Close to Spider Man
by Ivan E. Coyote
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000
Reviewed by Nathan Whitlock
There are times
when reviewing books makes me feel like a boorish lout, making all the
kids at a birthday party cry by criticizing the hired clown's timing.
If someone writes turgid schmaltz, with heavy vaseline on the lens then,
fine, time to carve the roast beast. It's when confronted with a book
like Close to Spider Man, which seems to have its heart in the
right place (i.e. not in the title, with other wax fruit like Desire and
Grace), that I feel like a heel for not
joining the party.
Close to Spider Man is Vancouver-writer Ivan E.
Coyote's first book
of short stories. It is a series of 13 first-person narratives which,
together, provide the history of the narrator's coming-of-age in the
Yukon in the late seventies and eighties; first as an awkward,
adolescent tomboy, then as a cocky, but no less awkward, lesbian. The
stories are clearly autobiographical, and written with disarming
directness.
Coyote strives to make her experiences feel universal , and
the difficulties she faces growing up seem to be pretty much the default set faced by any sensitive youth
- a family, a neighbourhood, a
town, a society that simply doesn't understand. That she is gay in a
conservative environment alters the specific make-up of her
difficulties, but the breeziness of her voice makes it so that the her
emerging dykeness appears no more painful than, say, acne.
My hand was touching her hand, ever so casually and
accidental-like, and I think maybe I wanted to touch her but I really
didn¹t know it yet, so luckily she interrupted my latent tendencies to
read part of an article aloud to me: "Says here that one of women's top sexual fantasies is to make love with
une autre femme.
Uughh. Speak for yourself, huh?" I immediately moved my hand away
from hers to sip my French latté and changed the subject. "So . .
. you wanna go swimming tomorrow?" - from the title story
Each story gives a brief glimpse into a pivotal stage
of her development, then sums up with a wry, rhetorical punchline
("Girls, we can be so complicated."). After six or seven of
these bite-sized vignettes, a question began to form itself somewhere
in the more cynical regions of my subconscious. At about the book's
three-quarter mark, I was beginning to have difficulty shrugging this
question away - it would even insert itself as a ghostly, italicized
conclusion to each story. Finally, the book finished, I gave in, nearly
saying aloud what had been bothering me all along: Is that it?
I
have no problem with books that can be read in an hour (Close to
Spider Man clocks in at just under one hundred pages), nor do I feel
reflexive contempt for any new work of fiction that does not make an
implicit attempt to overthrow the Western literary canon, the
bourgeoisie, society, etc. - Nicholson Bake's The Mezzanine
(1988) is as slim and gentle as a Q-tip, yet it is firmly entrenched
near the front of my own mental canon. I tried very hard to be let
myself be charmed by Coyote's tales of BMX races, sexual confusion,
swimming lessons, sexual confusion, babysitting, sexual confusion, road
trips and the like.
It was one of those little girl bikinis, a two-piece,
I guess you would call it. The top part fit like a tight cut-off
t-shirt, red with blue squares on it, the bottoms were longer than
panties but shorter than shorts , blue with red squares. I had tried it
on the night before when my mom got home from work and found that if I
raised both my arms completely above my head too quickly, the top would
slide over my flat chest and people could see my . . . you-know-whats. -
from "No Bikini"
The problem is not so much the brevity of the stories,
but their delivery. With the odd exception (the recipe woven into a
story about her parents' divorce; or this throwaway intro: "The
fabric of this memory is faded, its edges frayed by time."), Coyote
smartly avoids lining her prose with the frills of CanLit "pretty
talk". The chatty, unpretentious tone with which she delivers each
story is central to her book's charm, but it also highlights its
greatest weakness. These are anecdotes, and anecdotes rarely contain the
sort of beneath-the-surface complexity that animates great short fiction
- even fiction posing as mere anecdote. Anecdotes smooth over
complexity and provide only as much meaning as the teller is willing to
impart.
Subsequent readings do not reveal previously-concealed depths. I
ended up feeling like Coyote's pal ‹ familiar enough to be trusted
with some awkward memories, but never given a peek at anything truly
unsettling; no real high or lows. It's all harmless flirtation. Again,
this is not to say that Coyote needs to start lacing her stories with
deep-sounding references to TIME, and MEMORY, and LOSS - she has an
excellent sense of timing and pace, and needs no false props.
She does,
however, need to figure out how to animate her stories, give them a life
of their own, without sacrificing the charm of her voice. A story should
exist as something discreet form its teller - a living, breathing
organism with its own values and intentions. Each of these stories gets
cut off at exactly the moment when the characters and situations begin
to breathe, so that the book ultimately feels like a collection of
excerpts from a novel. Despite being thoroughly readable, focused -
downright friendly - Close to Spider Man does not satisfy. And
I feel like a prick about that.
Nathan Whitlock's short fiction
won the TWUC 2000 Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers and was
short-listed in THIS Magazine's "Great Canadian Literary Hunt"
2000. He lives in Toronto. (nathan_whitlock@hotmail.com) |
