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Very
Good Butter
by John Lavery
ECW,
2000
Reviewed
by Michael Bryson
Very Good
Butter is a great name for a book (it is metaphoric, suggestive,
tasty), and Very Good Butter is worthy of its moniker.
This collection of short stories is the first book by John
Lavery,
a Quebecer with an international and varied education. He puts
both qualities to good use.
Butter - which
by itself is little more than fat - is what we add to food to
give it extra flavour, even to make it palatable. The image on
the cover of someone chomping on toast is a perfect example. Just
looking at that photograph is enough to make one salivate. Is
Lavery suggesting his stories add a little extra to life? Are
his tales about the spices that make existence palatable? Such
speculation is interesting, but not rewarding. Which is a little
like butter, too - it tastes good, but offers little nutritional
value.
The ten stories
that make up Lavery's strong first collection contain many first-book
joys and concerns. Lavery's voice is fresh. His stories are sprightly
and provocative. They do not settle for the easy conventions of
lost love, small town isolation, or urban alienation. For example,
one of the strongest stories - "The Premier's New Pajamas"
- follows the ordeal of one provincial premier's speech writer,
who assists his boss escape from student protesters by driving
the premier out of town to his mother's. Once there, the premier
lays on some heavy homoerotic innuendo and then disappears. The
strongest element of the story is its narrative voice, which moves
quickly and refuses to allow the reader to settle on any singular
narrative track for long - the instability of meaning being one
of Lavery's strongest themes.
The strength
of this theme, on the other hand, contributes to one of the concerns
about the book. Namely, it falls into a common first-book trap
- the one-note syndrome - as the stories strike a similar tone
again and again. But
this failure is more than forgivable, as Lavery has demonstrated
an original calling and vision, which if it borrows from anywhere,
it borrows from fabulists like Terry Southern or Italo Calvino
- who are part of a constellation in the literary universe Canadian
writers, and readers, could do worse than visit more often.
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