THERE IS A RELATIVELY obscure, slightly inebriated subset in Canadian, and especially Toronto, writing circles, and, while it's actually a well established pattern group, it is these days showing a whole new roster of players. A youngish, socially hyperactive crowd of semi-bohemians who jostle each other in bars and takes turns in front of the microphone, fearlessly coughing out untried material into the night. This is the crowd that has produced such fine poets as Lynn Crosbie and Michael Holmes, as well as a raft of new fictioneers.
Crosbie is the slyly intelligent mind behind Villianelle and Miss Pamela's Mercy, as well as the recent(ish) anthology of women's writing The Girl Wants To.... and she's a bit of a famous spectre, quietly drifting in and out of the light and filling comer chairs at launch parties. Holmes's latest work, james i wanted to ask you, is a simple, beautifully written elegy for a dead friend, but it's a sure bet fewer people have read his stuff than have experienced him somewhere on his seemingly unending string of semi-theatrical readings. Like CityTV, he's everywhere in Toronto, and wherever he goes a crowd gathers. A recent Toronto Star article even had him sporting his tattoos on the cover of the entertainment section, a quirky specimen of downtown scribe for suburban perusal. On the fiction side the crowd turns almost wholly ironic, sending out brief, meteoric, cynical bursts inspired by the now stereotypical "Queen St. Scene." James R. Wallen's Boys Night Out and Russell Smith's How Insensitive both turn the lens back around and dare to take the piss out of the same people who sat, beers in hands, listening to these works develop from reading to reading.
On the surface, the newcomer novelist Christine Slater seems to fit right in with her fiction-writing fellows. With her partner Sam Hiyate, publisher of Gutter Press, Slater cruises the reading and party circuit with the best of them, and she's certainly capable of knocking back a pint or two before she steps out onto the stage. Her first book, a collection of short fiction entitled Stalking The Gilded Boneyard and published by Gutter Press, was favourably regarded by critics, and, despite its late-baby-boomer content, rode the concentric media waves caused by Douglas Coupland's big splash with Generation X. Her follow-up novella The Small Matter of Getting There was equally praised and even listed in Toronto's NOW magazine as a hip, urban novel in the same vein as Wallen and Smith. All would seem to be well -- if only she agreed with the comparisons.
"I don't mind the moniker 'hip' in some ways," she explains, sipping water in her well-shaded Queen St. kitchen, "I mean that appeals to my Stalking The Gilded Boneyard side, but the notion that Small Matter and these others are similar works -- it's like one of those Sesame Street quizzes, 'one of these things just doesn't belong'." What doesn't correspond is not the quality of the writing, as Slater, as humble as she is self-assured, is quick to point out, but rather the style and choice of content. Waiting for a streetcar after our interview, broiling on the corner of Queen and Bathurst, I have plenty of time to observe her creative surroundings. Here on any given day you can spot the cast from any number of recent books about the inner city ultra-cool. It is satirical fodder waiting to be savaged and savaged well, but scratch a bit, especially in unforgiving daylight, and Queen St. loses its slick, beer-commercial sheen. Looking around, it's not hard to differentiate between those cultivating attitudes and the others who are merely living their lives. It is this second group that captures Slater's attention, and that sets her apart from those she's too often lumped in with.
Stalking was less about the shallowness of New York artsy society in the 1980s than it was about what that dehumanizingly cruel shallowness does to the real people who get bit by it. You're not supposed to laugh at Anita Asher as she drowns herself beneath waves of heroin, and it's okay to actually feel for Perry Coltrane while he brings up his young daughter in the shadow of madness and violent death. Slater's characters, for the most part young and fashionably unkempt, are presented with the opportunity to respond to the world as juvenile slackers, but show instead a determined maturity, even as they self- destruct. And self-destruct they almost invariably do.
Mal Sully, the protagonist of The Small Matter of Getting There (Gutter Press), stumbles his way to literary success in the bright lights of London, at the expense of his marriage to a blameless and supportive wife. One could argue that he gets what he wants and pays the price for it, but there is little question that he is a less attractive character after his artistic debut than before.
In her most recent novel, Certain Dead Soldiers (published last month by Key Porter), Slater writes a charmingly direct story of romance between two young people in a fictional town in coastal England. Simply drawn, and with a complete lack of irony, the plot neatly sidesteps narrow convention by presenting a male lead, Eric McGuire, whose appeal never quite overcomes his obvious faults. Though not really physically attractive, Eric is quite brilliant and disarmingly sensitive to life's unending zigzag between cruelty and beauty. He's generally cynical, but is honest enough with himself to recognize the worth of Arabel Hume in his life, and yet his unquenchable thirst for whiskey and stupor make him a statistic waiting to be tabulated.
"I've always been interested in and attracted to disintegration," Slater admits, especially the notion of disintegration by choice. I can understand someone choosing to take a nosedive with their life, truly I can. You know, a lot of people go through life accepting the dictates of their society, religion, parents, whatever, and then there are the people who say 'No, I'm not going to marry the orthodontist, I'm not going to university, I'm not going onto the career track; I want to be an artist, I want to travel, or I want to drink.' I think these are interesting choices and I like investigating them."
If this approach to story sounds like it's wandering ever closer to typically GenX territory, keep that observation to yourself. Slater has little but bristling impatience for such knee-jerk attempts at placing her writing within some kind of age-defined continuum.
"To begin with," she says somewhat hesitantly, "I'm not of that generation. At the risk of dating myself, I do fall at the tail end of the so-called baby boom, and my life up until the last two years was very baby-boom oriented. I myself have a very strong work ethic, whether it applies to my career, when I had one, or to my writing career now, and I don't have a lot of empathy for people who are slackers. And furthermore I dispute that my characters are slackers. Anita Asher from Stalking, for instance -- she is productive as an artist, she does do things and she is acknowledged as being good at what she does. And again with Eric McGuire, I think applying the GenX label to someone who lives in that kind of community and environment is really missing the point."
In a way, Slater's work is a throwback to a much more individualistic literary tradition, in which characters' lassitude, eventual disintegration, or even success has more to do with what's inside them as individuals than what their present socio-economic environment can provide for them.
"GenX' ers are almost all university educated," she observes, "and I think their complaint is with how they view society and the subsequent limits of society. I'm sure there's a cultural relevance to this way of thinking, otherwise they wouldn't have tapped into such a load of recognition. But for people like Eric and Arabel, the luxury of wallowing is not available. I mean Eric does a bit of wallowing, but in their community, you know, you get out of high school and it's unthinkable that you wouldn't try and get a job, any job, and it's unthinkable that you would remain single and not commit yourself to another person and to the adult responsibility of a marriage and family."
It is that aura of determined adulthood that separates Slater's characters from the perpetually coming-of-age crowd who populate what she calls "that glossy, veneered, hiply dialogued stuff." While Eric and Arabel could be called kids by today's standards, insofar as one's physical age defines one, they choose for themselves a life that they want to see move forward in a very traditional, adult way. They don't worry about the relationship between their lives and a highly abstracted theory of society, they simply take the most obvious path toward some measure of happiness. Does this make them uninteresting by today's definition of what makes good reading? Hardly.
Eric McGuire is very much a classically modeled tragic hero, a man who might have veneered himself with some of the gloss of hip attitude had he seen any worth in it. His root flaw is a tendency that is almost culturally dictated by his small-town, working-class upbringing. When things don't go quite the way he'd like them to, and sometimes even when they do, he jumps into a bottle and disappears for the evening. The fact that none of his friends or family, including Arabel, ever make a serious attempt to stop him from drinking away his health may seem baffling to some readers, but it is not an inaccurate depiction. For this couple, there are very few special moments completely free of fog. For instance:
After that, the rounds kept pouring down his throat. He didn't give a shit anymore. He wanted to drown in his own enjoyment. The music and the voices flew around him, and he remembered laughing and holding Arabel's hand fussily, and then he remembered nothing except her taking him aside at one point and pressing a key in his palm and, vaguely, getting out of there, staggering, and Arabel guiding him up a set of strange stairs. Wherever they were, there was a bed there, and he tumbled into it gratefully, reaching for her as an afterthought.
In Eric's community the compulsion to escape is unquestioned. Another telling scene has Eric and Jimmy Hume, Arabel's father, bump into each other in a pub. It's midday, Eric is on his way to work and the bar is far from empty. By the novel's end, Arabel herself is quite capable of doing in a bottle on her own. In a way, Certain Dead Soldiers is really Arabel's story, and in it she fills the other half of a paradigm Slater seems very fond of using. She is the survivor of Eric's nosedive and after a certain point her life is primarily defined by a picking up of the pieces; mere continuance. At 30, she is solely responsible for a child and a home, and she accepts her fate with brute stoicism. "She's got nothing but another 15 years with the kid," Slater emphasizes, "and that's nothing but indentured servitude you know. She can't exactly goof off."
Strong by nature and necessity, Arabel joins a number of Slater's other female characters as untypical yet very real feminist emblems. Anita Asher places her artwork secondary to a relationship that is only barely removed from rock groupie, yet remains mysteriously fascinating. Kay Blessing, Mal Sully's publisher/lover in Small Matter, is a smart, focused career woman, swamped in the sleaze of her profession but completely unfazed by it.
But in Arabel Hume, Slater finds her fullest, most complex character, male or female, to date. By turns sickeningly romantic and coldly realistic, Arabel suffers from her love for Eric McGuire, but never quite loses herself in it. The novel makes a gradual transition from Eric's point of view to hers, and through this movement Arabel transforms from a simplistic figure of romantic fixation into a singularly fascinating, independent woman. There's an entire undergraduate essay to be written on Arabel's feminist awakening within a small, paternalistic, old-world community. She is very much a woman beleaguered by controlling, patronizing men and throughout her struggles she manages to remain whole, real, and determined. And for Slater, this is the central struggle for all her people.
"I see all my characters as individuals," she insists. "It's not terrifically important to me whether they're men or women. As they come to me they are people. Their sex is incidental. It's much more interesting to look at individuals in all their complexity, it's much richer a lode to mine."
The equality and individualist spirit of her fictional world is mirrored in her life as she and Sam Hiyate work closely together to build what is becoming a modest but remarkable Canadian literary phenomenon. Hiyate's Gutter Press is a small literary publisher that somehow managed to come to life during the last (present?) recession. Co-founder of Blood & Aphorisms, a five-year-old litmag that boasts one of Canada's highest circulations for that market, Hiyate discovered Slater through her submissions to the magazine. Those stories went on to form Stalking the Gilded Boneyard, Gutter's premiere publication. By that point the two had married.
In an artistic community where nepotism is just business as usual, Slater's book might easily have been dismissed by those in the know, and sank with Gutter into an overpopulated oblivion. Instead, it exploded, landing her an interview slot on TVO's "Imprint" as well as serious and positive reviews in major publications including the Globe & Mail. So armed, Slater is well prepared for suggestions, actual or implied, that her romance with a publisher somehow bumped her to the front of the line.
"I don't feel that people are muttering about it," she says, rather tiredly. "Even if the book had been beautifully produced and Sam had done all the right things; if it hadn't been well written, it wouldn't have gotten all that attention -- or the attention would have been negative. 'What a great looking book, what a piece of dreck,' that kind of thing.
"No, when Sam published my first book, it was also the first book he had ever published, so we were both operating in considerable ignorance and in the dark. It's not as if I married Avie Bennett [owner of McClelland & Stewart]. I've never felt the least bit compromised by the fact that my husband happened to own the publishing company that published my first two books. I don't think people think that way, and if they do, they're stupid."
In fact, with her recent move to Key Porter, Hiyate has lost Slater as an author just when her books might bring in serious money for the operation -- a standard, inevitable event for a Canadian small press when its star writer starts getting serious notice. For her part, Slater has a strong protective feeling for her origins with Gutter Press. Though her walk uptown was inevitable, she refuses to forget her downtown beginnings.
"I think Sam and I grew on a parallel track in our respective literary professions. It's spoiled me, dealing with a publisher that only publishes a few books versus one that publishes a lot. I used to get involved in everything, from typesetting to choosing the covers, and with the larger houses those things are out of your hands. It felt very much like the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, and in fact that operation is a real inspiration to Sam and to myself. It's a labour of love, and while Sam has lost me as an author, Gutter is an indisputable, intractable part of my writing past."
