Confidence: Stories

What he needed was some kind of confidence. He had confidence in his writing, and that was it. That's where he'd show them. He'd show them confidence. He'd come back tomorrow night, and the night after that, and write down everything he saw.

I don't live in Toronto, but I am technically in the exurbs, and after reading Confidence, I don't think I'd like to live any closer. The eight short stories in this collection are mostly about a certain type of urban male: those who want to be in relationships yet still remain free to take recreational drugs, hang out with their buddies, and if the opportunity arises, have guilt-free hookups with other women. Everyone in these pages has some sort of secret – whether it's a man planning to turn a basement apartment into a porn studio or a woman looking forward to an evening of dressing comfortably, drinking Pepsi straight from the bottle, and knitting (all activities that she, somewhy, must hide from her husband's censure) – and for the most part, this is a pretty unlikable cast of characters. Maybe you need to live in the city to see them.

The restaurants are all painfully hip (you know they're cool by their ironic names and lack of signage) and serve the kind of nonsensical meals that barely rate as food:

Rabbit dumplings in miso vanilla froth. And this is the mache mousse with wasabi beet crackers. And those are your seared whiting on lemon zabaglione. The quail broth is coming.

In these establishments, you'll probably see some hipster types, like:

A bearded guy, who couldn't have been older than twenty-three, sitting with his legs stretched out into the waiter's path, a guy with a heavy wool sweater, and tweed trousers and a tweed cap and knee-length Wellington boots.

As a fellow patron notes, “He has to sit that way so everyone sees the boots. Without the boots it's just casual wear.” Don't you just want to trip over his feet and sorry, not sorry spill your Lingonberry Smokedrop down his cableknit front? In more exclusive clubs, thirty-five-year-old female hedge fund managers are trying to lock down rich husbands – no time to date an actual nice/sensitive-type while the clock is ticking – while a Mirvish-wannabe and a washed-up novelist figure out how best to use each other. Those husbands who seem faithful just haven't been caught yet, and if men really want to know what their women are thinking, they just need to read their blogs.

After one date in TXTS, a man discovers himself on a blog subtitled “Adventures in Urban Dating”, and there's a certain ironic pathos to her being turned off by his mid-date texting with someone else when he doesn't even have a qwerty keyboard:

He just used the old fashioned alpha spelling, press seven twice for r, three times for s, get it wrong, back up, try again, do it in the wrong case, back up, try again.

Do they still sell phones like that? In Raccoons, an unfaithful husband-type can only know what his wife is really thinking from her “40YearOldMom” blog and her frequent Facebook and Twitter updates: When husbands move around a couple of boxes in the garage, do they expect the rest of the day off? #mommytime #entitlement

These stories are mostly about men, but I did like that sexy lady bartenders consistently brushed off the advances of guys who thought they were probably slumming by flirting with them; liked when one of the eponymous Fun Girls dropped her partygirl facade to explain to a man that, as she's a TA, she's not interested in him trying to teach her anything. As satire, there was much that I found funny in this collection, but curiously, what I found slightly annoying were any attempts to reveal a bit of soul inside the unlikable shells of these characters. Raccoons and Sleeping With an Elf were both shaping up to be favourites of mine until their final scenes rendered the stories a bit sappy and overdone. Confidence is an interesting time capsule of a very particular time and place (and like I said, I'm happy it's not actually like this where I live), and I'd rate it at 3.5 stars if I could, rounding down to rank it against similar collections.

I'm pretty excited that this year I was able to find and read the entire Giller Prize longlist before the winner is announced (with weeks to spare). If I were in charge, I'd give the prize to Martin John, and here is my ranked order of the contenders:

The longlist for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize in my order of ranking is:


Anakana Schofield - Martin John 
Marina Endicott - Close to Hugh
Patrick deWitt - Undermajordomo Minor
Heather O’Neill - Daydreams of Angels
Connie Gault - A Beauty 
André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs
Clifford Jackman - The Winter Family
Alix Hawley - All True Not a Lie in It
Rachel Cusk - Outline
Russell Smith - Confidence 
Samuel Archibald - Arvida 
Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

*Won by Fifteen Dogs; not my favourite but fine.

The 2015 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize nominees:

André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs

Elizabeth Hay - His Whole Life

Pamela Mordecai - Red Jacket 

Russell Smith - Confidence
John Vaillant - The Jaguar's Children

*Won by André Alexis, a good result in my opinion