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This One’s Going to Last Forever and Selected
Blackouts are story collections from two of
the city’s best emerging writers

by SACHA JACKSON

It’s 1989 and Clara Stewart is an undergrad at McGill. Fresh from Camrose, Alberta, she finds herself landing a job at The McGill Daily and like a lot of university students questioning her sexuality. This is the basis of Are You Committed?, the featured novella in local author Nairne Holtz’s short story collection This One’s Going to Last Forever.

It’s the usual tale: girl moves to Montreal, girl rooms with angry leftist student journalists, girl covers a Take Back the Night March and meets cute lesbian, girl falls for said lesbian, girl questions her sexuality, lesbian breaks girl’s heart.

Like the story of sexual discovery, the Montreal that Holtz presents is wholly recognizable despite the fact that it’s set 20 years ago. It’d be great if this feeling of stasis were a wry comment on the pace of development in this city—but it’s not. And it’s not entirely clear why Holtz chose to write about this era to begin with; beyond a musical reference or two, there are few signposts that this is Montreal circa 1989.

The one historical event she chooses to focus on (and I use this term loosely) is the Polytechnique disaster. Holtz takes what could have been a way to create atmosphere and mood and instead treats the event rather flippantly as a mere plot device. It’s just a small part of the narrative, but it feels so unjustified and off-handed it has you wondering why it was mentioned at all.

What Committed lacks in originality, however, Holtz makes up for in her short stories, which follow the disenchanted, the closeted, the fetishists and usually include some hot sex scenes. This is her territory and it’s obvious she feels more comfortable with this material. “When Gay is the New Straight,” about a gay Elvis impersonator in Sudbury, and “Phantoms,” about a recent amputee who finds out she’s now become a fetish, are both standout works. This is where her writing comes into its own, in showing the bedrooms and relationships of everyday people, the queer, the straight, the questioning.

Moving from lesbian to dude fiction, Montreal-based John Goldbach’s first collection of short stories Selected Blackouts traverses the blurry line between youth and adulthood. There are no Apatovian man-children here, but darker, tortured and inevitably real male characters whose bravado almost always comes into play.

“Blackout” opens with a striking scene, a classroom of boys cupping their necks till they pass out cold on their desks. It’s a harmless teenage prank, but there are deeper undertones here, and even as we follow two of the boys as they spend their suspension smoking hash and drinking beer, there’s an almost menacing atmosphere that pervades the prose.

The mood of most of these works captures the feeling of our vast un-travelled country roads and the solitude and the unknown that comes with it. Even when the story is set in a city a certain amount of loneliness remains.

There’s more quirkiness in these stories than the tone, sparse and direct, begets. The opening story “Odin Létourneau and Debbie Siskind’s Second Date” talks of one boy’s love for his pet turkey, while in “Easter Weekend” the protagonist is fond of writing fake suicide notes.

The dude-ness isn’t always subtle, though, and things get a bit out of hand with “Easter Weekend,” which pretty much blows its load of hetero hijinks (strippers, booze, drugs) in 30 pages. “How Much Do They Know?” is a another testosterone filled self-explanatory tale in which the narrator rants about his group of friends and the lies and treachery that goes on between them. There are no secrets among friends and this is nothing new.

When he gets it right, though, Goldbach nails it. “Conversation at 4 a.m.” and “Wedding” are stunning little masterpieces.

THIS ONE’S GONG TO LAST FOREVER
BY NAIRNE HOLTZ, INSOMNIAC PRESS,
PB, 226 PP., $19.95
SELECTED BLACKOUTS BY JOHN
GOLDBACH, INSOMNIAC PRESS,
PB, 172 PP., $19.95