Reproduction

At first, Army was 99 percent sure, then 98 percent sure, and now he was down to 96 percent sure that he couldn't be the father. It was biologically impossible from what he understood about reproduction. He would have had to had had, have had to had had, sex.


Ian Williams is an award-winning poet and that fact is totally apparent in his first novel, Reproduction: word choices are precise and often surprising; he plays (repeatedly) with structure; and I constantly had the feeling that something was going over my head. This may have won the 2019 Giller Prize, but I found most of it dull and more concerned with form than content; this one is for the juries. Spoiler-full from here.

If two people travelling in a straight line meet in a hospital room, is that a vertex or an intersection?

In the beginning...we meet Felicia (a nineteen-year-old student, recently arrived from an unnamed Caribbean island, now living with her mother in Brampton, Ontario) and Edgar (a fabulously wealthy but feckless 35-to-45 year old German businessman who has been banished to the Toronto branch of the family business where he can't screw up anything too badly), and the two of them meet when their mothers are put in the same hospital room. Felicia's mother soon dies of her heart condition, Edgar's Mutter grows strong enough to be discharged, and between Felicia's youth and grief and Edgar's laissez-faire attitude towards his mother's care, he convinces the young woman to quit school and move into his enormous house to act as his mother's caretaker. Mutual consolation turns to something like friendship, turns to something like romance, and a maybe-it-was-consensual sexual relationship begins: 

Felicia wanted him to press down on her and crush her face into stone so someone would come in and rescue her. Yet, contradictorily, she kept trying not to get hurt, kicking his zipper away from her ankle, where it was grating, trying to breathe under the weight of his body, he did not remove her underwear, or allow her to, she tried, but he slid it aside. And if not her mother, then the boy with the cow eyelashes from the small unrecognized island would intervene, the same half-muscle half-bone feeling of a turkey neck, in her hand, when she, because he had to be helped if she wanted him to kill her, but in her hand, now inside her, he only felt like a low hum, like a fluorescent light buzzing, despite the earnest thrusting of a snowman's carrot, the smell of his armpit and smoke and alcohol, his face buried in the pillow beside her face, was that his lip on her shoulder, was he dribbling, despite what she felt to be an earnest effort by a man ascending the mysterious and simple heights of male pleasure, already oblivious to her name and face, to whom she had died, despite this man so attentive to the pleasure her body offered him that he wouldn't care if a cat or his mother walked in, despite all that, she could only feel a low hum, the vibration of an automobile in park. Intervene.

What was decidedly not consensual was the pregnancy that ensues: In the beginning, Edgar had made it clear that he had had a vasectomy because he never wants children, and when Felicia becomes pregnant he turns it around on her (“I said I wanted a vasectomy, you should have been protecting against this”), and when she refuses to have an abortion, Felicia is kicked out to begin a long, hard life as a single mother to a biracial son.

Fast-forward fourteen years (to the 90's) and Felicia and Army (short for Armistice; Felicia had her Canadian History textbook alongside her bed in the maternity ward) move into the basement apartment of Oliver: a bitterly divorced has-been-wanna-be rockstar who has custody of his two children for the summer – Hendrix (a quirky seven-year-old) and Heather (a hot sixteen-year-old who drives Army crazy). We see that Felicia has worked hard to care for her son (with no support or contact from the millionaire baby-daddy) and has instilled in him good values, a work ethic, and an obsessive curiosity about his father. Heather flirts and makes out with Army but her heart thumps for the long-haired wanna-be rockstar who works the stockroom at the nearby Zellers. It's a summer of playfully exploring her burgeoning sexuality for Heather until the stockboy and his buddies roofie and gangrape her:

The second time, if there was a second time and not a third or fourth, it was like Skinnyboy was angry with her. Only it wasn't Skinnyboy, it was Skinnierboy, was it, then it was Skinnyboy again, then laughter, and smoke and the muttering, all like the beginning of a headache between her legs. She didn't feel anyone dragging her jeans down to her knees. She woke up on a Ferris wheel. But even that she couldn't be sure of, how their faces kept changing, every time they swished hair out of their eyes, and she was awake, but not. How many pills – what pills – had she had? It was just Ecstasy, no? She wanted to be awake when he opened her centrefold. She wanted to set her face in a certain way. Why was he so skinny? The top of her head was counting against the door handle. How many sips was this? She felt like she was upside down. She decided that she was asleep. It was dark. There was no way.

Definitely not consensual, but Heather does blame herself for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And when she discovers she is pregnant, Heather's American mother sends her daughter back to live in Brampton with her Dad; to have the baby secretly. When Riot (short for Chariot; Army comes up with the rad name) is born and Heather refuses to give him away as per her mother's plan, Oliver and Felicia decide to officially adopt the baby – even though they are not and never become a couple – and let Heather get back to being a kid.

The narrative jumps twenty or so years to the present and Riot is an artsy moviemaker, studying film at a local college. When he uploads videos of himself self-pleasuring to the cloud and sends links to a girl he likes, it turns into a big tribunal, with the girl's father accusing Riot of non-consensual “digital” penetration. Meanwhile, it comes to Felicia's attention that Edgar is dying of cancer, and although she doesn't want to invite him into their circle, Army insists on taking care of the father he never knew (not least of all because he wants to reinforce himself as the heir apparent to Edgar's fortune), and Riot is inspired to make a “slow” (days-long) film of the man's death. 

That is really a bare-bones plot synopsis, but more important would be the shifting formats. The first section is told in rotating POVs between Felicia and Edgar – denoted by an XX or an XY at the beginning of each of the twenty-three sections to indicate which one is narrating; the twenty-three sections meant to mimic the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes on a DNA strand. This is followed by the first of three “Sex Talk” interludes, which read like free verse poetry and each concern boys growing up and learning about their paternity. Part two rotates between four characters, four times, to add up to sixteen sections (marked off by an ever-increasing grid of bullet-points). The third section grows exponentially to 256 subsections, each of which is numbered, titled (often with pop cultural references), and marked with the name of the character whose POV the following few sentences concern. I must admit, the reading was growing tiresome by this point, but the most eye-straining technique was yet to come. As though the format itself is metastasizing, the final section has its sentences invaded by superscript and subscript, usually not referencing anything else in the narrative (and yet I couldn't force myself to ignore them, as much as they annoyed me, in case something important was revealed in them). I can't duplicate the technique, so I took a representative picture (apologies for the quality):

So that's the what and the how, but I have a little more to say about the who in this book. We have a cohort of unlikeable, privileged white men – Edgar is revealed to be an escort-frequenting, incapable of affection, deadbeat millionaire who jet-sets for work even if he doesn't need to; Oliver is a stripclub-(and later, online porn-)client, prone to violence, who has inherited several rental properties and doesn't work a job over the course of the book; Skinnyboy is a rapist who joins the army to avoid Heather's pregnancy (and leaves the story at that point); and Riot is a spoiled man-child who is uncommitted to his education and who believes in his right to making non-commercial art films and allowing others to support him. Felicia is an interesting character – tough-loving and hard-working – but maybe too good to be true. Heather is peripheral – we learn that she successfully hid the childbirth, received a pricey education in Women's Studies, and now has an underpaid administrative job in NYC – and her character isn't really explored. I thought that Army was the most interesting character – I liked his money-making hustle as a fourteen-year-old and ached for him as he was still looking for his first entrepreneurial break as a thirty-six-year-old living in his mother's (rented) basement. And does that just mean that Williams had the best handle on writing a young Black male? There is much about relationships in Reproduction – men and women are bonded together along that double-helix strand of DNA, whether along romantic or familial ties – and the sexual relationships all seem to revolve around the shifting definition of consent (is Army some kind of pervert for not telling Riot's friend, Faye, that he's fifteen years older than her [the same approximate age difference between his own parents] before initiating a sexual relationship with her?) I will add that I thought the book ended on the most appropriate of notes.

After all that, I will reiterate: Reproduction seems more committed to its genre-pushing (and ultimately tiresome) format than any exploration of the humans that people it. In a way I admired this, but I did not enjoy it.

The longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize:

Days by Moonlight by André Alexis

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta

Reproduction by Ian Williams


The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.