I received this book as a gift several years ago, but the subject matter (a country and western singer from Toronto) put me off it, as well as the fact that it’s a pretty ugly book with uncomfortably tight binding. Those may be stupid reasons to put off reading a book, I guess, but those are the kinds of things that can go through your mind when you’re looking for your next reading experience. It’s right up there with “am I in the mood or action, or contemplation?” I also think that I may have insulted the person who gave it to me by not reading it right away, which was not my intention at all. But I guess there’s no going back to those moments, right? So a few days ago I finally felt it was time, and here we are.
Robertson’s protagonist, James, is in fact a country and western musician who lives and works in Toronto, but was born and raised in a small southwestern Ontario town called Datum. If Datum is meant to have a real-world analog, I don’t know what it would be; the geography in this part of the country is too compact to have much meaningful distinction for me. Country and western music has a much larger hold on the northwestern part of this province, which is where I’m from, and I think that’s part of the reason why I dislike it as much as I do (with the exception of Johnny Cash, who was brilliant—and only mentioned once, in passing, through the whole novel); had I not been so over-exposed to it, my dislike may simply have been mild rather than great. James finds himself, in the middle 1990s, with an album full of music, but no lyrics, and his record label is pushing him to get something on paper so they can release his long-overdue third album. Pushing him so hard, in fact, that they are threatening to drop him entirely. To refresh and inspire himself, he hops drunkenly onto a late night/early morning bus and heads home to Datum.
What he finds, of course, is that you can’t go home again. The community has moved on in his absence, although like all such places, it hasn’t moved far. It’s a Canadian novel, so there’s unfinished family business to be taken care of, childhood grudges to be re-enacted, friendships to be re-examined, and of course the tragic death of a father to understand and come to terms with. It’s also a first novel published by a smallish press, so of course there’s a certain amount of the Canadian Indie Style going on. There’s the beautiful, sexual crazy girl (no unusual name this time, but she does pull a post-coital firearm on our confused protagonist, in an effort to make a point about art), and a tone that’s hard to pin down. Actually, to leave the CIS thing alone for a bit, there’s something a little odd about Robertson’s prose. His diction is pretty standard fare for the 1997 publication date, but there’s something jarring about his syntax. Words appear, from time to time, in unusual order with unnecessary or unaccountable hyphens strewn about willy-nilly. It seems that, like our protagonist in search of lyrics, Robertson (and therefore the reader) can never quite manage to settle into a rhythm. My biggest complaint with this book, the thing that I found frustrating me time and time again, was a very, very Canadian thing, and I think is in some ways connected to the Canadian Indie Style. James and the other characters inhabit a real city, the city of Toronto. In that city are landmarks, real places and things, that give the setting its meaning, that allow readers to connect with it as a place. That, as a co-worker of mine pointed out when I brought up my frustration, give the place its own mythology. So what do Canadian authors, including Mr. Robertson, do? They “allude” to real places by giving them almost-the-same fictional names. So instead of Sneaky Dee’s, an extremely well known bar (in my neighbourhood, actually) with a life and reputation familiar throughout the city and perhaps beyond, we are given the ridiculous Spooky Doo’s. You don’t find this in British or American books, so much. When a New Yorker writes about New York, unless fictionalizing a place serves a specific function, they leave the place as it is, because New York is a place with its own mythology that will function better without the interference from the writer. Likewise with London, or Paris, or you name it. But Canadians can’t seem to get past this. Erik McCormack has Kitcherloo instead of Kitchener Waterloo, Robertson has Spooky Doo’s, etc, etc, etc. It drives me up the wall, and it’s no wonder, then, that Toronto and other Canadian cities lack the kind of literary presence that foreign cities have. We neuter them on the page.
The novel also ends quite abruptly, though I won’t tell you how (that would ruin what little suspense there is), and it was mostly unsatisfying for all that, although I could see it working better if some of the penultimate scene(s) had been stretched a bit longer. On the whole I think I enjoyed this novel, but I’ll need to give another Robertson book a shot before I can determine if it was because of or despite his storytelling style.
Home Movies was my eleventh selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Flesh and Gold, by Phyllis Gotlieb.
