#13 – The Steve Machine, by Mike Hoolboom

This book had been giving me the eye in my local store for a couple months before I broke down and bought it. The premise of the novel as reported by the back cover struck me as fifty percent intriguing and fifty percent off-putting. The intriguing: Auden, Hoolboom’s narrator/protagonist hears a voice in his head, a voice other than his own. When he moves from Sudbury to Toronto after discovering he’s HIV-positive, he meets video artist Steve Reinke, only to discover that it is Steve’s voice he hears inside his head. (Reinke, according to the notes, is a video artist out here in the real world too, though unlike his fictional counterpart, he is not HIV-positive. Some of his work is available to watch online.) Steve and Auden become… well, friends is the wrong word, I think, but they become close, anyway, and Steve helps Auden begin writing a book about Steve’s life. The book isn’t just a book; it’s also a machine, designed to heal Auden, to change the voice inside his head, and to alter the reader in such a way that a new personality will emerge from the experience. Sounds pretty amazing, right? Steve’s video art also plays a pretty big role, though personally I think that video art is one of those things that sounds much more interesting when you read about it than it actually turns out to be when you see it. The off-putting bits on the back are the descriptions of The Steve Machine as an AIDS fable and plague journal. Though not actually true of this book (thank God), I always feel like the author (or the publisher on their behalf) has confused themselves with a social worker, and that they’ve just been assigned my case. Note to authors: I don’t give a shit about your social agenda, unless you’re telling me an interesting story in an interesting way, with interesting characters. Even then I still won’t give a shit about your agenda, but I’ll probably like your book. Whenever I see a phrase like “AIDS fable,” it makes me worried that I’m about to read a book about Gay People. I don’t mean a book about characters who happen to be gay, because I’ll take an interesting book about gay characters over a dull one about straight characters any day of the week. A book about Gay People is one in which the characters’ homosexuality becomes their sole important characteristic, and the world of the novel has been built around that sexuality, rather than it being merely one fact among many in that world. (I won’t even get into the fact that I know it’s ridiculous of me to assume that a book with an HIV-positive male narrator means that narrator is gay, except to say that we’re talking about literature as social work, not literature as art or even literature as a reflection of reality, because we know that in either of those last cases such an assumption would be foolish.) There’s also the strong possibility that the book will become about The Disease, and that the world of the novel will be constructed solely so that we can cry over people dying of AIDS, and we can rage against an uncaring society and a corrupt system and I don’t even care enough to finish the sentence that shit bores me so much. It turns out I didn’t have to worry; neither Hoolboom nor Coach House Books thought he was a social worker. Instead, they all seemed to think he was a writer who wanted to tell an interesting story in an interesting way with interesting characters. As it happense, they were right.

Holboom’s prose is casual and energetic, bordering on the Canadian Indie Style, but with enough discipline and control to avoid actually flying off into The Style. Though Auden seems to want to sublimate himself to Steve as the driving force of the story, it’s Auden’s strong, wonderfully developed personality that really shines through in sentences and paragraphs of The Steve Machine. I quite like this bit:

In my new dreams I savoured dinners with conversation so witty my guests ached with laughter, and all of them begged me to share their bed afterwards, startled by my perfect fashion sense and sexual athleticism. Shallow dreams, I knew, but sometimes even the unconscious gets tired of outputting Greek myths and new corporate logos. Meanwhile, in my waking hours, a small, angry man with a mouth in place of understanding hunted for blame. Like the hummingbird, he’d learned just one tune, and never tired of playing it. It was my fault. That’s what he let me know. Even if the day hadn’t started up yet, something somewhere was going wrong and I was to blame. When I spoke too frequently, this feeling would start creeping into conversation. Some were born with subliminal seduction, others with subliminal failure: it was a little trick some of us had learned to keep happiness from spoiling a view that had grown only too familiar.

There were two things I knew for sure when I tested positive. That I was going to die. And that I was going to hunt down the voice that was forever busy inventing new kinds of failure, and squeeze its little windpipe until it snapped between my fingers. I would not die guilty. I just didn’t have the time. (p. 98)

So much of The Steve Machine is about the roiling course of Auden’s attitudes and emotions as he becomes himself, the owner of his own true voice, in the face of his disease and blessing/curse of his relationship with Steve and the book they’re writing together. For every moment of despair there’s a moment of strength or apathy or affection. Interestingly, speaking of affection, I never really figured out if either Auden or Steve are gay; they clearly both like men, but there are passages that could indicate they might also like women. It just doesn’t seem crucial to the book or to their identities to pin a definite sexual identity on either of them. And that’s frankly refreshing. In literature, as in life, they are too many people whose sexuality eclipses all their other qualities to the point that it becomes the primary way you think of them as people (and don’t those people irritate you?), but there are just as many people for whom phrases like “I don’t like applying labels” actually means deep internal confusion, rather than the transcendence of labels that one imagines is the desired impression such phrases are intended give. Hoolboom ought to be commended for managing to create characters who actually achieve that transcendence.

Like Steve Reinke, Mike Hoolboom works primarily as a film and video artist. Though he’s written other books, The Steve Machine is his only novel to date. I do hope there will be others.

Next is Dante’s War, by Sandra Sabatini.