The world is hard. You have to be harder.Author Eden Robinson calls Son of a Trickster “a cognitive screwball gothic with working class people”, and that's too precisely perfect a description for me not to just quote her. As the coming-of-age story of a sixteen-year-old Native kid, Jared Martin, this book explores all the familiar anxieties faced by high school kids everywhere (social acceptance, family expectations, drug and sexual experimentation), layers on the less familiar anxieties particular to his situation (his mom's a violent hothead who exposes her son to a series of psycho boyfriends while denying Jared access to the substance-abusing father who desperately needs his son to help pay rent for him and his new family), and then further layers on the totally unfamiliar anxieties of a kid who is experiencing the thinning of the barriers between this world and that inhabited by his people's traditional bogeymen. I don't always have a lot of patience for magical realism, but this read like classic Stephen King and was absolutely terrifying. I was enchanted by the whole thing.
What works the best throughout this whole book is the believable decency of the main character, Jared – he is generous and empathetic and morally uncorrupted by the chaos around him – and his relationship with his mother: I laughed frequently at the verbal sparring between these two and their closeness radiated from the page. And not incidentally: the texting conversations between Jared and his mom (and a host of other characters) was probably the most believable use of this device I've ever read: why can't authors seem to get this right? Kudos to Robinson for knowing how and when to use texting.
With all the power of technology and science in the world, I would bet you dollars to doughnuts that you still trust a human face to be a human. But come closer and let me speak to the creatures that swim in your ancient oceans, the old ones that sing to you in your dreams. Encoded memories so frayed you think they're extinct, but they wait, coiled and unblinking, in your blood and in your bones.As the membrane between our earthbound reality and that of Wee’git the Trickster begins to thin for Jared, there are brief interludes in the narrative in which some entity (later become manifest as a swarm of fireflies) attempts to explain magic and altered consciousness through quantum physics; first to us the reader, and then to Jared himself. This sheen of science is useful, I guess, for those who might need convincing that ultradimensional beings are a natural feature of the universe (and not the easy-to-dismiss animism of so-called primitive religions), and I ate it up as simply interesting writing.
Set in Kitimat, B.C. (Robinson's hometown), Jared and his mother live off the Rez, but through school, Jared has contact with many Natives and non-Natives. Living in a party-house (his Mom and her boyfriend are drug-dealers), Jared is frequently given beer and shots, and most of the book sees him getting blackout drunk and showing up on YouTube with smart-mouthed rants and stumbling pratfall compilations. He's the Cookie Dude with the secret touch for baking pot cookies, but he also has a huge heart; helping the needy and taking the weight of the world on his thin shoulders. This book is filled with violence (of the human and supernatural varieties), people throwing their lives away on drugs and alcohol, and nonstop foul language; this view of Native life is totally unflattering. (There is one on-Rez kid, George “call me Crashpad”, who is a sober sci-fi geek, and the mostly white granddaughter of Jared's neighbour engages in activism with Idle No More and anti-pipeline protests; but they're definitely the exceptions.) On the other hand, this could be the story of working-class people anywhere, and until the Trickster shows up, nothing much identifies this as a Native story.
So, here's my criticism: I wanted more. The first chapter has Jared's paternal grandmother telling him, “That Trickster's been a huge dink to your mom's family for generations.” Yet, we never learn any of the details of what has gone on through the generations. Late in the book, Jared's Mom makes brief reference to events from her youth (and from her own mother's experiences at a Residential School), but no details are provided. Even the ending didn't really tie things up for me. And yet...I was happy to read in an interview with Eden Robinson that she is already at work on a sequel, Trickster Drift, and I can only hope that the blanks will all be filled in eventually. Because I will be picking it up; Robinson is too skilled at world-building for me not to join her there.
And just a note on what I refer to as "nonstop foul language": I wasn't offended by the language personally -- I don't know if any language in a work of literature actually could offend me; it's all in the service of art -- but when "fucking cuntosaurus" appears on the first page, as a person who works in a bookstore, my mind went to, "Is this language going to be offensive to the average reader? Will I need to keep that in mind while making recommendations?" As Eden Robinson chose this kind of language to represent some of her characters, it's a risk I'm sure she considered. And if it ends up alienating this book from a portion of the reading public, the risk/benefit analysis is up to Robinson herself to decide. (At least she put that right there on the first page; buyer forewarned.)
And I say this as someone who is considered a bit of a prude. We went over to Ken and Lolo's on New Year's Eve, and after we had some snacks, we started playing cards; like always. And after we played a few hands, Ken said, "Are we going to try out that game you downloaded?" It turns out that Lolo realised you could download Cards Against Humanity for free, and she had printed out hundreds of cards; but after reading through some of them, she and Ken wondered if I could handle the famous obscenity of the game. Of course I had heard of Cards Against Humanity, and while I wouldn't want to play it with my kids, why wouldn't I want to give it a go?
As it turned out, the cards we played with weren't particularly offensive, and we had a fine adult time of it. I'd play it again. I can't imagine what could possibly be written on a card that would actually offend me.
And on a related note: The other day, Delight posted this quote on facebook:
“There is no such thing as a dirty word. There is no word, nor any sound, that you can make with your mouth that is so powerful that it will condemn you to the lake of fire at the time when you hear it. ‘Dirty words’ is a fantasy manufactured by religious fanatics and government organizations to keep people stupid. Any word that gets the point across is a good word. If you wanna tell somebody to ‘get fucked,’ that’s the best way to tell him.” - Frank Zappa
And then a conversation started in which her notoriously foulmouthed friends and family, haha, all agreed that Zappa was right, and while adults maybe shouldn't curse in front of children (or at least teach the children the difference between "adult" words and those for everyone), no one should take offense to anything anyone feels like saying. I didn't participate in that conversation -- who needs the prudish buzzkill showing up at such a progressively open-minded self-congratulationsfest -- but if I did, the first thing I would ask is what religious or government organisation is trying to keep me stupid by banning my use of dirty words? Neither has any power over my freedom of speech, I don't know of anyone warning of the "lake of fire", so the whole radical activist slant of the quote is undermined from the beginning. I would have pointed out, instead, that as members of a society, we've agreed to certain standards of behaviour to keep the peace; and those standards include, in general, not wanting to listen to foul-mouthed people polluting up the air in public (do anything you like in private; play Cards Against Humanity and make it as obscene as you can among consenting adults). Honestly, when young people walk past me dropping f-bombs like commas in their conversation, it's not like I'm offended -- they just appear coarse and stupid and antisocial to me. And, if I had participated in the conversation on facebook, I would have pointed out that there are indeed words that no one there would ever use -- like faggot or retard, etc -- because we all accept that those are antisocial words; they could potentially offend a minority of people and, living in a society with standards of behaviour that include not purposefully offending others, "nice" people simply don't use those words. By extension, if there is some portion of society who are offended by your use of "dirty words" in public, why are their sensibilities not as important? Respecting each other is the foundation of a peaceful society; speak how you like in private, but have some restraint in the public sphere.
And again, this famously prudish attitude of mine doesn't extend to literature. The use of foul language is a valid and realistic character choice (I love Irvine Welsh's use of the very foulest of language in the Trainspotting books; it's like a poetic dialect), but it might have real world consequences for book sales. And note: I make this point here, off the beaten path, where it's merely an aside. In the body of my review, as posted on Goodreads, I acknowledge foul language without really sounding a warning about it; this isn't meant to be taken as a warning.
*****
The 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:
David Chariandy: Brother
Rachel Cusk: Transit
David Demchuk: The Bone Mother
Joel Thomas Hynes: We'll All Be Burned in Our Beds Some Night
Andrée A. Michaud: Boundary
Josip Novakovich: Tumbleweed
Ed O'Loughlin: Minds of Winter
Zoey Leigh Peterson: Next Year, for Sure
Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square
Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster
Deborah Willis: The Dark and other Love Stories
Michelle Winters: I Am a Truck
After finishing reading the longlist, I'll rank the shortlist (according to my own enjoyment only):
I Am a Truck
Minds of Winter
Son of a Trickster
Bellevue Square
Transit