Author: August

There’s a lot of energy in this book. The opening story, “A Sound Like Dolphins,” is possibly the weakest in the book, but it also sets up nearly every story in the book with its blend of frank violence and sexuality and the every day mess that is domestic life. When we think of tales of domestic life, particularly in this country, we tend to think of rural—or at least not explicitly urban—families living lives of no real import but nonetheless dealing with nuanced emotional and moral consequences. We also tend to think of these works as focusing primarily on the lives of women. Being, as we are, nearly a decade into the 21st Century, one would hope that we could put aside in both our national literature and our national subconscious such simple, ridiculous notions such as women having more or more interesting/important things to say about domesticity through… Continue Reading →

Those who know me, if I am known at all, know me as a bit of a nitpicker (okay, more than a bit). Little details can often get under my skin. I was therefore disappointed to find problems on the very first page of Be Good, indeed with the epigraph itself. There are three quotations that open the book, the third being lyrics from “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” attributed to Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash did indeed record the song in 2003, and it was released in 2006, nearly three years after his death. Cash’s five “American Recordings” albums were all excellent, but he only wrote fifteen of the sixty-eight songs on those albums. All the rest were covers. “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” is a traditional roots song of the kind that used to be known as a “negro spiritual” and then later just a “spiritual”, and is better… Continue Reading →

Faulkner is one of those writers who makes me feel woefully underqualified when I attempt to write about his work. Faulkner insisted that Go Down, Moses is a fragmented novel made up of related short-stories, what we here in Canada would most likely call a short-story cycle (indeed, the first edition of the book was published by Random House as Go Down, Moses and Other Stories). No matter Faulkner’s own opinion (which anyway I didn’t know until after the fact) I read Go Down, Moses as a short-story cycle. Any discussion of Faulkner’s work must necessarily deal with issues of race and family, both of which are central to this book. The various stories relate the history of the McCaslin family from a time not long before the American Civil War until roughly 1940. “Was”, which opens the book, can be a difficult story to read given that Faulkner treats… Continue Reading →

My home town is in this novel! That’s right folks, Dryden, Ontario makes a brief cameo appearance, in all its Boréal glory. Alright, since I’ve already mentioned Dryden, I should start out by saying there are two things that bothered me about this book (pet peeve sort of things, not hugely important, but they got under my skin), and it’s better to get them out of the way before dealing with the more important parts of the novel. The first thing is distance. There’s a fictional Ontario town in The Killing Circle called Whitley. Judging from the landmarks (West of Thunder Bay, with Dryden being the next town on the Trans-Canada, etc), it should probably be roughly where the real-life town of Ignace is. Pyper describes this town as about a half a day’s drive from cottage country. Double that, and he’d be closer to accuracy. Folk in Southern Ontario… Continue Reading →

The novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing” (Emily Dickinson, right?), at just over a hundred pages, is obviously intended to be the centerpiece of this collection. Unfortunately, it’s by no means the strongest story in the book. Ultimately it’s a tragic tale, but it is—or at least I think it’s supposed to be—more of a comedy for the first fifty or sixty pages. It’s actually quite a bit like an episode of The Office or Arrested Development, in the sense that the majority of the humour comes from paying excruciatingly close attention to the socially awkward. And excruciating is the word. The premise is a good one: misfit teenagers entertain themselves by collecting kitschy souvenirs autographed by obscure, washed-up celebrities, with hilarity and tragedy ensuing. It was just too much to stay with for so many pages. It wasn’t that I got bored by Dave and Todd manipulating Murray Mortenson for… Continue Reading →