A sense of play permeates the six titles on offer here. By play I don’t mean nice and happy, soothing feel goods or beach reads or manic mainstreams—no. The kinds of books catalogued below exhibit an artistic exuberance, a stylistic liveliness. They bear little resemblance to one another but appeal to the writer-reader (the rereader) in me in so far as they reliably astonish and renew my devotion to the written word. These are books whose delights I want to share and talk about, the better to understand their technique and form, the choices made, the paths abandoned. In each of the little musings included here I’ve tried to single out the elements I find most exhilarating. I hope you enjoy them, too.  

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Monkey Beach, by Eden Robinson 

The opening pages of Monkey Beach are so gripping, bristle with so much urgency, humour, and gossip—a missing seiner, a lost brother, rumours of insurance fraud and foul play—that even the keenest reader might be forgiven for underappreciating the nimbleness of Eden Robinson’s structure, the rhetorical feints and swerves that mark Lisa’s narration. Signs abound in this novel, blurring the real and the dreamed. Crows speak in Haisla. A seal bobs in the shallows. An orange cat perks along a verdant shore. Sleepless parents leave lit cigarettes askance an overflowing ashtray unsmoked, repeatedly smooth their hair.

The world of Monkey Beach is freighted in story and storytelling—“You’re telling it wrong,” Ma-ma-oo says early in the novel, interrupting Lisa’s father’s story about “B’gwus, the wild man of the woods,” to take up her own account—and one of the more impressive feats of this novel is how deftly Robinson conceptualizes Lisa’s intellectual and spiritual development while retaining the propulsive pace of a thriller. We move seamlessly from present to past, diving into a peculiar, somewhat liminal second-person: “Pull your heart out of your chest. Cut away the tubes that sprout from the top. Place your heart on a table. Take a knife and divide it in half, lengthwise. Your heart is hollow.” As Lisa learns to read her world, so, too, the reader learns to read Lisa.

When I teach Monkey Beach—both in creative writing classes and in standard literature classes—I ask my students to pay close attention to the sequencing of events, flagging tense changes, digressions, interpolated monologues, interruptions, as well as any instances of nonhuman storytelling (“The Elvis clock says the time is seven-thirty, but it’s always either an hour ahead or an hour behind”). This sort of artistic scrutiny makes for slow reading but yields multitudes. That a book as enthralling as Monkey Beach—a page-turner, in every sense of the word—rewards such scrupulous analysis is truly rare. 

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Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry

Under the Volcano is my favourite Canadian novel. Yes, I know. New Brighton born and tortured, Lowry, “Late of the Bowery/His prose was flowery/And often glowery,” despite a prolonged tenure in Dollarton, B.C. (roughly: 1938-1954), where he rewrote and revised and, in 1944—and thanks largely to Margerie Bonner: wife, editor—exorcised Under the Volcano from a fire, hardly screams “O Canada”; but the book, to me, seems significantly a thing of here: “He had reached his crisis at last, a crisis without possession, almost without pleasure finally, and what he saw might have been, no, he was sure it was, a picture of Canada.”

That a novel as wild as Under the Volcano could be written in a country categorically, if not constitutionally, allergic to modernism, opened up a world for me. Reading Lowry for the first time in my early twenties, I sensed—and, as of my last reading, sense still—what might be attempted: a sentence spanning three syntactically mellifluous pages; the word “immelmanning,” in reference to Max Immelmann, a German fighter pilot from the First World War, whose offensive aerial stylings Lowry enlists in the service of a description in which the reader is made to see (and hear) the ecstatic flight patterns of strange birds, “aerobatic as newborn dragon-flies.” Lowry’s unsparing, utterly humourless, hard-bitten depiction of not just alcoholism but of the terrifying humiliations of those condemned to endure its consequences remains unmatched.

Late in the novel, Yvonne, the Consul’s battle-hardened wife, imagines a future, a sober polestar, in British Columbia, “between the forest of pine and high, high waving alders and tall slim birches, and the sea […] salmonberries and thimbleberries and wild blackberry bushes that on bright winter nights of frost reflected a million moons.” Needless to say, they never get there; and the tragedy of the novel accumulates in these three, desperately simple lines: “And it was possible. It was possible! It was all there, waiting for them.” Begun in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1936, Under the Volcano was rejected by twelve publishers and finally released in 1947. It has the best, bleakest final sentence of any novel I’ve read. A masterpiece. 

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Brave in Bed, by Brecken Hancock

This book doesn’t exist yet but it will. From the author of the Trillium-winning Broom, Broom, a virtuoso debut I routinely push on friends, family, students, grad students, legions of the poetically skeptical, comes a suite of four essays spanning a panoply of deceptively quotidian tones: sleep, work, kids, and husband. Perhaps you’ve already read the sleep essay as it appeared in the second issue of Tolka under the title “Brave in Bed,” after which the collection intends to pilfer a name; and, if you haven’t, well, here’s hoping you do. Great writing, whether of prose or poetry, reveals its magnitudes at a glance. “One should not have to eat the whole roast to determine it once was a cow,” to borrow from William H. Gass. Too true. So here, then, at random, a few meaty bites: 

           My skull disturbs a pillow. 

           A micron slice of scalp crawls at the follicle.

           Every epidermal electron strikes the sheets. 

           I can’t sleep.   

Or this, from the opening of an essay simply titled “Kids”:

           If you’re reading this, someone bore you.

           Bore you, as in held the lightness of your emerging heft and mutated to house your enormity.

           As in folded their meat over the first speck of you and hived off the best portion of food from their blood for your bread.

           As in averted calcium from their bones to mineralize the skeleton soup of you, which they were stewing.

Maybe it’s the use of “house” as a verb in the second sentence in the passage quoted above, but right now I’m picturing a series of buildings, like those zigzagging Catalan palaces that enwomb the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, architecturally distinct but linked—husband lives in this house; while if you take your second left down these steps, first door on your right, mind your step, you’ll find that work tends to hang out over here—as an improving metaphor for this collection. Keep an eye out for this one, reader, and when it comes: run, don’t walk. Trust me.    

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Brother, by David Chariandy

I had the good fortune of interviewing David Chariandy back in 2017. I’d read Brother a couple of times in advance of our conversation, but listening to Chariandy read from the opening of his novel unlocked its inner rhythms, the wonderful music at work in the prose. Take a look at that first paragraph. Just over 100 words, twenty percent of which: verbs (with only one lonely occurrence—lodged inside a sliver of dialogue—of the verb “to be”). “Once he showed me his place in the sky. That hydro pole in a parking lot all weed-broke and abandoned…The feeder lines on insulators, the wired bucket called a pole-pig, the footholds rusted bad going way into a sky cut hard by live cables.” Rereading these sentences now I hear immediately those long O sounds (“showed,” “hydro,”  “broke,” “pole,” “going”), the supple repetition of “and” in “and abandoned,” as distinguished from Chariandy’s extensive use of polysyndetic coordination as a means of governing abundance (“We listened to Planet Rock and carried Adidas bags and wore stonewashed jeans and painter caps”); and I admire, too, the specificity on offer, the image of a distribution transformer (“wired bucket”) and its sobriquet (“pole-pig”).

If I seem to linger on these details, it’s because Brother warrants that kind of attention, and because music (“Between ska and blues. Between Port of Spain and Philadelphia. Between the 1950s and the late 1980s.”) figures so prominently in the novel’s overarching memory project. Like Monkey Beach, Brother, a novel of education, of spiritual and emotional growth, flits back and forth between the past and present, drawing on one realm to make sense of the other: “Memory’s got nothing to do with the old and grey and faraway gone. Memory’s the muscle sting of now.” Our narrator, Michael, proves an astute student, attentive and shrewd, as attuned to the “heated language of a changing nation” in Scarborough (“Scarlem, Scarbistan. We lived in Scar-bro, a suburb that had mushroomed up and yellowed, browned, and blackened into life.”), as he is to the curative lessons bestowed upon him by family and friends.      

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The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, by Jason Guriel

On finishing Jason Guriel’s brilliant second novel, The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, which, written in rhyming couplets—

            A full moon meant a full wharf: werewolves queued

            Up for a whaling ship. The wolves had crewed

            Since they were cubs; they knew no other lives. 

            They stood on two paws, upright, blubber knives

            In scabbards at their waists, and wore short slacks

            With cable sweaters. 

—follows on the lauded Forgotten Work, I immediately went back and reread a pair of essays from Guriel’s The Pigheaded Soul: Essays and Reviews on Poetry & Culture, “The Poetry in the Prose” and “Lovable Losers,” curious to see how this indefatigably talented poet and essayist and novelist and cartoonist and critic—and, and what else is there?—evolved.

In the first of these essays Guriel considers the poems (and, crucially, poetry critics) novelists shoehorn inside their fictions; while the second piece assesses the representation of poets (and tin-eared aspirants) in fiction. Rereading these essays in the wake The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, I like to think that I detected a stirring, a clarion call for the verse novels to come (and, lucky us, I hear a third is in the works). What if the poem spanned the entirety of the prose? And what if that novelist, writing in verse, writing about writers, readers, and fans, trafficked in something more expansive and epic and intellectually enduring than merely dramatizing another loveable loser? “We’ve had a lot of fictional poets who are easy to love,” Guriel writes; “we need more who actually deserve it.”

To say that The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles answers the questions raised in Guriel’s essays does the novel a small disservice, diminishing the weird wonders found within. Guriel even lampoons the very infrastructure of endorsements and blurbs: 

            The next time Full-Moon made an overture,

            It started barking blurbs designed to lure

            A teenager: “‘Eclipses Twilight,’ Slate.

            ‘An instant YA classic. I can’t wait

            To wolf it down again,’ the New York Times.

            ‘It grips you with its claws—and fang-sharp rhymes,’

            Library Journal.” 

In a review of John Updike’s Picked-Up Pieces, the late Martin Amis concedes, “having read him once, you admit to yourself, almost with a sigh, that you will have to read everything he writes.” Ditto Guriel in my books. Minus the sigh.  

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A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, by James De Mille

In the stacks of the QEII Library at Memorial University in St. John’s there sits a worn, navy-spined hardback of James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, in the margins of whose sun-faded pages I inscribed—first in pencil and then with a streaky blue pen—such amorphous annotations as “HA!” and “compare to Plato’s republic & Thomas More’s utopia” and (somewhat more obscurely) “reigns [sic] being pulled tight,” minor crimes, to be sure, a shy scribe’s idle misdemeanors, for which I as yet feel little compunction especially since (to judge by the concluding due date: FEB 01 2002) the last person to fuss about in these pages was me.

I remember the world of this book as I remember the world of reading this book, and my burgeoning interest in narrative play. Published posthumously in 1888, De Mille’s novel dutifully relates the discovery of the strange manuscript alluded to in its title. Written by Adam More, whose nautical debacles run him aground of the Kosekin, a peculiar, cave-dwelling people, “who revere paupers and hold in contempt the wealthy, who denigrate light and life and glorify darkness and death, and who live amidst plants and monstrous animals surviving from prehistoric ages,” this manuscript forms the bulk of De Mille’s text. The enveloping frame enrols a chorus of talky yachtsmen (Featherstone, Oxenden, Congreve, and Melick) who take turns reading More’s story out loud, stopping only to eat—they are constantly eating or preparing to eat—and to unhand their parboiled literary analysis. A lengthy Introduction, complete with Explanatory Notes, Abbreviations, Emendations in Copy-text, and not one but two—two!—Line-end Hyphenated Compounds indices, supplied by Malcolm Parks, appends the manuscript I defaced in 2002, and I heartily recommend reading this version. Parks’ commentary is wonderfully unhinged—think Nabokov’s Charles Kinbote but with tenure at Dal—and provides a more satisfying crunch to the ending De Mille left unfinished: “Here Featherstone stopped, yawned, and laid down the manuscript. ‘That’s enough for to-day,’ said he; ‘I’m tired, and can’t read any more. It’s time for supper.’” 

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Learn more about Hides: 

Hides is a novel of family and politics that distinguishes itself through its careful intermingling of seriousness and comedy, and its surreal but eerily plausible setting.

As wildfires rage across the country and another federal election looms, four friends convene for a wilderness hunting trip in northwestern Newfoundland to commemorate the death of one of their sons, killed in a mass shooting in Calgary the year before. Hides traces the emotional ruptures following this violent, untimely death, along with the tensions of old friendships and father-son relationships marred by loss, betrayal, and a pervasive political and environmental disenchantment.