"If it bends," begins the famously pompous lecture by the character of Lester (Alan Alda) in Woody Allen's 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, "it's funny. If it breaks, it's not funny." Comparing two new books of short stories by Canadian writers Chris Gudgeon and Gary Barwin suggests a similar judgment about the extent to which authors can experiment with the nature of reality-if it bends, it can be poignant; if it breaks, it's probably meaningless.
Gary Barwin's new book, Doctor Weep and Other Strange Teeth, as suggested in the title, is a collection of short pieces written in stream of unconsciousness style. A random sampling from the book (in this case, the opening of a "story" called "Transgressor"), reads: "I open my briefcase. Three men in suits pop out and unfold themselves in a jiffy. To each of my teeth they attach a silver string bound to a tooth-white horse. Each horse wears a golden bridle and feather plume. The sun is doing that thing where it disappears at the end of the day, making light the colour of tanned skin. The tallest man lifts his arm and starts whistling." The entire book, divided into vignettes (these divisions must makes sense to Barwin alone), goes on in pretty much the same vein: lighthearted, catalogued randomness that sometimes almost achieves a glimmer of poignancy but mostly wallows in meaninglessness. It breaks.
It does not take an Olympian act of literary interpretation to understand Barwin's project: he is dismantling reality and phenomena and reassembling them into something new. He seems to be asking us, in the process, to question what we think we know as reality and the arbitrary relationship between things. What Barwin sets out to accomplish in Doctor Weep and other strange teeth he does accomplish, but the question remains: Is it worth reading? Well, it might be worth tripping through one or two of his vignettes, just to get a sense of his undertaking, but eventually the lack of meaning beyond the cute experiment in meaning is simply numbing.