Sloth city

>> A Fine Ending chronicles Montreal through the eyes of its nihilistic pre-millennial inhabitants

by Juliet Waters

There’s a moment in Louis Rastelli’s A Fine Ending when two characters debate how interesting their lives in turn-of-the-millennium Montreal really are.

“I can’t imagine that our kids, if either of us ever have any, would want to hear our stories about the nineties” says Serge, roommate to Louis, the novel’s autofictional narrator. Louis agrees, more or less. He wonders, however, if “maybe the future will be so different, so ‘futuristic,’ that things we don’t even notice today are going to seem really strange and primitive.” Serge tries to imagine this. “I can’t see it, I think it’ll be more like there will have been some nuclear war or something, and they’ll be curious to hear about how we lived before it happened.”

“Yeesh,” Louis replies, “I sure fucking hope not” before winning the debate with this insightful point: “If it does happen, I doubt we’ll have any children to tell stories about it to.” A reason, the roommates decide, that “is reason enough to clink our beers together for a toast, after which we began going through our record collections to play some of the many post-apocalyptic punk songs we knew of.”

It’s a scene typical of Rastelli’s laconic and sometimes subtle chronicle of braindead bohemianism. Sure, it’s possible that somewhere out there among the many idealistic, creative, politically active twenty-somethings that populate the world today, there are still a few that might have a conversation approaching this level of dumbass apathy. But when they scroll through their post-apocalyptic playlists and pass out with their iPods, it just won’t be the same.

Serge has a point. It’s not only hard to imagine kids ever wanting to hear about the ’90s, it’s hard to imagine parents ever wanting to talk about them. In the rest of North America it was the decade of slackers. Montreal, already slack by any urban standard, was home to a people better described as slothers.

It is possible that Louis, fictional Louis of course, might want to tell his kids about the litter of sick kittens he saved. But this would involve explaining where he found them: in his girlfriend’s apartment, in the care of roommates so chronically unmotivated and self-absorbed, they barely noticed them dying. It’s less likely he’ll want to tell them about the severed cat’s head his own roommates left on the balcony for an undetermined amount of time, discovered only while trashing an apartment they’d decided to abandon.

A Fine Ending is at its best when life is at its worst. When Rastelli is fully engaged in the numb nihilism of the time, and giving detailed descriptions of the consequences of that life, the novel cooks. The rest of the time it simmers. And since the plot can pretty much be summed up as “a novel about deadbeats in a city where rents gradually increase” sometimes it’s like reading about frogs being boiled.

Or kittens dying. Rastelli’s greatest strength as a writer is his tenderness for characters that most people wouldn’t give a crap about. As publisher of Fish Piss, Rastelli can lay claim to being one of the first publishers to give a platform to writers like Heather O’Neill, Jonathan Goldstein and Golda Fried. Eventually those writers moved beyond the zine world and found editors. There’s a lot to be said for a world in which everyone and everything gets published. And there’s a lot to be said about a world where there are people who know when to cut the crap.

As it is, the appeal of A Fine Ending can best be summed up by fictional Louis’s thoughts about an aging local punk band, whose one hit is about how the lead singer lost his job as a bouncer at Station 10 “to a guy named Gino.”

“A lot of people used to dismiss these songs as being banal, but I liked that they’d written about the sort of stuff that actually happened to us.”

A Fine Ending by Louis Rastelli,
Insomniac Press, PB, 328pp, $15.95