouble is, they sober up and get back on the train. Before they know it they’re sixty and on anti-depressants, flipping channels on their big screen TV. This is what Labozzetta’s book is about: to repeat a tired phrase, life is short.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been fast sliding into the middle-age demographic that these stories resonated with me. The thought of my life becoming small and empty scares the shit out of me. These tales of inner struggle are true to life. I make my living doing renovations; I work in people’s homes every day. Believe me, Labozzetta is on the mark in her short story collection At the Copa.

Soucouyant

By David Chariandy

Arsenal Pulp Press, p. 200, $19.95

Review by Bill Brown

The cover states this is a novel of forgetting. In Soucouyant, Chariandy, a young west-coast writer, bears witness to the collapse of a family and its dreams. As Adele, the mother, rushes headlong into dementia, her son, our narrator, provides the axis on which her story turns. Adele has come to Canada at a time when multiculturalism stopped at “wop” and “DP.” So Adele, forced from her home in Trinidad by war and poverty, finds battlefields aplenty in post-war Toronto where she raises her family in a ramshackle house on a cul-de-sac on the Scarborough bluffs, under a dark cloud. With trains all but running through the house and Lake Ontario threatening to swallow everything she loves, Adele shows us how every new Canadian must find their own way out of their own cul-de-sac.

The story’s elegiac tone, revealed through regular flashbacks, creates touching exchanges between mother and son, between his despair and her growing confusion. And Chariandy at his best has an eye for the telling detail: discrimination revealed obliquely, as in a scene at a cashier: “her (Adele’s) change always placed on the counter, never in her hand.” Or, “… in every bone of her reinforced brassiere, there is a spiritual purpose.” Or, “her ankles painted cool by the wet grass.”

Regrettably, this reader can’t fully agree with Alistair MacLeod’s comment on the cover: “The writing itself is of the highest order.” For example, in Soucouyant, the narrative voice and setting can shift suddenly and unsteadily. And the unconvincing description of a mother’s descent into dementia lists her losses and suffering without reaching the heart of the tragedy. Sexual references, normally welcome stuff, clash with the erosion, anger and sadness. And how on earth does our first-person narrator get inside the head of, among others, the nurse’s teacher? “Why couldn’t Meera appreciate the joke, the teacher thought to himself.”

The narrator sets out to teach us many things. We learn about Trinidadian superstitions, about Caribbean herbal medicines, about the Canadian Shield, about the US role in Trinidad during WWII, about Canadian racists, about the naming of Trinidadian villages and about the composition of various clays. Unfortunately, the story’s pacing suffers when these lessons bring the story to a full stop.

Those were more openly racist days in Toronto. But it jars that, apart from Mrs. Cameron, a local librarian, all whites are wooden and despicable. And of course the librarian, for her liberalism, suffers isolation. In Chariandy’s Toronto, teachers make racist slurs in front of students, a waiter asks a newly-arrived Adele if she’d like a fuck, neighbours talk, vandals strike. Their landlord says, “I don’t know anyone so stupid to have niggers in their place.” And it’s not just blacks. Kids torture an autistic boy. You get the idea.

Still Chariandy uses a confident but light touch with the music of the Caribbean dialect. The warm melody off Adele’s tongue stands in stark contrast to the cold climate and people she has settled amongst. Still, in Adele’s undoing, it was an unspeakable youthful misstep that plays a bigger role than the idiots in her adopted country. It is this heartache that makes sense of the soucouyant. But read the story and you’ll learn what one of those is.

Soucouyant – being Chariandy’s first novel – has flaws. Maybe in future work will we see the same dexterity displayed in his dialogue and phrasing applied to his use of literary devices, his pacing and development of fully-rounded characters. Adele says, “They does always tell the biggest stories in books.” Not always, Adele.

 

A Woman Alone at Night

By Tamara Faith Berger

Soft Skull Press, p. 197, $13.95 (US)

Review by Matthew Firth

The good people at Soft Skull Press are going to think I have it in for them and stop sending me books. I don’t, honestly. Maybe I just keep grabbing the wrong books to review. Whatever is going on, this novel let me down.

Tamara Faith Berger’s sexually-juiced novel A Woman Alone At Night actually starts with a splendid bang but quickly falters and then eventually unravels into a discursive heap. Berger’s novel desperately needs a thorough edit. Or more than this, she needs to reconceptualise her narrative, strip it right down and simplify the bejesus out of it.

The story starts well. Mira, the novel’s anti-hero, is a sexually-bold young woman. She recounts being fondled at a young age by Ezrah, a male family friend, and his chums. Later, as a fifteen-year-old coffee shop server, she was picked up by an older man named John. They got it on in his squalid apartment. Shortly after, John introduced Mira to his gay cousin. Quickly, the three of them moved on to making cheap amateur porn. All is fine to this point – though Mira’s rush to whoredom is brisk. Next up, she’s off to a strip club to dance and turn back-room tricks. Mira starts to pal around with a Russian ripper named Adi and this is when the story goes wrong because Berger takes her beautifully perverse story and jams in a metaphysical, quasi-mystical angle that summons Biblical references to whores and their yearning for redemption. Sound jumbled? It is.

The redemption sub-plot is prompted when a strip-club goer named Gio falls at Mira’s parted legs and begs to worship her pussy. This, again, is fine. But rather than keep it simple, Berger imbues the narrative with mysticism, shrouding the story in oblique references to Biblical whores, cluttering the story with some gnashing of religious traditions (e.g., Mira is Jewish and doesn’t dig the Christian perspective Gio brings). What’s worse, the perversity and blunt sexually leave the book the further it moves along. A nice dirty story is lost amidst psycho-babble and dross. Eventually, Mira is in over her head and looks back to Ezrah for help, as the novel seemingly comes full circle. The problem is – by its conclusion – the narrative is so obscured, it is difficult for the reader to make heads or tails of poor Mira’s plight.

Berger writes well about sex. I love her brash, female-centred take on the joys of fucking and sucking; she can make whoredom sound alluring and dignified. Trouble is, she wanders way too far from her strength in A Woman Alone At Night. Kept simple – this could’ve been a juicy plumb of a book. As is, it is sour and confusing.