Boreal rouse

>> Punk teens flee Canada’s northern nowhere in
Nadia Bozak’s dark and violent debut Orphan Love

by JULIET WATERS

A Northern Ontario outpost in 1989 was a way different situation for a fucked-up teenage punk rocker than it probably is now. No Internet, no music downloads. If someone gave you a couple of tapes that spoke to your alienation and anger, there was no joining a suicide chat club to trade MP3s and make some city friends before your eventual escape.

Back then, those tapes would be prized possessions taken along on a much more uncertain journey. Hearing Black Flag and SNFU for the first time, the narrator of Nadia Bozak’s Orphan Love recalls, “...with their uncooked anger, to soothe me with their broken teeth and pain—a sign of life. Suddenly I was not alone anymore. That music had come from someplace real and that meant there was a world out there, a world not here, a place for me to get to, a star to focus on, a beautiful fuck you to follow along.”

This Canada is not the Canada of our kinder, gentler mythology. Nadia Bozak has a sharp eye and keen ear for the images and stories that make up the Canadian nightmare, as does her young female protagonist, appropriately and curiously named Bozak. She speaks of small towns run by incestuous bullies and populated by lost boys and girls, natives mixed with white trash who know little about their past or heritage, or how the hell they ended up here. Bozak, who doesn’t even know her real age, has been raised under mysterious and miserable circumstances by an uncle dying of alcoholism and the associated diseases of hard, mean northern living. Her major life skills and wisdom are pretty much focused on how to take and, if need be, give a beating, physically and emotionally.

Circumstances propel her to hit the road, though the road out in this case is mostly a river. Not far into her journey, she hooks up with Dave, a long-haired half-native thrasher who is on the run from his redneck father. Brutal, cold and empty as the environment is, something deep resonates in their canoe trip out of Canada’s heart of darkness. There are hints of disturbing ’70s movies (think Deliverance) about taciturn outcasts that pre-date our more self-aware, chatty, therapized world.

One reviewer called Orphan Love a cross between Sid and Nancy and Huckleberry Finn. But the story rarely hits the notes of absurdity that comparison might suggest. There’s an authenticity to these characters that transcends folksy stereotypes or self-destructive icons. Bozak (the author, not the character) writes more in the tradition of contemporary masters of cyclical violence like Russell Banks and Dennis Lehane.

The story turns on an extremely violent encounter with a gang of “cock rock hockey jocks” and their slutty drunk girlfriends. A car is stolen and the story moves from the river to the road. Should they run into any cops, and need a story, they’re on their way to catch a Voivod show in Montreal. The real plan, however, is to bypass the city, return to the “St. Larry” and make it to NYC. To “the last of the north-going water. Canada’s last chance to fuck up our getaway and drag us on back into all that big boreal nowhere.”

This is a first novel and Nadia Bozak takes some risks that don’t entirely pan out. Some improbable plotlines woven throughout an otherwise convincing story seem abstract and generic (though one senses they were intended to be postmodern.) Dave’s father stalks him like a native trickster/horror movie stalker. There’s some interesting irony here, given that Dave’s ultimate goal is to make it to L.A. and become an actor in stalker movies. But another plotline involving a stranger who kidnaps a baby and pays hookers to breastfeed it on a road trip seems more reparative fantasy than honest resolution. One authentic note of hope in these difficult hardcore lives would have served the novel better.

Orphan Love by Nadia Bozak,
Key Porter, pb, 310pp, $22.95