SIX WAYS TO SUNDAY
By Christian McPherson
Nightwood, 184 pages, $19.95
Christian McPherson's stories can sometimes have the quality of cartoon storyboards: Plots and characters are hyperkinetic, yet still seem sketches, unanimated. What matters is the better half of this debut.
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Meet Rumford, a man who builds. He has been building for half a century, happily married to an obsession pursued not with hammer and two-by-fours, but with balsa and tweezers. Paid for decades to construct models for an architectural firm, in his retirement he fulfills a dream, building a meticulous replica of London's St. Paul's Cathedral. Vault of heaven completed, he makes a start on the hellish: a Tower of London on his dining table.
One night, some drunken teenage skateboarders wake him in the wee hours and he observes them vandalizing his neighbour's garden. The little girl next door has planted a menagerie of tiny plastic beasts among the flowers. With Rumford, we watch a leering teen pull out a lighter and begin melting the heads of giraffes and horses.
McPherson's violent climax seems a stretch, the drama hastily cranked up, but the story's cumulative power remains. Through Rumford, we view the world as he has for a lifetime: raptly, affectionately, from a distance - until a deep reservoir of suppressed rage finally spills over.
Lucifer's Tavern follows a few days in the comic-pathetic lives of dissolutes in training. Squid and his buddies share spliffs and cheap beer while amusing themselves with the career losers at a local bar. Squid's the sensitive one, our forthright guide to scenes of willful idiocy and ordinary folly.
An eight-page story with a first-draft feel presents a son's visits to his deteriorating father in a psych ward. The general madness feels real, while pain of losing a dad gets lost in the rough-cut ending.
The inspired Clown Face plunges us full tilt into a druggy rave party, then detours to a beer store after our miffed young narrator finds the fridge crammed with fruity "smart drinks." Queued up for his 12 of Moosehead, he casually hits on a clown awaiting her Heineken. A rare instance of quirky meets incisive, the tale is perfectly pitched, slyly constructed, graced with tender ironies. McPherson's theme is blind love - its joys and its limits. The closing sentence is a summons to imagination, the resolution left entirely in readers' hands. (By contrast, a later story about budding love is 100 per cent froth and quirk, its diverting moments playing like computer-generated film effects.)
In Star Gazing, an ex-con dad kidnaps his six-year-old son for a weekend, then botches an armed robbery while the kid waits in the getaway car. We're meant to see the boy as an unwitting criminal-in-training, but it all seems too unlikely, with their mutual star-gazing a fuzzy sentimental aside, and the child strangely unperturbed by his father's violent arrest.
Squid returns in a second story, somewhat less sensitive this time, washing dishes in a restaurant and bristling at the stupidity of immigrant workers. Threatening violence with a fork, he spits sarcasm at an Asian staffer over her faulty English. Then the author seems to have second thoughts, cooking up a love interest that closes the tale with a hint of rehabilitation.
Much better is our encounter with Rose, who on impulse feeds a toonie into a VLT and within minutes rakes in $300, beginning an abject ride with fate. Her spiral into desperation is augmented by the surprising yuck factor in McPherson's imagination.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.
