Feel-bad fun

>> Cordelia Strube creates a realm wrought with black comedy, depression and sympathy in her seventh novel, Planet Reese

by JULIET WATERS

When I reviewed Cordelia Strube’s first novel, Alex and Zee, well over a decade ago, I called it the “feel-bad novel of the year.” I actually meant that as high praise. I’ve always been something of an advocate for depression. And I don’t mean that I’m an advocate for helping people out of depression. I mean that if you’re really looking at the world today—at the violence and the poverty, at the weather, at the crap that our economy spews out, and the making of that crap, which is considered meaningful work—and you can maintain a deep feeling of well-being… well, it seems to me that you may possibly need a bit of psychiatric intervention.

Mild depression, at the very least, seems the most appropriate response. Just enough to let you know that you’re seeing the mess, but not enough to let you off the hook for not doing your part to fix it. Once you get comfortable with that philosophy of life, it’s amazing how it frees you up for those occasional and appropriate moments of real happiness.

Strube has always had a talent for creating depressed characters that manage, somehow, to come off as significantly saner than any of the more “functional” characters. What allows her to get away with these morose, introspective anti-heroes is her equal talent for black comedy.

It’s easy to sympathize with Reese. A former political activist, he cares about the things people should care about. Maybe his children are a little young to listen to his evidence for the impending global apocalypse, but his heart’s in the right place. And he’s courageous. When he sees a suspicious Middle Eastern man about to molest a stewardess, he doesn’t hesitate to intervene. He’s also a good son to impossible parents, who seem bent on terrorizing each other into an early grave. Finally, his growing sense of victimization certainly has some basis in reality. His estranged wife seems to be accusing him of sexually abusing his daughter, as a strategy to gain sole custody of their children.

At the same time, it’s also easy to have contempt for Reese. That he’s authentically distressed about the planet doesn’t let him off the hook for his current job, managing a call centre that markets generally sleazy for-profit charities. The son of lifetime grievance collectors, he’s a malfunctioning jack-in-the-box of repressed rage. If he had a better handle on his aggression, he might not have accidentally killed the Middle Eastern molester. And even while he’s being deprived of his parental rights, he’s clearly too depressed and angry at this moment to be much of a father anyway.

This tension between contempt and sympathy is what keeps the laughter going. Reese can’t escape the memory of killing a relatively innocent man because somehow the media has decided that he saved the plane from a terrorist. Everywhere Reese goes in Toronto, he’s being congratulated, and his guilt is being exacerbated. Coerced into social dance classes by his stripper neighbour, Reese first encounters the custody mediator in an empty hallway while he’s practising his sashay.

After the mother of his kids argues that she is “not prepared to sacrifice the children’s emotional well-being” just so Reese can “feel involved,” Reese wonders: “Emotional well-being, is there such a thing? Are not emotional lives fraught with inconsistencies, fragments of euphoria, sunken hopes, miscommunications, fears real and imagined? Does she really believe that banishing him will cause no ripple in their pond?”

This is the question at the centre of every Strube novel, and probably at the centre of any thoughtful person’s life. But here’s the question that continues to plague me, now after her seventh novel. Almost every one of Strube’s deep domestic comedies has the potential to become the Canadian “feel-bad movie of the year,” the next Little Miss Sunshine or the next Knocked Up—so why aren’t they being adapted?

Planet Reese by Cordelia Strube,
Dundurn, pb, 349pp, $21.99