The first thing I thought when I read the blurb for this book was “zomg it’s like Six Feet Under but in real life!” And, like most of my ‘zomg’ reactions (which I’m working on culling, I swear), it was a complete over-generalisation. There are two commonalities: It’s about the life of an undertaker, and it’s filled with borderline inappropriate black humour. Also, Canadian multimedia journalist and author Tom Jokinen wasn’t born into the business, as seems to be the trend for many traditional funeral homes. Rather, he decided to take a year off work to try his hand at an undertaker apprenticeship. So yes, actually quite different from that television show.

Under the guidance of funeral home owner Neil Bardal and the rest of the staff, Tom learns how to embalm a body, how to roll out a stretcher without dropping the body (or rather, how not to roll them out), and how to comfort grieving families while maintaining a safe, professional distance.

It’s not so much what Tom learns in practical terms. The thing that kept me reading was the way he processes it all along the way. Besides, can you really learn, in less than a year, how to maintain that delicate balance of tact and compassion for complete strangers? (I think I’d have more trouble with that than the embalming, to be honest.)

This memoir could have been a completely internal, personal story about one man facing his fears/questions/etc. about death, without any great significance to Joe Reader. But Curtains becomes more than a memoir. It becomes a response to sociological and philosophical commentary on the ritual of death in the western world, in particular, Jessica Mitford’s controversial 1963 book, The American Way of Death.

It also is an “insider’s” (well, he was only there for one year) investigation into the massive funeral trade, which is of course full of debates such as the pros and cons of cremation, pre-needs services (which probably means exactly what you think it means) and funeral trade shows in Vegas. Plus, of course, juicy economic tidbits for conspiracy theorists and their ilk.

But most interestingly, it’s an examination of the spirituality that is entrenched in saying goodbye to our loved ones.

“There’s enough latent Catholic in me to feel guilty about not being Catholic enough to know what it is…There’s a lesson for goyim in the hard-core Jewish ritual and it has something to do with community. In my world it’s possible to lose someone, spend two days in the embrace of family and friends and then wake up alone, staring at an empty crusted scalloped potato dish, with no clue what to do next. The Jews have a schedule you can pin to the fridge, and when you go to the synagogue people wouldn’t even know will sit with you and say Kaddish.” (p181)

The book moves slowly away from cadavers and funeral makeup and towards those big scary questions about the meaning of death and the structure and comfort that ritual and religion provide for the bereaved.

Curtains takes an honest, albeit strangely humorous look, at the ideal western funeral, and all its derivatives. For me, it was a chance to allow myself to think about one of those aspects of life I’ve never allowed myself to give much thought to (even when I’ve needed to). In his mid-forties, Jokinen is at that age when funeral companies, and life insurance companies, are putting the pressure on to plan for the future (*cue ominous music*). I’m in my early twenties, and like most people in my generation, I believe I’m invincible. Death has never really frightened me. But it’s something we all think about. And Curtains isn’t quite the level of humour of say, Six Feet Under, but it’s enough to be funny when it’s almost too wrong, and sombre, when the funny just won’t cut it.

Reading this, I wanted more. But that’s the problem with writing about funerals, and rituals for the dead. It’s a conversation that can last forever.

By the by, if you’re thinking of buying this (or, you know, any of the other books I’ve reviewed), can I suggest waiting until Wednesday? 1st September is Indigenous Literacy Day, where participating booksellers and publishers will donate at least 5 per cent of takings towards the Indigenous Literacy Project. The profits will go towards improving literacy levels for indigenous kids in remote Australia. So save your book shopping for Wednesday. Check out their website for more info, as well as photos from the fundraiser last week, where children’s illustrators donated their artworks, and Shaun Tan mixed his universes and pasteled up a gorgeous reading themed drawing live on stage for us.

This panel session was destined to be made entirely of win. Illustrator Shaun Tan, of The Arrival and The Lost Thing fame (not to mention a plethora of picture books), Eddie Campbell, best known for illustrating the graphic novel From Hell with Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman, who probably needs no introduction (although here comes the obligatory mention of his famous Sandman comics… Oh, there it went).

The topic of discussion was the enigma that is the evolution of an idea. Given that the works of these panellists in particular have been adapted into new media, and given that they’ve all worked on various collaborative projects, the discussion very much revolved around the challenges and advantages of such creative developments.

And while the ideas that came out of the discussion were insightful and clever, mostly, the audience was treated to some delightful anecdotes.

Gaiman brought up one my favourite recurring panel topics, the enormous influence of writers, films and music on a person during their most formative years. While I’ve always been a firm believer of this, Gaiman actually put an age limit on it, almost declaring that this formative age expires at 20 years old.

Mr Gaiman, if that is true, I’d be very sad, because I’ve discovered and devoured many, many new writers, films and musicians in the nearly 2 years since I turned 20, including you, and I’d hate to think they were any less influential on me.

In fact, when I was doing some workshopping with the Inspire group last year, we were told the ‘Identity-forming’ stage was considered to be 18-24, or something like that. I’m still trying to figure out who I am, and I think to put an age on something like that is a little short-sighted. Some people’s “formative years” stretch longer than others. But I digress.

Shaun Tan also raised a really intriguing aim of storytelling, to create an absurd new world, a la Dr. Suess, and convince the reader to abandon all reason and jump into the author’s universe. What a relief that his mother reading Animal Farm to him and his brother when they were children didn’t emotionally scar him.

Eddie Campbell mostly shared stories that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the panel discussion. To me, he is the king of comically awkward pauses and that foot-in-mouth disorder specific to panels.

It was far too short, and clear that the guests could have probably talked for a good couple more hours. The questions avoided stupidity, to my great relief, and there was never a dull moment.

The best part about this panel was that I was only vaguely familiar with the artists’ works, but these insights into their minds will hopefully shape my reading experience for the better.

Also, it turns out Gaiman is an expert in obscure Edwardian literature. Tre cool, no?

It occurred to me, as I took my seat along with the other 24 or so members of the audience at Sydney Theatre Company on Saturday night, that I know next to nothing about the woman who brought me one of my life-long favourite novels, or her sister, who gifted me with a story that saw me enraptured (and glued to my hammock an entire day). Being as unburdened with preconceptions of the Bront? sisters as I was, watching this play presented a rare opportunity to sit back, absorb and enjoy, without the whirring machinist fact-checking that my brain tends to do in the far chambers of my mind during biopic-esque plays and re-imaginings.

The play, written by Polly Teale and directed by Paige Rattray, doesn’t feature the other two Bront? sisters, Mary and Elizabeth (presumably because they died before they had the chance to write their own grand novels). It explores the bleak, dim life that the girls shared, their resulting resolve to  make it (life) work, which of course included getting their writing published, and also attempts to examine the influences that came into play in their respective novels.

Anne (played by Ashley Richardson) remained a bit of a background character: peacekeeper, quiet. She didn’t possess the sound leadership of Charlotte (Jennifer Williams), the romantic escapist ideas of Emily, or the heartbreakingly self-destructive drinking habits of their brother Branwell (Kipan Rothbury). Richardson’s portrayal of her did not allow the audience to forget her, though. Of the three sisters, she is the most grounded and present.

I found Charlotte to be everything I remembered about Jane Eyre. She is cripplingly insecure about her short straw in the looks department, much like the plain governess herself, and once again, I found myself drawn to the unattractive woman. (Not the actress, the character!) Maybe because that’s one insecurity I find uncomfortably close to home.

Emily (Laura Francis) was dreamy-eyed, with a far-off gaze that evoked the same dark, misty moors of Wuthering Heights. While Charlotte insists that writing is the only way to make sense of our existence in this world, even suggesting that words in fact turn our existence into something solid and tangible, Emily reveals that writing is only ever an escape for her: a way out of her dreary life. Of the three, she seems to love Branwell the best, and is the most affected when he meets his inevitable demise.

There is a fourth female in the play. She exists as the forming characters, first as ever divisive heroine Cathy, then later as mad Bertha Mason (played by Elizabeth Heaney). Interestingly, Teale had previously written a play called After Mr Rochester, in which Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, tells her story through her alter-ego, Bertha.

The play, while predominantly linear, is interspersed with various scenes as each author writes them:  A disturbing scene between Helen Graham and her alcoholic husband, from Anne Bront?’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Cathy’s death; Mr Rochester’s (Cooper George Amai) revelation to Jane about his wife, and their reconciliation: he, a hideous and deformed man, she a woman who has returned to where she belongs (but not in the ‘a woman’s place is with her man’ sense).

Despite the talented actors, the intimate mood (they even provided wooly blankets on the seats for us) and thoughtful script, I have to say that my favourite aspect of this play was the array of books. Books! Hundreds of them. They formed props, becoming stepping stones, newspaper reviews, letters, furniture to be knocked down. Conversations were had over them as they were picked up, and heated arguments were had over them as they were throw onto the ground.

I went with a friend who has never read, nor is familiar with, any of the Brontes or their novels, but she seemed to enjoy it well enough. But for those who enjoyed any of the novels, it offers you the chance to see parts of the cherished stories replayed, and it offers you the chance to take everything you knew about the sad little Bronte family and mull, chew and ponder over it all. In other words, if you allow it, Bronte will feed right into all your Victorian era fantasies, the ones you had as well as the ones you didn’t know you had.

So basically, if you’re in Sydney, get your butt down to the Wharf Studio down at Sydney Theatre Company and watch yourself some cool young people theatre, female literary heroine style (and I say young people theatre literally. ATYP stands for Australian Theatre for Young People). It’s running until the 7th August and all the nitty gritty details are over at their website: http://www.brontetheplay.com/ Me? I’m going to go by myself some Anne Bronte novels and catch up on what I’ve missed.

Do eeeeeeeet.

I couldn't find a pic of the book but this is the author.

So the inside jacket blurb of this book describes the narrator as “a pitiless gormandizer” and says that “at one level Memoirs of an Old Bastard is a Rabelaisian satire of a New World city…”

Now how the hell could I possibly improve on this summary? I’m not even going to try.

The ‘New World city’ referred to is Melbourne, but this is not the Melbourne we are used to reading about. It’s twisted, and gothic, and filled to the brim with ridiculous-yet-not-entirely-inaccurate caricatures of the city’s cultural elite. There are flaring tempers, the physical ramifications of said flaring tempers, characters who wear a pince-nez, a nurse who goes by the nickname Booze Bus, and truly awful poets. Threading through the narrative are fragments of a letter from the millionaire narrator to his lost mystery daughter.  It could be sweet if it weren’t for the fleeting references to Nabokov and waifs. It’s not as wrong as it sounds. But then, it is.

Literary name puns and overbearing satire aside, Hibberd’s novel is sharply funny. One has the impression, when wading through the elaborately adorned sentences, that the author intentionally wanted to sound as wanky as humanely possible. You could get annoyed by this, or you could sit back, pause, and just revel in the utter, utter absurdity of it all. What better way to take the piss out of the cultural capital of Australia than to truly embody the aspects of it that you’re targeting?

Hibberd is an Australian playwright whose work I was unfamiliar with, being the theatre noob that I am (plays include the Brain Rot series [1967-68], Dimboola [1969], and The Les Darcy Show [1974] to name a few). While I’m not going to be tearing down the mountainous stacks of books at Gould’s Second-hand Bookshop to find the sequels to Memoirs (The Life of Riley and Perdita), this man is one serious Australian theatre veteran so his plays are on my TBR list.

Giramondo Publishing

2007

The relationship between parent and child has driven many pens to paper, and the results waver greatly from mediocre to masterful. The same could be said about Holocaust stories, or stories of love, loss, grief, and memory.

Mireille Juchau’s second novel, Burning In, deals with all of these themes, keeping their inherently tragic beauty intact. In Burning In, Martine, Australian photographer of German descent, leaves behind Australia, and her mother, Lotte, and heads to New York.

Now this is where writing this review gets hard. Because just thinking back to the book is making me sad again. Martine has had a daughter, after living in New York nearly a decade, and her daughter goes missing in Central Park. But the book is exquisitely sad even before that event takes place. Martine’s strained relationship with her worried mother leaves the reader sympathising equally with each character: the complexities of Lotte’s dark past and the fears that are borne of this, and the yearning that a young, seemingly capable woman has to spread her wings, having never experienced the same displacement or family separation as her parent. Juchau’s characterisation of Martine, detached and numb as it is, only heightens the emotional depth of situation.

Martine enters the kitchen, holds up a can of coffee, in the other hand, tea, raises an eyebrow. Her silence makes the place austere, turns them reverential. Lusk nods his head at coffee, Joanie points feebly at tea. They’re waiting now, for her to set the tone. She lights the cigarette, watches Joanie’s quiet surprise. And doesn’t know anymore which part of what she does is performance, which part’s real. Grief is a floating world, though nothing about it is gentle. (p183)

Juchau’s writing, to me, seems like it’s bursting with literary juices. Each sentence drips with intricately set up scenes, and nuanced character descriptions. Something in the words feels like the same black and white photos Martine carries with her when she embarks on the next part of her journey, tracing her family back to Berlin. Despite the impossibly sad tones that are present throughout, there is also a playfulness that emerges in strange moments, when Martine interacts with her mother, and in the way she observes her friends’ reactions to her delicate psychological state.

This is a literary novel. The plot is in there somewhere, but it doesn’t drive the story. And there is enough of it for you to find yourself absorbed in the mood and the characters, and all of a sudden find that Martine’s story has travelled quite far without you noticing. I happen to love stories that do this. Not everybody does.

I wish I could tell you the Sydney harvest launch at Berkelouw’s Newtown was a fantastic affair. All I can tell you is that the last five minutes of Ryan O’Neill’s reading from his fiction piece “The Eunuch in the Harem” was pretty damn funny. Which I already knew, because I scored my copy of Issue Five earlier in the week (seriously, my nostrils, meaning the inside of my nose, were stained with coffee as a result of reading O’Neill’s story). All I can tell you is that people were lining up to have editor Davina Bell sign their pretty-like-a-patchwork-quilt copy of harvest after the formalities had come to a close. All I can tell you is that, arriving late due to an unprecedented gridlock that gripped the CBD and an ignorant decision to choose bus as my mode of transport, I stood out in the freezing doorway, looking in on toasty warm launch-groupies and literary enthusiasts as they enjoyed frivolous festivities.

So that was Sydney launch.

harvest issue five opens with an article by Davina Bell urging her “precious snowflakes” (baby writers) to disregard Ted Genoway’s article in Mother Jones, which instructs said baby writers to “swear off navel-gazing”. Davina’s article essentially defends the younger generation of writers, who have not experienced world-shaking events to shake up their/(our?*) lives and world views.

Curiously, about halfway through, we come to Dan Bigna’s reader’s guide to writing like Charles Bukowski, who happens to be an author I quite admire. I say curiously, because Bigna’s piece points out Bukowski’s remarkable similarity to his Post Office protagonist Henry Chinaski, on account of Bukowski’s soul destroying stint as a mailroom clerk. “Bukowski shows us that artistic expression can transcend the dullness of a constricted life, and give hope to the rest of us who might find ourselves in the same kinds of situation as the embattled Henry Chinaski.” Navel-gazing much? Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Mr. Genoway!

These two pieces in particular, along with Anthony Levin’s deconstruction of a poem, form the corner posts of this issue which suggest to me that harvest is no longer just a hip literary magazine with freshly plucked talent and pretty pages and fun household games such as “Literopoly”, but is growing into a medium through which relevant discussion about the culture of the written wor(l)d. In this case, the inward-gazing, self-reflective prose of young writers that seems to have formed generational gaps in the writing community, if Genoway’s article is to be taken as absolute truth.

Chris Flynn closes issue five with “Rethinking the Australian Literary Identity”. While it’s a highly topical subject (i.e. writing locally for a global readership and diminishing significance of determining a national literary identity), I found nothing groundbreaking in Flynn’s commentary and will say no more on the matter (because harvest have encouraged responses to this piece, and I’ma save a more articulate version of my thoughts for that).

(*I don’t know if I count as a baby writer. Embryonic, more like.)

The jaded, unnamed narrator, dumped by his beautiful, Japanese lover, screws up his story about an ice-cold sombrero into a ball of paper and throws it in the bin at the beginning of Richard Brautigan’s 1976 novel, “Sombrero Fallout”. While he pines pathetically over a single lost strand of her hair, we, the readers, travel through the room and towards the wastepaper basket, over to the printed, screwed up ball, where we learn that this mysterious sombrero has fallen from the sky, at minus 24 degrees, and somehow results in a town going mad. I mean really mad. The townspeople start wailing on each other. First with fists, then with knives, then with live ammunition. They eventually overrun the town police. And the sombrero sits innocently on the pavement, ignored by all.

Meanwhile, the narrator, evidently a writer (so of course emotionally unstable and quite insecure), reminisces the history of what he deems his great love affair. He recalls their first act of love, the stunning first impression she made on him, disclosing that she’d read all his books but (kindly) refusing to ever speak to him about them, and of course, her curtain of straight black hair. He trawls through his phonebook and imagines imperfect scenarios, and doesn’t give the sombrero, or the angry mob, a second thought.

And while he does all this, his Japanese lover sleeps. She sleeps because it’s the only place she can see her suicidal father’s grave again, and the only place where everything is right in her world.

And while she sleeps, and he pines, and the townspeople riot, I feel my heart, piece by piece, giving itself wholly and unreservedly to Brautigan’s strange and alluring prose. Its effortless comedy, as displayed through the town librarian whose ears are shot off, and its careful melancholy tone, as the Japanese woman remembers the suicide of her father when she was still a girl, are woven together impeccably.

But the narrator and protagonist, our dumped writer (ironically a famous American humourist), is pathetic. Enigmatic, complex, but ultimately, pathetic. His mind wanders often and he processes his thoughts obtusely.

Sometimes he talked to himself a lot and he was talking to himself about the absence of eggs in his apartment.

“Where are those eggs?” he said to himself. “They must be here somewhere,” and all the time knowing that there were no eggs in the kitchen.

He was just starting to think about looking for them in other rooms, perhaps the bedroom, when a lightning bolt of despair suddenly fried his brain into thousands of pieces of dancing bacon. He remembered his love for the Japanese woman.” p95

Well, I guess he had only been dumped that very evening. So perhaps I’m being a hardarse.

Have you ever finished reading a book and immediately felt the bottom of your stomach drop upon turning the final page? It’s not simply a case of being sad from reaching the end of a story, but more of a need to dive back into that world, and to make sure everything will still be alright.

I blame Charley. Charley Thompson did this to me. He’s fifteen, alone, and has taken a job helping the grumpyfuck Del look after his racehorses down at the track. If a person could read this book without their heart breaking for Charley, I would be surprised. And slightly suspicious. Charley and one of Del’s horses, Lean on Pete, form a beautiful friendship that results in a trans-American escape. You know how I said Charley was alone? There’s one exception, his aunty, who was told to piss off by Charley’s father. And she’s the only person in the world that Charley’s placed hope in. So Charley and Lean on Pete are off to find her.

Sometimes when you’ve been reading too much Bronte or Proust, you can sort of get caught up in the literary fanciful goodies that great writing can contain. Vlautin’s writing sort of brings you crashing back to reality. There’s something incredibly raw about his writing, completely devoid of bullshit. Charley narrates honestly. He finds himself in all sorts of scrapes, forced to shoplift band-aids for his injury, siphoning petrol from other cars with his mouth, to fuel his stolen truck, you get the idea.

Charley runs. He hides. He cries. He’s the most real fifteen-year-old boy I’ve known, and through the hopeless situations he finds himself in, he never gives up.

Vlautin’s no-bullshit, straight, clean prose echoes Charley’s loneliness. The one-sided conversations Charley has with Pete leave him exposed and vulnerable, and well, they made me want to reach into the pages and grab him and hug him and tell him everything was going to be alright.

As Richard Fidler brought up in an interview with Vlautin at the Sydney Writers’ Fest, there is something very Huckleberry Finn about “Lean On Pete”, and to me, something wholly American about it. When I say American, I refer to the themes I’ve commonly found in American contemporary fiction: the rough journey, that physical and emotional rollercoaster that sees the protagonist fall, and then rise, and then fall again, where the reward at the end is comfort, or security, or family. It’s impossibly sad, yet at his lowest moments, Charley continues his narration in a matter-of-fact voice. His drive, and ability to retain an essence of childhood despite the trials of his journey, keep a sense of hope alive throughout the book.

There are times when it’s difficult to fathom the absence of any caring adult in Charley’s life. And he has a tendency to make the frustratingly wrong choice. But this is, again, the raw human element that Charley possesses (as does Vlautin’s writing).

I’m almost afraid to read his other novels. What if they’re not nearly as involving and hugable as this one?

A girl who has lost control of her tear ducts. A young boy driven to canicide by his mother. A suspect teacher-student friendship. Post-September 11, Washington DC. Off-colour Holocaust jokes and Asshole (the game) and Russian scientists. I could just keep on naming all these random elements of Emmett Stinson’s short stories but, well, that would be a pretty shit way to review such a short story collection. Amusing, perhaps, but shit.

[Also, just an aside, I did a very broad sweep of Googledom to gauge other people's reactions and possibly respond to. What I found was Stinson's own blog post, where he read and reviewed Irma Gold's review of his book for Overland's blog. That's confusing right? Authors reviewing reviews of their book? One sec, I'm dizzy.

But really, this should be done more. It might put us reviewers on their toes a bit more if we were faced with the undeniable fact that authors do actually read reviews of their books (especially the ones who vehemently deny that they do).]

I’m not particularly well read in Stinson’s writing, apart from having come across one of the “Known Unknowns” short stories (Clinching) previously in Issue 1 of “Kill Your Darlings”, and just yesterday reading his impressively numerical dissection of the digital book piracy market in the latest Overland journal. So for the most part I went into this without knowing what to expect.

To simply sweep over these stories as “Washington circa post-September 11″ stories would not be sufficient. Stinston’s stories are filled with dark humour and odd characters, some of whom reappear throughout. And a dead dog. Fourteen short stories make up “Known Unknowns”. The uncertainty of the people of America, and larger global shift that occurred in September 11’s aftermath, provide only a faint backdrop to the stories in here. Stories which stand independently and become almost beacons of the short story genre, a genre that is never appreciated enough in the reading community.

In one of the longer stories, Local Knowledge, a history teacher attempts to make sense of the moment his life broke into pieces. He reflects on the nobility he sees in teaching high schoolers American history, and has been injected with just the right balance of clever hindsight and denial to make him a breeze to sympathise with. Dry, written in the second person, was surprisingly not a pain in the arse to read. Every creative writing class tutor I’ve had has sternly informed us that stories in the second person are a crime against nature: It forces the circle reader into a square cutout of a character. It manipulates the reading experience. So what is it about Dry that makes it not suck? I have a theory, and it’s the details. You, the reader, find yourself in a bar, where “you open the door and feel briefly the chill of the air conditioning, which is good compared to the swampy humidity outside that makes your entire body feel clammy.” You had your first drink in five months because “you needed a beer. It was no question.” The incredible detail of your Mt Pleasant apartment, thumping ceilings (landlord’s kids) and all, shifts the focus. You’re no longer feeling like you’ve been sucked into the permanent, printed world (word) of the author, because you’re distracted by the detail.

My two standouts were The Sound of Fury and Visions.

Sound of Fury examines the somewhat disastrous combination of single parenthood and pop psychology. A mother who frets that her son never does anything naughty, unwittingly provides an army of inappropriate substitute role models for him.

Deprived of my father, my surrogates were Oprah, Maya Angelou, DeepaK Chopra, M Scott Peck and Della Reese — whatever faceless daytime-television authority the masses absorbed between ritual offerings of One Life to Live and Days of Our Lives. I was raised in an Orwellian nightmare of gooey self-esteem-boosting doublespeak. (p132)

In Visions, Celia’s childhood talent for turning her tears on and off on demand backfires later in life. She cries all the time. Tears run “down her cheeks in a faucet’s steady grip.” This story contains some of the best phrases, and contains a James Dean love affair. My prehistoric early readers and those who know me best may recall that I, too, suffer from a debilitating obsession with the man with the fast cars and the red leather jacket. And the connection of Jimmy Dean combined with the fantasy love affair is a PERFECTLY VALID reason to cite for loving Visions.

But seriously, hot dead actors aside, Visions had me from its first page:

At five, though, she learned how to open her tear ducts and coat her face in a red flush. Eyes blossomed into open sores. The lips unfurled in a perfect pantomime of spasm. (p155)

I mean, how many of us dreamed of being able to “extort our family with weeping”? Well, not me. *cough*

Okay I’m going off on tangent after tangent. One last thing. Each story has its own particular voice: almost alternating between sombre and irreverent, dark and just plain funny. Stinson writes as a history teacher who smells of failure, and then turns around and writes as a hyperchondriac brother about to do the unthinkable. And that’s a rare thing for a short story collection, I think.

Having not read a YA book since I was about 13, I’m not exactly an expert in the genre. So it’s with complete lack of authority that I tell you Richard Van Camp’s first novel is unlike any book I have ever read in the genre of young adult fiction.

Teenager Larry, like the author, comes for a tiny town in the northwest of Canada, and is a member of the indigenous Dogrib people. Larry’s a strange little kid. A mixture of teenage no-goodnick boy troublemaking, and ancient Dogrib wisdom passed on through the generations to him, through his own mother’s teachings.

“I stopped in the porch and took off my shoes. ‘Pussy,’ Johnny scoffed, ‘taking off your shoes at a house party. What a putz.’ He dropped his jacket on the floor on top of a small shelf that held books. I hissed and hung it up. My mom never allowed anyone in our house to drop a jacket or hat. If you do and a woman steps over your clothes, that’s it. You’re done for: bad luck and you’ll never catch a moose. I hung it up for him and carefully hung mine up too. Like I said, I’m Dogrib, I gotta watch it.” (p32)

Larry befriends Johnny, a classmate with a useless mother and a younger brother who Johnny pretty much parents. Their friendship introduces Larry to that dark, hidden world of teenagers, the one nobody ever seems to want to write about. The one where it’s not just the baddies, but also our protagonist that takes drugs, gets into punch-ups (or worse), ends up sleeping with the knocked up girlfriend of their best friend, and well, pushing the boundaries that need to be pushed. Despite it all, though, Larry maintains a sort of innocence. With an absent father, he attaches his love, and a desperate-ish hope to Jed, his mother’s off-again-on-again boyfriend which is completely sweet and pathetic (though, for once, the stepdad character is a genuine good guy).

Larry is a perfectly biased, yet completely truthful narrator. Truthful to his situation, upbringing and personality. Given that he’s not a boy of many words, it’s the reader’s privilege to share in the inner workings of Larry’s mind. And it works, even when he does something stupid, with no plausible rationale.

At a panel session at Sydney Writers’ Festival, Richard Van Camp told the audience about his hometown, Fort Smith: a somewhat obscure town where gossip is the main currency. A town where he had to actually reinforce the fiction aspect of his book to fellow Fort Smithians, lest they mistake characters from the story for real life people. (You’re probably thinking…’surreeee, fiction…. but the guy said this with authority. I believed him, in any case). But the heavy gossiping is something that plays a pivotal role in “The Lesser Blessed”, and without giving too much away, is a reminder of the cruelty of small town life rules.

The Lesser Blessed is full of stories within stories, and is a vigourous head-nod to Van Camp’s own upbringing. The creation story of the Dogrib people is gorgeously sad, which I will roughly paraphrase. There was this woman, who gave birth to six puppies. She kept them in a sack when they slept, and would go away to find food, and all that. She started to notice footprints in the ground near them when she got back. One day she left them, and hid in the trees. She could hear them yapping. And then suddenly she could hear whispers, and human noises. They broke free, and were humans. She saw her six babies break out and start running around, playing with each other. This is what they had been doing whenever she left. She ran towards them, bursting with love, but they saw her and freaked out, mistaking her excitement for anger. She reached out to grab them as they began to change back into their dog forms, but only managed to hold on to three. The other three turned back into dogs. The three that remained human were the first of the Dogrib people.

The book is incredibly short, at 120 pages, and only simple to digest if you read without thinking. But to do that would be to miss the subtle humour and cleverness that is somewhat hidden beneath the story of Larry and his friend Johnny. Richard Van Camp is a brilliant storyteller in person, and his book loses out some of his enthusiastic delivery. It’s understated. But, it turns out, “The Lesser Blessed” isn’t so bad after all, for a YA.