A Random Sentence from “GLDN BOYZ”

My piece “GLDN BOYZ” appears in the current issue of the Naswaak Review (26/27).  Here’s a random sentence:

“The frame framed an enormous chunk of text in a fancy script that admonished something about starting each day by telling yourself that this very day you’d be running up against some serious interference and ingratitude and insolence, not to mention disloyalty, ill-will, and general selfishness, all because of the offenders’ personal ignorance about all things, especially good old good and evil, and continued on saying that for his fucking part he, the writer of these words, had long ago perceived something about the nature of good and its apparent nobility and also the nature of evil and its something something, and for Kiki to not get too down about it all because the ignorant evil culprit was still his brother and such—but not like in the physical sense—but as in a fellow creature similarly endowed-like with reason and that therefore none of the interference and ignorance and ingratitude and shit could never in nowise fashion injure him because nobody could implicate him in what is degrading, but also that therefore—because the evil motherfucking brother had best be seen as a real true brother—it was therefore impossible for the reader of these cursive scripted words behind glass to be angry at the rotten evil brother or fall foul of him, for the two brothers were kind of born to work together in their own way, and here there was some kind of analogy about these good/evil bros. being like a man’s two hands and the analogy pointed to how ridiculous and stupid it’d be to be angry with your brother because it’d be like being angry with one’s left hand and shit” (186-87).

“GLDN BOYZ” FORTHCOMING IN THE NASHWAAK REVIEW

Just received notice that a significant excerpt–entitled “GLDN BOYZ” (10,000 words)–of my in-progress novel, Wreckage, is forthcoming in the next issue of The Nashwaak Review (St. Thomas UP).

LOOK AWAY, ACTUALLY

Review of Hal Niedzviecki’s Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened.

Originally published in slightly different form in the Globe and Mail, Daily Review, 4 May 2011.

© 2011 Tim Jacobs

Three-line conversations.  An implied threesome.  Two who-cares suicides.  Clichéd weltschmerz and jaded idleness (nobody holds even stupid jobs, now).  Twenty-something anger at oh, . . . nothing, never mind.  Puerile humour and thrown liquor bottles and a foetus pleading for the mommy-to-be to abort! and God incarnate sniffing cocaine off girls’ bellies (and “doing them both” after) and a guy barfing on another’s “balls.”  Look up, look around, look, this is Hal Niedzviecki’s return to short fiction after two works of nonfiction, Hello, I’m Special and The Peep Diaries.

The polite Torontorati will perhaps blush, but these stories are not particularly good art.  Niedzviecki is a cultural observer, and one senses that these stories are attempts at putting some halogens on our quotidian yet bewildering late Capitalistic, everything-goes culture—“we are permitted everything,” intones a glyph to a cipher.  As for that aesthetic, great, but real artistry would not just point out deplorable situations and people but would also find a way to revive them, redeem them, at least render them precisely.  Because of their supreme familiarity—of scene, situation, style—these are largely unaffecting stories.  It is easy to dismiss the characters because they’re uniform, not recognizably human, and who may as well all have the same name, even though their names are unique (Star, Sheils, Mickers, God).  This must be the point: to dramatize the contrived docility and reckless idleness and cultural zombification of the Snowflake Generation.  The stories work, if you keep this in mind, otherwise they all suffer from a familiar sameness: you’re me, I’m you; we’re bored, or broke, or horny, or jaded, or who cares.  But where’s the meaning?  Niedzviecki does ruined people pretty well, but the reader roots for him to try to restore them, to put them into real conflicted positions so that we care about their decisions and what happens to them.

The style is stilted almost to the point of being mannered.  But that’s also the point: the style reflects the stiltedness of our lives.  There’s no other way to account for the clipped, repetitive style: “Sometimes she calls me during the day.  She almost always calls me during the day.  On her lunch break” and “He nodded like he understood.  He understood.” The stories are composed in an ablated-sentence-fragment style that can be tiresome: “He unzips her slacks, rubs.  Shrugs the camera off his shoulder,” or  “stares down at her, his face a looming grimace.”

Charles Baxter, in his essays on fiction writing, Burning Down the House, claims that “good art is always precise.”  These stories’ many imprecisions alienate the serious reader.  (The book is so poorly edited—even for an advance copy—that it shames the famed press of Lawrence Ferlinghetti).  When fiction is imprecise the dream-experience of reading is fractured and the reader latches onto things that the writer certainly wouldn’t want.  The examples are endless: “Hmmm, he mutters, his gaze glancing from chart to scale to chart” (um, can a gaze really glance?); “Charlie shakes her head.  No.” (yes, thank you, that’s what a headshake signifies); “Charlie . . . slurps hard to get at the liquid pooling in the bottom corners of the cup” (yes, obviously the bottom, hence gravity, but are there corners in a cup, and just how much suction is required to suck up a droplet of liquid? And so can droplets even pool?); “Charlie quickly turns the channel” (just how fast can a button be depressed anyway?); “She walks hunched over, slowed by a spherical wobble” (can a sphere wobble?  I’m trying to imagine this); “The camera spurts” (pardon?); “His stomach twisted, twisted again: tighter” (maybe just try a metaphor?); “Just the tree’s new leaves drifting in the breeze” (can leaves drift?  Okay, fine, but aren’t these new leaves anchored to the boughs?  And shouldn’t that preposition be ‘on’ instead of “in”?).

Look in, and you’ll get the idea.

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Tim Jacobs teaches for a mess of colleges and universities in the GTA, and is slow-baking a novel called Wreckage.