Whereas "Me and Ye" fits with the spirit of Walsh's collection, however, the poet's use of rhyme and metre falls flat in other poems, pushing them near the edge of kitschiness, as in "Summer under Winter": "January and your cheeks are red /and there's a blue hairy cap on your head /but the sun is a great white ball on the hill / and we're not cold at all, even standing still" (48). The dominance of tetrametre and simple aabb rhyme scheme complement the rather cutesy topic of two lovers frolicking in the snow; but both content and form, while "folksy," are inevitably corny and lack the freshness Walsh delivers in many of the collection's other poems.
Indeed, there is a refreshing quality to Going Around With Bachelors. The people, the culture, and the land of "the Rock" are all carefully evoked in poems that demonstrate Walsh's ebullient flair for storytelling. I would caution that the poet's style is not that of "high brow" literature: her poems are often more prosaic than dogmatic critics of poetry would approve of; but the unpolished quality of her verse is also part of the book's charm. Going Around with Bachelors is, ultimately, an earnestly captivating selection of poems that takes its reader on an emotional journey of both loss and whimsy. It is, above all, Walsh's creative yet sensitive depiction of her province and its people that is not a breath of fresh air, but rather an energizing, salt-tinged Atlantic breeze.
With its motifs of exile and incest, and its satirical confrontation with Canadian culture (the bulk bin at Sobey's hosts a verbal catfight between two middle-aged women in one scene), Taking the Stairs sits comfortably among other specimens of contemporary Atlantic Canadian fiction. The novel's initial setting affirms its maritime roots: Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley. We first meet Jarod Palmer at the tender age of “seventeen(ish)” (12) in his unspecified valley town. Amid ox pulls, quilting groups, and cheesy local talent showcases, we learn of Jarod's na_ve love for his teenage sweetheart, town beauty Eliana Bannerton, a.k.a. Lana Banana. Lana's exceptional singing voice combined with her good looks promise to deliver her a one-way ticket out of Nova Scotia, which Jarod fears might leave him to endure the quaint East coast community alone. Lana's strange relationship with her cousin Wayde, however, puts an end to any promise of departure for Lana when both teens’ bodies are found floating in Murphy’s Canal after a swimming accident. A newspaper eulogy reporting the deaths laments “The tragic news comes on the tail news of a harsh July frost and an infestation of spruce bud worm” (46). This article brings the first section of Stiles's novel to a close, when our narrator leaves Atlantic Canada and its rural folk behind for the veritable host of Nova Scotian exiles: Toronto.
Stiles precedes the novel’s second section with an epigram from Ernest Buckler's Canadian classic The Mountain and the Valley (also set in the heartland of the Annapolis Valley)—a move that both situates Taking the Stairs in relation to a canon of Atlantic Canadian fiction and invites comparison with Buckler’s mid-twentieth-century tale. Both novels, after all, feature male protagonists in their thirties who struggle with writing a book while grappling with their sense of self. But unlike Buckler’s David Canaan, who spends practically his entire life in the valley, Stiles’s expat Jarod Palmer abandons his roots to live his adult life in the urban epicenter of Canada; and whereas Buckler’s novel (arguably) has a strict, formal narrative structure, Jarod's move to the metropolis in Stiles’ novel prompts a dissolution of any semblance of formal structure and leads into a metafictional mode. Initiating a mise-en-abyme effect, Stiles has his protagonist work on the very novel we began reading at the start of Taking the Stairs: the Lana Banana novel. This mirroring effect launches a series of reduplications in the novel as we witness Jarod rewriting the events of his childhood in the valley.
Unfortunately, Stiles’ metafictional move is trite, and it means that he all but abandons a number of rich and interesting characters and relationships from Jarod’s valley life. Obviously, Lana Banana is one. But there are others, such as Jarod’s carefree, older brother George and his sensitive father Edward. One of the most fascinating dynamics ultimately lost to the novel's stylistics is the relationship between Jarod and his mother Dar. Dar, according to Jarod, was a school teacher (and Sunday-school teacher), a compiler of chores charts (with stars, and a point system!) for “her kids” (12). At the novel’s outset, Jarod paints his mother’s portrait as a dogmatic, bible-thumping, and nosey “big broody hen” (42) who wears the pants in the Palmer family. Such a fine and detailed portrait developed over the novel’s first 45 pages plants a number of questions in reader’s mind. First among them: why does Jarod call his mother “Dar”? But this question, among others, remains a seedling, and while Dar reappears briefly in phone conversations and through memories Jarod shares about his dysfunctional family, the relationship between Dar and Jarod, along with Edward, George and Rachel, more or less dissolves into a faint residue left on the many mirrors of Stiles’ postmodern tale.
In fact, one might say that Stiles replaces these East Coast characters with Torontonian caricatures in the novel’s second and third sections. Chief among these would be Elliott Bale, whom Jarod describes as “the biggest threat to the Lana Banana novel as he is simply an opportunist alcoholic/dickhead/weasel/film dude trying to cash in on my dubious ability to write for the screen” (51). Posing as Jarod’s literary agent, Elliott – whose business card proclaims he is a producer (54), but whom Jarod notes is little more than a “soundman, a hired hand” (51) – becomes a leech draining Jarod’s energy, will, identity and talent through his incessant phone calls and imposing, Torontonian persona. But there is also Jarod’s girlfriend, Adrieneese, a beautiful Hispanic artist from the city’s North side who becomes little more than a token of Toronto's multiculturalism foiling the “Snow White” paradigm of East coast beauty, Lana (22). Adrieneese's funny accent and insatiable appetite for both food and sex only hyperbolize her status as caricature in the novel.
Jarod, for his part, transforms from the loveable, anxiously smitten boy from the East Coast seen at the beginning of the novel into a disrespectful, whiney and insecure push-over as the story progresses. His treatment of Adrieneese is perhaps the most off-putting aspect of his adult character: he treats her as little more than a distraction from his work, and frequently refers to her in degrading terms, such as his “dark Spanish horse” (99), and “Spanish whore” (126). Although Jarod regains some dignity by the novel’s end as he realizes his mistreatment of Adrieneese and finally stands up for himself to Elliott, the road leading to this point is long and arduous – like the titular metaphor of “taking the stairs” – and it is difficult to warm up to this new and improved Jarod who shows up only within the last twenty pages of the novel.
Although Jarod Palmer is the dominant voice guiding us through Stiles’s novel, his is not the sole perspective, nor the only story offered in this quirky book. There are a number of ephemeral elements that offer a different point of view on events and characters, such as the newspaper articles about Lana, and Elliott’s business card. Moreover, the reader is privy to a selection of short stories and a screenplay written by Jarod, which shift the focus away from the dominant narrative, but speak to the novel’s main characters and plotline in a way that is insightful and thought-provoking. The screenplay, along with the novel’s humourous dialogue between characters, reflects Stiles’s experience in the film industry. In addition to his 2000 documentary The Smalls…er Whatever about an Alberta rock band, which Stiles both wrote and directed, his book of poems Scouts Are Cancelled: The Annapolis Valley Poems (Insomniac, 2002) was the basis of an award-winning documentary he helped write and film about his life as a writer (2007). Stiles’s talent for handling various genres of writing is skillfully incorporated into his latest novel, making Taking the Stairs a colourful patchwork of literary material.
Despite a few minor setbacks in character development and the use of a formulaic mode as a launch pad for the story, Taking the Stairs is a clever, well-crafted work of fiction. Stiles’s wit and the multifarious narrative elements that comprise this novel make it a fun and thought-provoking read. Fans of Atlantic Canadian fiction will not be disappointed!
December 15, 2008
Goose Lane Editions Launches New Online Media Resources
December 15, 2008
New From Gaspereau Press
