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To live and die in St-Lambert >> Debbie Howlett's dark and funny coming of age stories by JULIET WATERS
If you haven't read Marine Life, you should, now. And afterwards maybe you should think about writing to Svendsen at UBC and begging her to stop teaching. She's notoriously unprolific, and it seems a crime against nature that this woman waste her precious, brilliant talent on anything other than her own work. This said, at least Svendsen is producing students who seemed to have acquired some of her magic. Montrealer Debbie Howlett, who studied with her at UBC, has all the signs of having had the best of mentors. Howlett's stories about coming of age in St-Lambert, We Could Stay Here All Night, are confident, sophisticated, interesting and, above all, honest. Anyone who has read both Marine Life and Howlett's collection will have a hard time not drawing comparisons. Still, even if Howlett isn't working at the same level of brilliance, she doesn't suffer by the comparison. We Could Stay Here All Night doesn't have the attention to physical detail or the rich symbolic texture and stunning insight of Svendsen at her best. But Howlett's stories are still driven by a lucid, fearless vision and the same brutal truths and mysteries about sex and family that will resonate for some time with anyone who reads them. One won't find much to criticize about these sharp, darkly funny, linked stories. But my one harsh criticism is reserved for the cover. The second most clichéd cliché, after that saying about doers and teachers, is probably the one about not being able to judge a book by its cover. And in this case it holds true. This late '80s mocha brown bedroom with its brass bed and rough white linen is about as far away as one gets from 1970s South Shore--a world of yellow Ramblers, vinyl furniture and dayglo kitchens. And in the context of this cover, the title suggests a trite suburban nostalgia. Something entirely absent from Howlett's book. "We could stay here all night" is a line used by a teenage boy who is attempting to seduce Howlett's fucked-up heroine, Diane Wilkinson. He is the better-looking, more sophisticated, best friend of her boyfriend. The drunk couple are lying under the stairs on a mattress that smells like a bathroom, while his father beats up his mother and Diane's boyfriend waits for her outside in the car. It's one of those moments that could double as a scene from River's Edge; an example of the soullessness that often lurks at the margins of suburban settings. These characters could so easily be sucked into a depressing void, but what saves them is Howlett's grace, humour and compassion for the desperation that drives some people to become alcoholics, sluts and horrible parents. Diane's parents are less awful than others, but bad enough. There's her discontented, Cameo-chain-smoking mother--a Quebec champion synchronized swimmer who sacrificed glory to pregnancy. There's her extravagant, womanizing, drunk father--a failed television magician/host who lost his slot to Magic Tom. But interwoven throughout the tacky aura of failure that haunts this family, there is undeniably love. This is a wonderful first collection of stories. It doesn't change my belief that Linda Svendsen should teach less and write more. But they are evidence that she may still be as fine a teacher as she is a writer.
We Could Stay Here All Night by Debbie Howlett, Beach Holme Publishing, pb, 159pp, $16.95 |
It's one of the oldest clichés: "People who can, do; and people who can't, teach." But if there's one person who entirely disproves this statement, it would be short story master/creative writing teacher Linda Svendsen. Marine Life, her 1992 collection of linked short stories, was a coming of age masterpiece on a par with Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. In fact, when Munro reviewed the book, she wrote that it embodied "such terrific power that the last story left me shaking."