Pillow

Most of the things Pillow really liked to do were obviously morally wrong. He wasn't an idiot; clearly it was wrong to punch people in the face for money. But there had been an art to it, and it had been thrilling and thoughtful for him. The zoo was also evil, a jail for animals who'd committed no crimes, but he just loved it. The way Pillow figured it, love wasn't about goodness, it wasn't about being right, loving the very best person, having the most ethical fun. Love was about being alone and making some decisions.

Okay, this is why I bother to read literary longlists: if Pillow hadn't been longlisted for the 2016 Gillers, I would probably never have heard of or read this book, and that would have been nearly as sad as the fact that a year after its release this helluva fine book only has eight reviews on Goodreads. I read so much dreck in a year that I'm nearly angry when I find the hidden pearls; why didn't anyone direct me here before this? Pillow probably isn't a perfect read – and I need the qualifier “probably” because as a surrealist roman noir, I can't say that I get all of the novel's allusions – but I can definitely state that author Andrew Battershill swung for the fences, writing a book that was thoughtful and interesting and jam-packed with savoury/hilarious mouthfuls; this is everything I want in a book. While I acknowledge that this wouldn't be to everyone's taste, Pillow deserves a wider audience than its eight measly reviews would suggest. 

Pillow is a former boxing champ, and after taking a few too many jabs to the skull, he's currently only good for looking intimidating in the background as brighter members of the “Bureau” conduct their criminal affairs. When a transaction goes awry on the same day that Pillow learns his casual girlfriend is pregnant and in need of support, he (and his scrambled, slow-moving brain) joins those who would double- and triple-cross the big boss in order to find and disappear with the goods. On the one hand, this might seem like pretty standard crime fiction, but on the other, as this big boss is named for André Breton – the founder of Surrealism as a cultural movement – and as many of Breton's henchmen are named for various surrealist writers, artists, and filmmakers (about all of whom I know nothing), there's a constant friction between language and situations that seem fantasy-based and brutal actions whose violence anchors the whole to our own, sorry reality. (I'm probably not remembering Pulp Fiction exactly right, but the overall vibe is like greasy-haired John Travolta doing the Batusi in one scene – definitely surreal – and then jabbing a needle of adrenaline through the OD-ing Uma Thurman's sternum in the next; a scene that seem ultrareal because of the bizarreness that preceded.) Throughout it all, it was the language that delighted me. The following is a pure Chandleresque pastiche:

Her sergeant, Michael Simon, was no wider than a highway and no uglier than a piece of roadkill. He had giant, bulging eyes and a few foreheads, a healthy helping of jowl hanging off a stingy slice of chin. He looked like someone who smelled like the inside of a crowded shipping container.

And I loved that way that these metaphors were repeatedly stacked upon each other to stretch from just enough to too much to an obviously overdone amount that, in the end, felt just right:

As soon as Pillow arrived at the Bureau, Breton hustled him right back out to help roust Jack Prevert, a degenerate gambler who owned a sewing-supply shop. Jack Prevert looked like a suicidally depressed guppy with hair plugs. Jack Prevert made it seem possible to smoke roll-your-owns at the bottom of the sea. Jack Prevert shovelled chips onto the table like he was bailing out a rowboat. Jack Prevert looked you in the eyes the same way most people look out their windshield on the Autobahn.

And I loved the dialogue (the backwards punctuation is as it appears):

   'Okay. To sum it up, you're at home, you're doing some kind of horrible sex thing and you realize that you're late for a stolen centaur-coin sale, and your lunatic friend in a morphine coma has stolen your centaur coins, so you decide to pack him up and bring him to the buy of the coins he's stolen. I get all that, ish, y'know? But why do you give him a dinner fork? That's...that's where I'm lost on this one.'

   'He must have had it in his sock.'

   'How is that the first thing you say? Just right to the sock? “Hey, sorry I almost got your eye stabbed, Pillow.” Nope? Just out with the sock idea.'

   'The foot is the most human part of the body. Think of apes.'

   'Okay, I'm about done with you. You know I love apes, you know that about me, Georges, but now is not the time. So, since this is a majillion percent your fault, you're going to help me with this situation here. I need both hands, so you open the door. I'll handle Artaud, and you stay out of the way, sound good?'

(Out of context that might not seem like the best example, but I totally laughed out loud at this exchange.) This book isn't character-driven, but I appreciated that the few women in it weren't cartoonish; they were all strong and purposeful (and like with the reality-anchoring violence, the pregnant girlfriend, Emily, keeps reminding us that, sure, Pillow is off [hilariously, ineptly] trying to recover the coins for the benefit of his unborn child, but if people are going to in fact get hurt, Emily [who is a real, noncriminal person] won't be any more impressed in actuality than I [a real, noncriminal person] would be.) And on a tangent that begs to be noted: my edition of Pillow is printed on heavy, textured stock (in the endnotes this is described as “Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter”) and I include all of this to make the point that everything about this book (starting with the artisanal craftsmanship and, obviously, including every carefully selected word) feels intentional and thoughtful; this is not rush-to-market mass appeal pulp fiction (as it were), and I appreciated that both as a tactile and as an intellectual experience. In the end, this doesn't feel like a true five star, life-altering read, but I'm rounding up because Pillow deserves more attention than it seems to have garnered; I'm delighted that it appears on the Giller longlist, like it better than many of the titles that made the shortlist, and recommend it to anyone who is tired of reading the same paint-by-numbers book over and over again.

The  2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:

Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Andrew Battershill : Pillow
David Bergen : Stranger
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Kathy Page : The Two of Us
Susan Perly : Death Valley
Kerry Lee Powell : Willem De Kooning's Paintbrush
Steven Price : By Gaslight
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People

*Won by Madeleine Thien for Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Not really a surprise, but this is how I ranked the shortlist, entirely according to my own enjoyment level with the reading experience:

Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People