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Non-issues >> André Alexis defies the usual schedule for young black writers by JULIET WATERS
However, I don't expect him to be a lot like Thomas. The cliché about first novels is that they're usually autobiographical, but Childhood reads like a work of pure imagination. It just doesn't have the tone of disguised memoir, that reportorial voice, tinged with denial. Plus you wouldn't wish Thomas' magically eccentric, funny but poignantly empty life on anyone. In his picture, Alexis is wearing a white shirt buttoned to the neck. From behind wire-rimmed glasses, he shoots out the serious stare of a self-made, up-and-coming young black author. Someone maybe like British writer Caryl Phillips, who apparently gets up every morning at 6 a.m. to iron his shirts, or Dany Laferrière, who once chewed me out for being late for an interview. I'm not late, but I get the feeling right away that Alexis isn't like that. "I hate schedules. Totally despise them," he says before ordering his second cranberry juice in 10 minutes. He's a bit hungover from a reading in Toronto the night before and has just gotten off the train. He doesn't look anything like his picture, but more like a slightly sloppy teddy bear who smokes Camels and doesn't spend enough time outside. He does confess to a few similarities between himself and his narrator. They share the same birth date, they both have family from Trinidad and they both spent chunks of their childhood in Ottawa and a small Ontario border town called Petrolia. "But these details are really just like the first few marks on a painting," Alexis explains. "It does begin there, but it doesn't really stay there." After a few polite prods into his background, I find myself not really caring all that much about Alexis' life. Not that he doesn't seem interesting, but because it seems so irrelevant to his work. Some people are obviously just born writers, so you don't tend to question how they got where they are. Like you wouldn't waste time talking with Alice Munro about her life, if you could talk instead about her characters. And though one wouldn't yet put Alexis in the same class of writers as Munro, it's worth noting a few things both writers share beyond a childhood in southern Ontario. First, a passion for Russian literature that comes out in their stark but eccentric Gothic sensibility. While Munro has often been compared to Chekhov, Alexis' collection of short fiction, Despair and Other Stories From Ottawa, published four years ago, has earned him a comparison to Gogol. Second, both writers have always made politics subservient to art. In Childhood, politics hardly exist. While other noteworthy Canadian writers born in Trinidad, namely Neil Bisoondath and Dionne Brande, have centred their careers on confronting racism, Alexis barely touches on it. The reason for this is fairly obvious once Alexis explains it. Thomas is dealing, at this point in his life, with the psychic wounds inflicted by family, not society. Six months after the deaths of his wild, romance-addicted mother Katarina, and her gently weird lover Henry, Thomas is trying to focus his grief by writing his autobiography in the form of a letter to his first real love. "He's writing to someone who's black, and who knows he's black," says Alexis. "So the moments when he's stepping outside himself to talk about racism are pretty rare. What would be the point? In order for Thomas to talk about racism in an abstract way he would actually have to be thinking about race. Whereas he's thinking about the past, the present, love and things that are more important for him now than racism. The thing I kind of object to is the inevitability of talking about race in a linear and reasoned way, whatever the character is. It comes up when he's talking about his origins, because it would have been dishonest for him not to mention it. But it would have been dishonest for him to go on talking about it in a non-Thomas-like way. He's got other things in his life, specifically someone he loves, for whom the unveiling of race is not an issue." A black writer who chooses not to make race an issue in his first novel requires a confidence that the writing stands on its own. Judging from the quality of Childhood, Alexis has reasons for that confidence. Childhood by André Alexis, McClelland & Stewart, pb, 265 pp, $19.99
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Because of André Alexis' publicity shot on the flap of his first novel, Childhood, I'm expecting someone a bit like the narrator, Thomas MacMillan--the kind of person who likes to make and keep schedules.