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Mongrel

by Marko Sijian
Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2011
197 pp. $19.95

Sera is on the way across the Canadian-American border to reunite with a man she can feel in her soul. Earlier the same week, under a water-pumping station, Gus is sure he is about to lose his virginity to her. That night Sophie will try to take her own life. Across town, Milan will witness his father’s rebirth, only to watch him disappear. Shortly after this, Gunther, the quarterback, celebrates a meaningless victory by losing everything. Their stories are intricately and sometimes grotesquely intertwined, connected by the tenuous interdependencies that thread adolescence together. This connection only increases each story’s brutality, and each character’s vulnerability; as supports are erected, torn down, and reconfigured, we can only hope for them that they will make it through the next day.

Marko Sijan’s breakout novel is set against dreary Windsor, Ontario, in the summer of 2009. Over the course of a few days, five teenagers hurtle through these momentous experiences, though the real pleasure (and, it has to be said, some of the horror) of Mongrel is in Sijian’s fiercely accurate depiction of the intense mundaneness of teenage life. The novel is not afraid of the reality of racism and ignorance, and it doesn’t pretend that anything will ever be okay. Sijan’s narrative is by no means void of compassion, though there is little kindness in the characters’ lives, or at least, in their perceptions of their own lives. This would make for a challenging reading experience, and even though there are some moments where I wanted to almost physically pull away, there’s something magnetic about how common these otherwise very specific experiences actually feel. Sijan’s real victory here is in stripping his characters of so much, deconstructing their dreams, to leave something raw and infinitely more real underneath.

Maybe this pursuit of the real awful flesh of adolescent experience, cowering beneath the cliches of self-realization so common in stories about teenagers, explains the novel’s insistence on the physicality of adolescence. Sijan wields sexuality like a battering ram in Mongrel, wearing down any gentleness and sentiment to mere physicality and excretion. Each chapter takes the reader inside the mind’s voice of a different character, but interestingly, never so that we can experience different sides of one same situation or moment. Though we get to be inside them all, understanding them, for this brief time, like no one else seems to understand them, this privileged position isn’t used to build any bridges between them: love and friendship are dismembered as systematically as love is, and we outsiders on in the inside are too helpless to put anything back together for them. This impotence is strangely unifying after the fact – we are as useless in improving their lives as they are they unable to foresee what lies ahead for them, and certainly, what lies in them, though both are things that the adult reader might have a slightly more optimistic sense of.

Mongrel is a clamouring of voices. It is a geography of cruelty and cultural oppressions. Sijian’s characters have the rare quality of being almost too human, but are also successfully allegorical. The novel sometimes feels like an assault of moments that are all too familiar, and of crises my own interior teenaged self doesn’t think it could have survived, but there is something so honest about the characters and their situations (even when they feel foreign to personal experience) that it would feel like a betrayal to deny them and the social realities they face every day.

Sijan’s writing is sharp and accurate, and sometimes profoundly comic in the darkest ways. This first novel is a serious achievement, and its seriousness shouldn’t be discounted because of its narrators’ range of wisdom. Instead this is exactly why it should be taken so seriously – as a rare and importantly sincere portrait of the emotional and psychological dangers of adolescence – at a time when the media tries to address the urgency of real-life adolescent crises without being brave enough to explore these realities in the representations provided to teenagers. For these reasons, despite having struggled through parts of Mongrel, I have not stopped thinking about it since and suspect it will stay with me for quite some time.

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