Teenage wasteland

>> Sue Goyette fictionalizes the South Shore in Lures

by JULIET WATERS

Sue Goyette’s first novel, Lures, is set in the fictional suburb of Beaumont just after the first election of the PQ. It will confirm the suspicions of anyone who has ever sensed that there’s something a bit scary about the South Shore.

On the surface, Grace and Gary, a teenage brother and sister, aren’t too different from your average harmless delinquents. Numbing their anxiety with drugs, they watch blankly as their friends and neighbours move away. Grace gets her first job at the Crêmerie and Goyette captures perfectly the nauseating feeling of trying to fake one’s way through a menial job in a language one is barely competent in. But Grace has to keep the job because she owes Gary for the drugs he fronted her, and Gary owes even more money to a violent psycho named Ralph.

Sheila, Grace’s mother, is a depressed clean freak who covers the furniture in plastic. Her father Les is such a creepy loser, it would be funny if he weren’t so depraved. He labels everything in the house with his name, to discourage thieves. He demands quiet in the house while he tapes all his LPs with his new tape recorder. When he can’t get a piece of furniture through a door, he blames his wife for wanting a house with “nonstandard” doorways. He hangs around a lot near elementary schools.

Grace’s friend Lilly offers her some sense of refuge, though it becomes increasingly clear that Lilly’s family is far from normal. Lilly’s brother Jerry has dropped out of high school, left the house and lives in the woods. He is known throughout the community as Rave. Her father, Stan, is a rage-a-holic, now filled with remorse for having driven Jerry out. Her mother, Eliza, has psychologically divorced Stan. She spends her days drawing, leaving Stan to tend to the kids and housework. Curtis, the youngest son, is an intelligent, sensitive young kid with only one bad problem: there’s this guy hanging around his elementary school.

Lures could have been written by Joyce Carol Oates, if Oates were a little more hopeful. But Goyette, who was in town last week (she now lives just outside Halifax), is the opposite of what one would expect from this bleak, discomforting novel. Gregarious and funny, she has fond memories of growing up in St-Bruno, most of which involve being bad.

“Everything in the South Shore is just so well maintained, the lawns are so well manicured and everything is so well done that if you are a teenager, you just want to shake the shit out of it. I remember being hauled up to the police station because we’d taken all these flower things and just dumped them into the lake because we were drunk and we thought they were too pretty. There’s just something about that place that brings out that [she makes a demon growl] in you.”

She remembers it as a predictable, ritualized life—flocking to the arena, or the mall. “We’d always know who was going out with the guys who were doing B&Es by the jewellery they had.” On Wednesday nights “The Labatt truck would park outside Chez Nancy. We’d go and steal a case of quarts and sit in the fields. But it’s interesting what also came out. There was this guy who would go into Les Promenades St-Bruno and steal poetry books, like The Collected Sylvia Plath. A bunch of us were reading Richard Bach, and we thought we could change the world.” This led to many bad, stoned poems about infinity. But also, eventually, to a nomination for a Governor General’s Award for her first book of poetry, The True Names of Birds.

Whatever impression one has of the South Shore as a cultural wasteland, obviously someone’s still reading poetry. “After True Names came out, I would get e-mails from people that would go, ‘Remember me? We went to high school. I think we necked to ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”:

Lures by Sue Goyette, Harper Flamingo, hc, 292pp, $32