by JULIET WATERS
In the
closing story of Neil Smith’s debut collection Bang Crunch, an actor who suspects
he’s not much more than a hack gets a role as a cop on a
Québécois TV series and a Gemeaux as best New Face.
Eventually, Benoit will walk away from acting when he stumbles on his
true passion, furniture making. At a basement café on St-Denis,
Smith confesses easily to this sly wink at his publisher. Last week,
Knopf released Bang Crunch in
its New Faces of Fiction series.
“Yes, I wrote that
story after I got the contract with Knopf,” says Smith. “After signing,
I was really nervous about living up to their expectations—and also
wondering whether I would continue being a writer, how much I enjoyed
it, whether the pressure was worth it. So I think that all comes
through in that story. Because, at the time, I was freaking out over
finishing a book and whether it was going to be up to standard.”
There’s nothing coy
about Smith’s performance anxiety. It’s inevitable, given how quickly
his success has unfolded. Born in Verdun to a family who rarely read,
Smith came to writing late in life and pretty much in the same way
Benoit stumbles onto furniture making, as a hobby he intended to
practise on Sunday afternoons. But success came relatively fast and
easily after Smith enrolled in a writing workshop. Early stories were
leapt on by literary magazines. Three of them ended up in the Journey
Prize anthology. Last year, the rights to Bang Crunch were sold to Vintage in
the U.S. and
Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the U.K.
Smith left Verdun as a kid and grew up
in the U.S. ,
moving frequently: Boston , Salt Lake City , Chicago
—eventually moving back to Canada
and living in Peterborough , Ottawa and Quebec City . But with grandparents
in Verdun
, he returned every summer. Currently, he lives in the south-east end
of the city, having assimilated into the francophone community as a
translator.
Last month, Quill & Quire tried to do a
photo shoot of Smith next to a curling rink in his old neighbourhood. A
recurring character in Bang Crunch
is a ghost whose cremated ashes are preserved in a curling stone, an
idea Smith got from a cousin who had the same thing done with her ashes.
“At one point in the
clubhouse, we asked some curlers if they could move a bit because we
wanted to take a shot of me through the window and they said no,” Smith
recalls, laughing with evident affection. “We just wanted them to move
a tiny bit... No!” Coming from such a relentlessly unpretentious world,
it’s easy to see why, until recently, Smith had never even read Alice
Munro, let alone considered becoming a significant Canadian writer.
Not that Smith grew up
without ambition. He read regularly as a kid, developed a passion for
fantasy literature, and dreamed of being a graphic artist. For a school
project in Chicago, he attempted to condense Lord of the Rings into a graphic
novel. He is sheepish now about the fact that he hasn’t even seen the
movies.
Characters who seem to
feel vaguely fraudulent dominate Bang
Crunch: a doctor who is also a recovering alcoholic and talks to
her dead husband. A support group of people with benign tumours. An
eight-year-old with Fred Hoyle syndrome, a rare disease that makes her
brilliant, but accelerates the aging process. A school shooting
survivor who is haunted by his cowardice. A department store detective
who flirts with shoplifting.
Anyone who reads this
collection, however, is likely to agree that Smith is the real thing.
His imagination roams effortlessly, it seems, into the hearts of
seductive hacks, hesitant new mothers and dying children. His plots
range from coming-out stories to magic-realist fables, including a love
story between a shoe and glove. Smith’s instinct for significant detail
is a skill that takes most writers decades to master. Bang Crunch is a showcase that will
hopefully prove to himself, not to mention anyone else, that he was
born to write.
Bang Crunch by Neil
Smith.
Knopf, hc, 256pp,
$29.95
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