Daddy Lenin by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Daddy Lenin, by Guy Vanderhaeghe (McClelland & Stewart 2015)

Guy Vanderhaeghe built his early reputation as a short story writer.  His debut collection, Man Descending, secured him the first of two Governor General Awards in a career that has also garnered him shortlist nods for both the Giller and the Dublin IMPACT, among his many accolades. Arguably, his current reputation among readers is staked upon his more recent loose trilogy of novels, which terminated in The Last Crossing.  Daddy Lenin marks Vanderhaeghe’s return to the short story genre after a twenty-three year hiatus.  Evidently, time has not blunted his purpose.

              The measure of a good short story should be how easily it can be held in the hand.  Like a cut stone, the reader should be able to turn it over and hold it to the light – to enjoy the unity of purpose each facet contributes to its fashioning.  The short story stays with you in a way the novel, in its length and complexity, cannot.  A good short fits in the pocket.  In this way, the nine stories of Daddy Lenin might be a master class in the genre.

These are the stories of men, primarily.  Men searching for purpose.  Men struggling for relevance.  Men reflecting on lives lived and not lived.  Men all too aware of the “tick tock” of their own mortality, and how their passage will be weighed or found wanting in the end. Even the teenaged Troy, in the collection’s opening story, “The Jimi Henrix Experience,” is forced to take a long, hard look at the abyss of an old man’s photo albumn.  An experience which leaves him thinking, “It’s no different from staring into the blank television screen.  The snow shifting, forming faces of famous people locked in the circuitry from old programs.  The hiss of static turning into favourite songs, guitar chords whining and dying.”  An experience so bleak and frightening that it leaves him “running through the late-afternoon stillness of an empty suburban street…where the sun is either coming up or going down.”

In similar fashion, the collection’s title story examines the recently retired, Jack Corbin – failed academic and disgruntled husband – who rediscovers an old mentor and professor whom he holds responsible for his unhappiness.  Jack sets out to redeem himself, bolstered by a late opportunity to seek a revenge of sorts – against the man, against his wife.  But Jack’s disappointment is foreshadowed in his inability to win a mid-story “staring contest” he unwittingly enters with a mysterious stranger.  “Heart banging, he lowered his eyes, and before he knew it his feet were carrying him away…he couldn’t say why this Disney-enchanted-kingdom nightmare filled him with such anxiety and apprehension.” Like Troy, who had seen his future measured out in another man’s photo albumn, Jack comes face to face with his past and his present, “the place to which every step and misstep he had ever made had been leading him for years.”

In spite of these bleak endings, Vanderheaghe’s stories offer both humour and stoicism, as well.  The former is best evident in the aging, acerbic tongue of Uncle Ted, in “Counselor Sally Brings Me to the Tunnel”; the latter, in the attitude of Billy Constable, who in “Live Large” catches “again the bird-like cloud on this morning’s horizon, when everything seemed salvageable.” But most importantly, these stories offer courage.  In worlds where media and the working-class father figures of a bygone age have left Vanderhaeghe’s protagonists bereft of applicable role models, in steps Charley Brewster.  The climax of “Tick Tock” should bring back images of Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino.

If you read short stories, this collection will confirm your faith in the genre. If you don’t, this just might convert you. The stories of Daddy Lenin are ultimately brilliant bits of prestidigitation, satisfying and full blown in their revelations.   

The Cat's Table

The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje (McClelland & Stewart 2011)

The Cat's Table is the story of eleven-year-old "Mynah's" voyage from Ceylon to England aboard the passenger liner, Oronsay, in the early 1950s. It is Ondaatje's sixth novel.  However, while it may share many things that readers have come to expect from an Ondaatje story -- marginal characters  and quasi-mythical histories -- it does not begin with the same attention to language, or the same initimate intensity.  In fact, in the beginning, it is much more reminiscent of the author's memoir, Running In the Family.

That being said, Cat's Table most certainly holds the reader's interest through an episodic, haphazard plot, reflective of the fact that it is the excavation of a child's memory (albeit told in retrospect by an adult).

Halfway through the novel, however, Cat's Table undergoes a transformation.  Mynah's child-like observations give way to the far more introspective "Michael" -- Mynah's adult incarnation (as fate would have it, a famous author). "Ramadhin's Heart" is a brilliant, touching episode which demonstrates the author's narractive strengths.  It is here that the reader realizes just how attached he has become to the disparate characters, through their random misadventures. 

In addition, forgotten threads of story find their way back into the weft hereafter, and tighten their grip on the reader.  Previously dropped stitches seem suddenly purposeful, and out of thin air, a mystery beings to unfold. 

While it would be difficult to argue that Cat's Table is Ondaatje's best artistry to date, it is certainly his most accessible. Diehard fans of Ondaatje the prose stylist, may be disappointed here; however, the author will win over new audiences with this stripped down tale.

Garcia's Heart

Garcia’s Heart by Liam Durcan (McClelland & Stewart 2007)

With the publication of Garcia’s Heart by Liam Durcan, yet another Canadian doctor throws his hat into the ring. Who knew there were so many with literary aspirations?

In this debut novel, Durcan dances across the corpus callosum, proving that the combination of medicine and literature – the left and right brain – make for good fiction. Garcia’s Heart tackles difficult moral conundrums, like the nature of good and evil, innocence and culpability. It also, to a lesser extent, delves into the responsibility of the individual in an increasingly amoral corporate world. Durcan serves up these meditations in a topical exploration of the vagaries of the World Court, and not without a smattering of mystery.

Patrick Lazerenko, an expat Canadian living and working in Boston, learns that his former boss and mentor, Hernan Garcia, is to stand trial in Den Haag for crimes against humanity. He is accused of aiding and abetting the torture of political dissidents in his homeland of Honduras during the turbulent 1980s. Patrick leaves his job – a company he founded – during a critical juncture in order to attend the trial and discern the truth about the man he so well respected.

Complicating matters is the possibility the Patrick might be subpoenaed by either side of the case. The defence wishes to employ his unique expertise as a neuroscientist to discuss Hernan’s ability to judge right from wrong, while the prosecution suspects Patrick withholds damning testimony.

Ah, yes. Did I mention that Hernan’s daughter, Celia, is Patrick’s former lover?

The plot requires much telling to unravel the truth. But it is sufficiently compelling to keep the reader interested. The character of Patrick is also a well-crafted invention, vacillating, pondering, and loving unrequitedly in a very believable fashion.

However, when dealing with highly technical and specialized fields such as neuroscience and law – let alone juggling both in a single novel – an author runs the risk of losing his reader in the minutiae. As affirmed by the novel’s protagonist, "any interesting job could be reduced to a series of bureaucratic functions." Garcia’s Heart stumbles in and out of this mire on a few occasions.

The diction and sentence structure here can also reflect the cumbersome topics. Appositives, subliminal interjections, multiple clauses, and dense vocabulary can combine to create some tricky prose from time to time:

"He was also, despite his designation as protege, miserable in the office where his recent arrival and prepubescent appearance combined with the insecurity of the business-types to bleed credibility from him...with a bit of supportive psychotherapy and an implied challenge to his intelligence – motivational tactics Patrick had mastered as a thesis supervisor – he agreed to stay."

Ultimately, these are small quibbles. Garcia’s Heart is a confident debut novel that will leave you wondering "what had to happen for a life to double in on itself, for separate trajectories to form and diverge, and if living this lie took as great a toll as another having to discover it."