by JULIET WATERS

I’ve never met Todd Babiak, a novelist and arts reporter for the Edmonton Journal, but such is the world today that I can skip the usual banal warm-up questions like, “How’s the book tour going,” and jump right in with, “So, any news about your wallet?” Blogs make everyone feel like your neighbour—sometimes it’s good to know that the writer sitting across from you had his wallet stolen the other day, though it made for a particularly miserable section of his tour.

This is a stroke of bad luck, right after a stroke of good luck. The Garneau Block, the book version of the popular serialized novel Babiak wrote for the Journal, has just been long-listed for The Giller Prize. Set in a fictional cul-de-sac, it follows a small cast of Edmontonians as they grapple with daily life after a neighbour is shot by police in a domestic hostage crisis. It’s a grim situation, but Babiak has turned the mystery of what motivated the tragedy into a stage for a quirky and often very funny examination of community life. And sometimes an examination of something more, as in this meditation from an aging university professor.

“Nihilism, for Raymond, was a rigorous philosophical concept. Once you got past yourself and your being in the world, once you fully grasped nothingness, nihilism overcame nihilism. Once you understood there was no self and no soul outside the one you know intrinsically, the one who eats and drinks and excretes in the mundane world, you could return to the mundane world and see its magic.”

It’s a nice thought, but sometimes the mundane world rears up against the magic with all its mundane force. No news about the wallet, so I proceed to warm-up question number two: “Where did you live when you lived in Montreal?”

Babiak lived here from ’95 to ’99, when he was doing an MA in creative writing at Concordia. Later he will tell me he arrived here just as the entire country was converging on Place du Canada, that one of the first things he did here was go to the demonstration of love and federalism, and that someone from Toronto puked on his feet. But right now I’m curious whether he lived somewhere in Montreal that might have the potential for light-hearted, serialized satire.

“My first year I lived near the Forum, really close to Dawson, actually across the street.” Not a ’hood that’s going to be ripe for satire any time soon, even for someone able to mix it up as well as Babiak. Inevitably, this becomes a conversation about people we know who know people who were shot, or terrified, or traumatized, and once again the world today seems strangely small.

The challenge for books like The Garneau Block is to take a small piece of the world and make it bigger and more universal. Edmonton may seem a far cry from Montreal, but reading Babiak’s novel it seems the two cities have much in common. Over the decades, Montreal has become less commerce-oriented, while Edmonton has become more culturally rebellious, well known—across Canada at least—for its theatre and music scenes. Both cities have bigger, more capitalist (and, we like to think, more soul-less) rivals in Toronto and Calgary. Both cities long ago abandoned the project of trying to create an easily definable identity, and as a result seem to be developing a gentle, practical Canadian nihilism that often serves them very nicely.

Then there are those times when nihilism doesn’t serve us as well. When that happens, it’s good to have good neighbours. Later that day, I check Babiak’s blog to see if the tour is looking up. “Tonight I’m going to a memorial for the girl who died at Dawson College last week. My friend works there and wants someone to go with her. It is at a downtown church. Afterward, I expect to buy us some wine.”

The Garneau Block by Todd Babiak, M&S, hc, 401pp, $32.99