Jason Hrivnak
The unnamed narrator of this debut novel begins by recalling the death of his best childhood friend, Fiona. At the age of thirtysomething, she broke into their former primary school and killed herself in the anteroom to the principal's office, seated on the very bench where delinquent kids await their fate. In his first paragraphs, Jason Hrivnak succinctly posits a triple-barrelled theme: grief bound tightly with innocence and guilt.
News of the suicide triggers a rush of memories. Fiona and our narrator entered pubescence as the school's devoted odd couple, bullied for their strange obsession, driven closer by each taunt. Hrivnak crystallizes their dark passions with a riveting bit of imagery. In an old trunk, they found "two porcelain-faced dolls, a boy and a girl. They were undoubtedly antiques, perhaps valuable. We named them after ourselves and then smashed their faces with a cinderblock. We used baling wire to bind the limp bodies together and buried them in a shallow grave."
We learn that our macabre duo spent hour upon hour imagining gauntlets of cruelty for their tormentors on a human "Testing Range." An ugly boy might win a pretty girl's love by breaking his feet with a hammer. An aspiring violinist might be locked overnight in a cage of rats, to become a star if she survived.
From this intro, we move to the Plight House text proper, our narrator's written strategy for exorcising his grief at Fiona's death. Each paragraph is a riddle ending with a question. Forty multiple-choice scenarios are addressed to the spirit of dead Fiona, perhaps the most representative being one in which two potential lovers in separate cars hurtle toward a head-on highway crash. Random death and human failing fuel this section, with love tagging behind like a wounded puppy.
The elaborate riddle scenarios, one or two per page, continue. We meet an array of quickly sketched characters, all proposed surrogates for Fiona and the narrator: brothel keeper, astronaut, carnival performer, detective, high-finance guru, kidnapping victim, hideously malformed outcasts and many more. I confess I began to tire of the litany of disconnected and portentous mini-stories and unanswerable closing questions. The endless interrogative cliffhangers are mind-numbing. One episode, imagining the narrator's brief employment slaughtering pigs, ends with him rescuing a pig, then the question, "What does the creature say to me?" When "Hey, thanks" popped into my mind, it felt like a small respite from thickets of unmeaning. An adjoining question - "What is the occult significance of the seven-eyed pig?" - sent me to Google. It was a fruitless search, but I couldn't help noticing that it offered some refreshing narrative drive.
This is the more disappointing because Hrivnak is an elegant and often incisive prose stylist, skilled at image-making and intent on exploring difficult questions of personal and societal responsibility. But as an explorer, he makes little progress upriver, heading off on dozens of tributaries, each quickly abandoned for the next one. He's clearly leading us toward his particular heart of darkness, but he never gets close enough to reveal it. Despite the distance travelled, we're left only with the message that life and love are cruel, and Hrivnak's final word, delivered without a wink: "Discuss."
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.