Spray Job: Stories
by Harold Hoefle
Black Bile Press, 2003
Reviewed by Lori Lavalee
Originally published in 2003, Spray Job is now in
its third, limited edition, printing. Consisting of four short stories,
including the title story, Hoefle writes from the varying perspectives
of a son jockeying for independence from his mother; an
itinerant-scholar-of-sorts, living with similarly unemployed men in a
Vancouver rooming-house; and a revolutionary worker-soldier assigned to
a coffee-picking brigade, along with an international volunteer.
The stories, Cutting, Czechs and Flaco Was Here
clearly demonstrate that Hoefle is a master of characterization. While
these selections are beautifully cultivated the final story, Spray
Job, is most improbable and uninspiring.
In this story the protagonist, Laszlo, is a grade-school teacher who,
for reasons unknown, is desperate to be recruited by the New Fenian
Army. On his initial visit to an Irish pub he is approached by two men
he believes to be operatives. Espousing the rhetoric he has learned from
books, the conversation progresses in a predicable and mundane manner.
They agree to meet the next day, at a doughnut shop, and eleven hours
later Laszlo is carrying out his first assignment. At one point the
narrator hints that this story might be the coming-of-age tale of a late
bloomer: "Touching the door handle, fingering the key, he paused.
He was leaving his mother’s world." Based on subsequent events,
however, the story instead reads more like a cautionary tale for young
readers.
Rather than deliberately presenting the protagonist as a blundering
fool, Czechs and Flaco, merely suggest that their
characters are "idiots," depending on one’s ideological
perspective. In Czechs, Anton has escaped communism only to exist
in a child-like state in a world, where for him, "everything is
upside down." He struggles to understand his Canadian friend:
"Harold, sometimes I am thinking about you like brother. You
are good guy. But there is problem. You are kind of Western Guy Lenin
called ’useful idiot.’"
Although born in a free country, Harold has chosen not to conform to
the expectations of a capitalist society and makes no apologies for
these circumstances.
In Flaco Was Here, Ernesto’s distaste for Walter, a gaunt,
skinny kid as his nickname, Flaco, implies, is evident. After learning
the "blue-eyed idiot" is in Nicaragua "‘[t]o show
support,’" he tells us: "I spit at his feet, which is the
nicest message my brain is flashing to my mouth. I want to strangle
him."
Living in close proximity to one another, it is both necessary and
impossible to patrol the boundaries of personal space. Affable and
perhaps somewhat naïve, Walter decides to visit with Ernesto during a
break:
Flaco sits beside me and smiles. Blood of Christ, I can feel myself
smiling back. What’s wrong with my face? Does it have its own brain?
Because I didn’t sleep, I’m so groggy I can’t even think.
As in the previous two stories, Hoefle provides readers with critical
cues about his characters and the subjects they observe, in the smallest
of actions and the briefest of thoughts. We learn, for example, that
Walter later earns Ernesto’s begrudging respect: "When I come to
get him at 5:30 he’s already standing on the veranda, in the dark, a
rifle slung over his back. He’s tall, I’ll give him that."
In his assessment of Flaco and his communications with him,
Ernesto’s character is palpably male. This quality is readily evident
in his body humour:
. . . every midnight he [Flaco] jumps out of his sleeping-bag and
runs from the compound into the grass. The soldiers imitate him, the
quack that starts the river out of his ass, then the way his butt
coughs – like a tree-frog or a sick machine-gun.
In Czechs, Harold has a somewhat more congenial relationship
with his comrades. Nonetheless their interactions with one another are
also characteristically male: He never asks for more than his friends
are willing to tell him. Rather than probing for further explanation, he
habitually says, "I see." What they do discuss in detail is
women and the changing dynamics between the sexes that, somehow, is part
of the immigrant experience. Like Flaco, this story is
distinguished by a brotherly kinship:
That night we stayed in the rectory with the grey-haired priest and
drank his beer as we swapped hitch-hiking stories. The priest had the
most and the best.
And as short as Cutting is, almost befitting the genre of a
postcard story, it too succeeds in conveying the intensity of human
emotion in a realistic and complex manner: The reader feels every nuance
of the strained, but loving relationship, between mother and son and is
sympathetic to both.
In stark contrast to these three selections the title story, Spray
Job, is invariably lacking in sophistication and overall appeal.
Judging by this publication, first-person narratives appear to be
Hoefle’s forte.
Writer, reviewer and
editor, Lori Lavalee is actively involved in the Writers’ Guild of
Alberta, the Editors’ Association of Canada (Prairie Provinces Branch)
and the Mudlark Writers Collective, Lethbridge AB. |
