I actually finished this book on Monday night, but have not had the time to write about it until now. Smith is a favourite of mine, one of my very favourite living Canadian writers, in fact, and this was the last of his fiction that I had to track down. I’m not sure if it’s available from another publisher, but this particular copy was from The Porcupine’s Quill. For anyone not already familiar with TPQ, some explaining will be necessary. They are a small Canadian press, notable for two things: first, they publish well-written books by emerging or under-appreciated authors, and second, in terms of their status as objects, they publish the ugliest books known to man. This seems like an exaggeration on my part, and I assure you that it is not. I have several TPQ books, but let’s just use Noise as an exemplar, as it is fairly typical. I’m pleased to report that it’s a trade paperback, which is the finest format for fiction, in my opinion, but sadly it’s over-sized, and is actually about the same dimensions as a hardback, with equally tight binding, making it unnecessarily heavy and awkward to hold. The paper stock they chose is exquisite, far too high-quality for anything other than a special edition, frankly, although this isn’t one. The choice is doubly strange, as they seem to have chosen the cheapest, most fibrous and poorly-finished cover stock available. It has some kind of laminate peeling back from the edges, but only the outside; inside the cover feels like wet cardboard. As a further disgrace, the typefaces chosen for the book are ugly and inappropriate, with the presentation face (the font used for the titles and chapter headings and such) being so ugly it could have been downloaded from the internet bundled with hundreds of smiley face pictures and a program to turn your mouse pointer into an animation of a flamethrower. The layout isn’t too terrible, although chapter transitions are inconsistent and there isn’t enough space left at the top margin, so even though it’s an over-sized book, the page feels cramped. And the cover! Oh my God, the cover. The picture I’ve included, while accurate in its way, cannot really convey how god-awful and monstrous is the orange of this cover (and I like orange, it’s the the colour scheme of this website, for crying out loud). To top it off, TPQ used a horrible black and white stock photo and followed the “I don’t know art, but I know what I like” school of graphic design in laying out the cover. A ten year old could have done better with a copy of MS Paint. It would probably be amusing to say that I read the book so quickly so that I wouldn’t have to be around such a hideous object anymore, but that wouldn’t be the truth. For all their terrible choices when it comes to printing books, one thing they excel at is choosing which books to print. I read this book so quickly because just like with Russell Smith’s other books (and frankly, every other TPQ book I’ve ever read), I couldn’t put the damned thing down. It was just too good.
And what, you ask, is so good about this book? Satire! Russell Smith is one of the few Canadian writers who gets it right. Noise feels like and extension of How Insensitive, Smith’s first novel about a young man new to Toronto who struggles to make not only a living, but any sort of emotional connection. In this novel we’re following James, a freelance critic/journalist who is trying to negotiate the world of high cuisine, wannabe poets and pretentious video/performance artists in an effort to pay the bills, get laid, and live some kind of authentic life. Smith nails the Canadian arts scene, and the Toronto scene in particular. Literati, fashionistas and other glitterati glide in and out of the book, oblivious to everyone and everything outside their ken, evasive, pretentious, often monumentally stupid, but somehow moving more smoothly through the world than James and his friends (De Courcy in particular is less well off than he appears; there is a sequence where Smith reveals the source of De Courcy’s seemingly endless supply of currency, but hints at a darker secret just under the surface).
I’ve heard it said that this is Smith’s best book, but I would have to disagree. Noise has many features that How Insensitive lacks, like a sense of industry and a keener eye on the Canadian literary scene, but while he obviously revels in Toronto and its foibles, he goes beyond satire to the point of contempt and unnecessary cruelty on nearby Kitchener-Waterloo (called “Munich” in the book, a nod to Kitchener’s pre-WWI name, “Berlin”—I have to say, though, that renaming smaller cities for no good reason is the sort of thing that pisses me off in modern novels, right alongside overly obvious parodic names of stores and products). His biggest issue there seems to be that it’s a middling sized city and therefore not Toronto, and the tone of the Munich scenes doesn’t line up with the tone of the scenes in Toronto. Muriella Pent, Smith’s most recent novel gets the non-Toronto sequences right, and the entire book seems far more consistent and mature, and I would say that it is definitely his best work.
Critics have said that Smith focuses too much on the superficial, but it’s exactly in the superficial that Smith shines and carves out a necessary place in Canadian literature. Too many writers seem to think that in order for a book to be serious it must also be somber and melancholy; Noise (and his other books) has a light touch but is still a serious picture of urban Canada despite some characters and situations that might seem frivolous if left unexamined (that such people and situations should be examined is part of the point).
Next is John Welter’s Night of the Avenging Blowfish.
