Vivian Moreau
I was suspicious when Patrick e-mailed to ask if I would "take a look" at his novel manuscript. Why does he need me to read it, I wondered. He'd already published one novel. He has an agent. He must want something more than opinion. Does he think I will review it?
"I've got another guy reading it," he wrote, "hope the two of you can yin-yang each other and offer some insight. Please read it blind, as if you didn't know I was the author, i.e. the main character, or try your best to. I know it will be hard. Don't worry about spelling or grammar. I want to know how it made you feel, how the story flowed, parts you liked, parts that sucked, and whether or not it was something that made you want to read more after it was over."
Is this a privilege or a responsibility? Answering his questions honestly could mean damaging a fragile, hungry ego. It doesn't matter so much when it's a book review and you don't know and don't care about the ego of the author you have never met. But to analyze the work of someone you know well enough to comment on Facebook, "This profile photo is stupid and you're not, so please take it down," well, that's something else. It's a commitment.
I am not alone in my manuscript-reading skittishness. Other writers at all stages of their careers are asked the same favour and experience the same emotional mix of dread, resignation and grand presumption.
Poet Gary Geddes says he gets asked about once a week to take a look at a manuscript.
"I've had to learn to say no for my own good," he says. "Now I more or less only read manuscripts, or portions thereof, for friends, and even then sparingly. I feel badly about this, but just can't respond to all those requests or I'd get no work done. Then, too, there are all those folks who sidle up after a reading and, instead of dirty postcards, which might be interesting, pull out a manuscript or two. Yarghh!"
Novelist Kevin Patterson says much the same thing.
"A few times, I've agreed to when I didn't really have time to think about it properly and felt afterwards that I disappointed them. It's a tricky business. Mostly, people want help - getting an agent, getting an intro to an editor - and fair enough, we all need help, especially at the start. It's an intimate thing, though, getting involved as someone's advocate, and one wants to be careful how many of those circumstances one gets into."
Patrick had published his first novel a year before, a slim angry-young-man rendering I'd repeatedly put down in disgust but to which I'd consistently been drawn back.
The brawling, failed-to-get-to-the-big-league protagonist seemed overly autobiographical, as was the bare-knuckled critique of professional hockey, of male friendship and of 20-something love and loss.
But somehow it worked. It pulled me back enough to forgive the needy, blurted prose. Maybe this was style. Maybe this was the early-21st-century young-male-author oeuvre.
As to the new manuscript, I wasn't afraid of not being up to reading his work. I am a good reader. Four years of creative-writing classes had given me a skilled, if cynical, eye and ear for good writing. I had come to judge a manuscript not from its first few pages or even the first few paragraphs, but from the first sentence. Five corresponding years of getting paid to review fiction had started as giddy, turned to desultory and ended with some disdain for Canadian literature. Oh look, they're left alone and desolate. What a surprise.
Since then, when friends and family asked for recommendations on what fiction to read, I'd grumble that I'd not read a good novel in years, that we publish too many novels in this country and it was just too boo-hoo bad that another publishers had gone under.
After much stalling over Patrick's request, I realized that envy was the issue. I've never written a novel. I don't have the gift. Or the patience. Although I told myself I preferred the regular paycheques and bylines of journalism, Patrick's request was a reminder of my failure, that I didn't have the stuff to be a fiction writer.
Ultimately, it wasn't duty to friendship or a pretense of authorial kinship or even false superiority ("Well, if I must") that compelled me to agree. It was curiosity, prompted by Patrick's hasty, vulnerable, spoiler-alert synopsis:
"Right now working title is Random Acts of Vandalism. It's presented as four stories - The Novelist, The Journalist, The Academic and The Addict. The reader starts out thinking these are four separate guys, but by the end, when Robin resurfaces, we realize they're all one guy, and the story is being told backwards, and there's another twist at the end too. Anyways that's what I'm going for. Also each chapter deals with different types of death and how they effect us. This one centres around infamy a bit, or whatever."
Never mind that the multiple-character-as-one gambit is a plot cliché. Or that Patrick's sketchy grammar and forehead-slapping spelling still grated. Or that the character sounded suspiciously like the first novel's character, who was pretty much … well, Patrick. I wanted to read the dang thing. Would guilt in all its alcohol-soaked guises again be the theme? Would it have another way-too-much-information-scene such as when buddy urinates in a one-night-stand's shampoo bottle? Would it titillate as the first did with a damning critique of a Canadian institution?
That the manuscript would offend was expected. That it would surprise was the hope.
I printed off the first 50 pages, turned on the reading light, settled into my favourite chair, and began to read:
"When seen from Vancouver, this other city looks as if it's parallel with the pillowy clouds brought in from the mountains overtop. They come rolling down the north spilling into the valley onto the bay as papered marshmallows. So full of white, like crack smoke from the pipe, pearly, creamy, with a tint of shadow along the edges."
I kept reading.
Vivian Moreau is a reporter in Victoria, B.C.