STRIPMALLING
By Jon Paul Fiorentino,
Illustrations by Evan Munday
ECW Press, 188 pages, $24.95
Stripmalling is the first novel by poet Jon Paul Fiorentino, and a very funny one it is. Fiorentino's readers will recognize places and maybe even situations from his 2005 collection of comedic fiction, Asthmatica, and reunite with Jonny, Winnipeg's crass, delinquent-but-soft son. In this new novel, Jonny discloses, or we should say exposes in full deshabille, the formative and exemplary moments in his working life, his sex life and, most important, his writing life.
Much of Fiorentino's poetry and humour is built on the theme of abject existence set against the backdrop of mass culture. Here we are given a front-row seat to the authorial species of abjection, the fragile ego. And as you might gather from his christening of the protagonist, Fiorentino tempts the reader to associate, or conflate, the author with his fictional counterpart.
Unlike other writers who have explored this device to serious ontological ends, Fiorentino, through Jonny, turns it into a joke: "It's a novel in many voices - all of them mine: the character Jonny, the writer Jonny, and the miserable real-life Jonny. But please note that, as usual, all three Jonnies are fictional. The real Jonny can be found on Lavalife under the tag sweaty4u2009."
One can't help but feel, even after a page or two of Jonny's confessions, that he exposes his faults and social liability, not in order to exorcize demons, but to ingratiate himself to the reader. It is within this complex vocal play - a pitting of self against self in view of an audience - that Fiorentino thrives: "In the winter I lost a part of me when I sold the Chevette to make December's rent. I was having trouble getting used to being poor. ... Not that I was ever rich growing up, but I was middle-class enough to understand that I wasn't poor. I had all the Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcakes a confused young boy could possibly need."
Amid the hilarious scenes that make up Stripmalling - gas-station hot-boxing, desperate ploys for sex, moderate success in the writing world - Fiorentino produces peaks of warmth and true sadness. He achieves such dimension, in part, by composing the book out of multiple voices and forms. Jonny's girlfriend Dora, for instance, contributes scrupulous commentary on the bogus entries. Someone's editorial scribbles cover a fake draft of the novel in the "Bonus Material" section. And comic strips of Jonny's life, made by artist Evan Munday, tell a truncated and alternative version of certain episodes and jokes. I'm not sure that these give us a more complete portrait of Jonny, but they may provide a greater fictionality.
The novel weakens only when it revels in extravagantly stupid invention, which Fiorentino seems to reserve for cultural commentary. When Jonny visits Russia on a literary seminar, he tries his hand at travel writing: "St. Petersburg was founded in 1941 by an ex-merchant marine named Peter Parker. He was such an awesome guy, and really cool to drink with and so all the local people called him 'Peter the Awesome.' He had a short temper, however, and forcibly shaved off the beards of every Russian woman who lived in the city." Et cetera. We might want to forget these parts.
As in Asthmatica, Fiorentino lards this book with images and novelty pages; the book, a 188-page hardback, possibly 100 of which are prose and the rest a sort of fun filler, might give a consumer the feeling of being duped. Which seems fitting, and part of the game, or at least true to the prevailing climate of Jonny.
As our antihero posits, "The publication of any literary text is unacceptable. It is indicative of some kind of intense pathology." Should we encourage such pathology? Even subsidize it? I don't know, but I like this little book.
Malcolm Sutton is writing his PhD dissertation on two giants of postmodern U.S. fiction.