by JULIET WATERS

"I’ve spent my entire life in the same neighbourhood of Montreal," writes McVie, the narrator of a set of interlocking short stories in Neale McDevitt’s first collection, One Day Even Trevi Will Crumble. "Officially it’s called Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, French for Our Lady of Grace, but most people refer to it as NDG. Some kids snicker that NDG stands for Naked Dancing Girls. Others say it’s for No Damn Good. All I know is that there is precious little grace to be found in these streets."

People who didn’t grow up in NDG in the ’70s and ’80s might find that statement extreme. Many people rave about this perfect inner city neighborhood: peaceful, middle class, safe and green. But for my generation it was a hard place to stay. If you were intent on remaining a middle-class anglo, you might as well be doing it in the city of middle-class anglos with their thriving careers: Toronto. If you weren’t intent on being a middle-class anglo then you moved east. The neighbourhoods were cheaper and more interesting and you wouldn’t have to face the friends and family who could never quite get why you weren’t with the program. By the ’90s, the only low-income people I knew who lived in NDG had moved there from the West Island, trying to escape their friends and family.

So McVie is a rare bird. A native NDG-er who has stubbornly remained in the stretch of Sherbrooke between West-Hill and Hampton - one of the demarcation lines between middle-class NDG and its working and non-working poor.

This would explain why a couple of McVie’s drinking acquaintances might play a guessing game as to who the hell he is. One bets he was "just another waste case, another lost soul." The other bets he’s "a poet from Argentina or an old boxing champ or a bank robber on the run." Unknown to his pals, and to any reader who doesn’t know NDG, McVie is living in a form of self-imposed exile. A down-and-out ex-pat living in same place he was born. There’s a lot of Bukowski and Miller in this collection of fragments, character sketches and anecdotes that add up to something that feels more like a novel than a collection of stories. McVie scraps his way out of the void with a lot of sex and almost as much booze. There may be precious little grace in these streets, but there’s a precious lot of talent in these pages. There would have to be for a story like "Honey-Tongued Hooker," a sort of Dunkin’ Donuts version of Lolita, to win the CBC-Quebec Writers’ Federation Short Story Competition. McDevitt has a way with a metaphor that is rivalled only by his character’s way with women. Sex opens people up like oysters "on a half shell." His world is a tapestry of "transient shadows" and "silk crapping" sons of bitches.

At the same time there’s something a little contrived about McVie. He’s obviously more than a "waste case," but he seems just as intent on avoiding introspection as adventure. He runs on a kind fossilized cynicism, relieved occasionally by nostalgia and sentimentality that’s endearing but not really sustaining. You want to know more about him, but he’s not telling. You’re forced to guess by putting a life together from things revealed by other male narrators in the second half of the collection, who are not McVie, but sound enough like him that they might as well be.

McDevitt is a former member of the Canadian weightlifting team and it shows. He reads people, especially women, through their body parts. Few male writers would get away with this, but he pulls it off. He also tends to pin each story down to the ground. This writing is either struggling, or not struggling enough, when it really needs to be dancing. :

One Day Even Trevi Will Crumble by Neale McDevitt, Exile Editions, pb, 167pp, $22.95