Lost Girls
by Andrew
Pyper
HarperFlamingo Canada, 1999.
Reviewed by Michael Bryson
Andrew Pyper's first novel follows his critically acclaimed short
story collection, Kiss Me (Porcupine's Quill, 1997). It has also
made him something of a literary tabloid star (at least within the nefarious
Canadian lit scene) after he snared a controversial agent who secured
him a six-figure two-book deal with U.S. and U.K. publishers.
And so, how is it? What do we conclude? Lost Girls is
a modest effort in the familiar first-novel kind
of way. Like, say, Martin
Amis's The Rachel Papers, Pyper's novel shows a young writer
of talent trying to work out a relationship to his craft. The protagonist,
for example, is straight from central casting. He's a young coke snorting
lawyer self-consciously without morals and eager to confess the sordid
details of his life. Yawn.
The plot mixes elements of Margaret
Atwood's back country and Robertson
Davies' ghost tales as Pyper's urbanite lawyer is banished to Northern
Ontario by his senior law partners to defend a nutty high school English
teacher (surely the only one!), who hears voices, collects girls' underwear
and is accused of murdering two teenaged girls who were in his class.
Lost Girls, in short, is a safe convention breaker. It is a convention
blender. There are more interesting things happening in Canadian
literature - indeed more interesting things happening in Ontario's cottage
country than the events described in this book. Placed beside the zombie infestation weirdness in Pontypool
Changes Everything by Tony Burgess, for example, Lost Girls
can only disappoint.
|
