Reviewed by Paul Duder

Early on in Stan Rogal’s novel As Good as Dead, Victor Stone (whose stats--Torontonian, ex-Vancouverite, poet, middle-aged--mark him as a Rogal stand-in) shares a beery meal with the head of his (presumably Pedlar Press-ish) indie publisher. For all the usual reasons (greater sales potential, visibility), Stone is urged to put the poetry aside and turn his hand to a novel; for all the usual reasons (integrity, laziness), Stone resists. Still, after some brave/unwise dumping on Can Lit and the bourgeois proclivities of the philistines at the granting bodies--did you know they require a novel to be at least 135 pages, ha ha ha--a weakened Stone is suborned, and so begins our lightly-meta traipse through Hollywood, big business, the creative life, and all their various discontents.

For the first two-thirds of the book’s (lusty, Toronto Arts Council-pleasing) 194 pages, Rogal is painfully parsimonious with his brick & mortar plotting: Stone writes his novel, has its film rights optioned for an obscenely large sum, and thereafter frets mainly about his trouble finding someone with whom to share his suspiciously easily-won windfall. With little else to preoccupy him narratively, Rogal is happily (for him) free to indulge what appears to be his first priority, a festival of love for the sound of his own voice.

His favoured contrivance, and the one wherein his poet’s disinclination to the novel form is most pronounced, is the run-on, list-y, parenthesis-laden, free-associative brain dump: the kind of untamed spew that is doubtless great fun (and certainly not terribly taxing) to write, but almost always a trial to wade through. Indeed, he starts us off at the top of page one with an effusion of free-form randomalia on Jack Kerouac--so, fair warning, I guess--which serves as a quick and ready litmus test for reader tolerance :

So said Joyce Johnson about Jack Kerouac when On the Road hit the stands way back when, and what did he think, how did he feel, did his hat size enlarge, did he wear his shirt differently or a different colour, did he put his pants on right leg then left leg whereas prior the opposite was true, or both legs at a time, did he switch from Tokay to Beaujolais, from Bud to Brewer’s Best Wheat, from pork chops to T-bone steaks, was there a wiggle in his walk, a giggle in his talk, or was there nothing out of the ordinary; the same-old-same-old, except (perhaps) in the eyes of others, yes? Or no?

…and on for the better part of six more breathless, lightly-punctuated pages.

I’d guess that this is tickety-boo with the poetry claque, who’ll have trained themselves to do the spade work to excavate meaning without the assurance of finding any. And those who think structure is for simps and linearity for romance novels will think they’ve won the lottery. But for the ordinary unwashed, maybe just a little too eye-glazing, a little too easy to gloss over. (I wonder, for example, how many of the punters will stick around till page 33, when a numbing rant on telemarketers spurred on by a ringing phone on page 26 finally shudders to a halt (Stone answers; it’s not a telemarketer)).

When Rogal can muster the discipline to better order his thoughts, he has some specific axes that get a good grinding. While he seems to have been positioned (and/or positioned himself) as some sort of shibboleth-attacking, reverse maverick (an "intellectual redneck", per the Globe and Mail blurb), there’s none of that boldness in evidence here. Instead, his heavily pre-chewed targets include McDonalds and Blockbuster ("spreading like a virus"), gentrification (bad for artists), cell phones ("shut the fuck up!"), answering machines (impersonal), Hollywood (phony), Chopra-esque self-help movements (superficial), and publishing conglomerates (bean counters).

Worse, his framing of these deeply conventional lamentations can be startlingly trite. His pensées on Hollywood are particularly banal:

…in Hollywood…everyone is either trying to become someone else or is being urged or forced to become someone else in one way, shape, or form. Though not much different from Toronto, I suppose. Scratch the surface of any waiter or waitress, taxi driver or lawyer, even, and you’ll discover a wannabe actor, screenwriter or stand-up comic.

Or:

After all it’s Hollywood: reel life, not real life. Nothing is as it appears, nor does anyone wish it otherwise. Put twelve monkeys in a room with twelve typewriters and let them bash away. In the final analysis, it’s not the quality of the product that counts, but how the spin doctors package and serve it up to a generally lazy and undiscerning audience. In fact, seems the less story the better, as it just gets in the way of the action.

How to react? To feel bad for Rogal, that he finds this trenchant?; or be insulted, insofar as he thinks that we will?

Occasionally, Rogal remembers to punch the clock on Stone’s actual life, to treat AGaD as novel qua novel, rather than as delivery system for his own dyspepsia. But even here, it’s mainly flaccid, diary-like discursions on family, job (he canvasses for an environmental group), Toronto v. Vancouver, and similar. And perversely, in that so much of the book is internal to Vic, we’re never given much of a sense of his essence, of him as an individual: whether he’s likeable, or even interesting.

For the last third, once we’ve safely sailed past the legal 135-page limit, Rogal hitches up his socks and shifts to a higher gear. Stone’s book attracts Tarantino/J-Lo/Uma-level interest, and though he maintains an odd, Candide-like passivity throughout, he soon finds himself a newly-minted Hollywood it-boy. On an appearance on Oprah, he delivers himself of a "brave" disquisition on the crassness of contemporary culture and the public’s acquiescence in all the general dumbing-down, and (improbably) sets off a flood of public outrage that spins the book off in a new, potentially more interesting direction. (Though in the process shooting himself in the rhetorical foot, as Oprah’s considered and nuanced reactions, and the full and fair discussion she allows--even the public’s outrage at Stone’s condescension--seem to completely gainsay his arguments in re cultural torpor).

Going instantaneously from cause celebre to public pariah, Stone drops down a wormhole into a weird conspiracy straight out of Crying of Lot 49, as he’s followed, shot at, has his bank accounts frozen, and all the rest of it. This should have been AGaD’s meat, with slowly uncovered wheels-within-wheels--the conspiracy pulling Stone’s strings goes much higher than you will at first imagine--casting all that’s come before in a new light. (Not a bad thing; the underwhelming stuff is more palatable if retroactively cast as preamble).

But since neither Stone (who maintains his oddly sanguine passivity) nor Rogal (who rushes through these last chapters) seem to take all this metastasizing weirdness seriously, it’s hard for the reader to fully invest. There are some worthy points hastily made about the commercialization of…well, everything, and our boy, whose main hobbyhorse has been the old standby indie-is-beautiful, gets (cynically, predictably) co-opted by mammon like all the rest. This conclusion--how, at the end of the day, we’re all just workin’ for the man--seems to be our only take-away.

AGaD begins with three epigraphs, the last by Edward Bond:

The structure is episodic; the hero moves through a sequence of experiences, each one complete as a short narrative, yet the whole is given unity by the continuity of the central figure, and significance by the clearly stated objective behind the hero’s journey.

In retrospect, this feels like a pre-emptive apology, or excuse. Rogal is a promiscuously imaginative writer, but here he’s turned in a frustrating and tedious work. His subtitle--"a cautionary tale"--is apt, but probably not in the way he envisioned. With AGaD, he’s martyred himself so the rest of us know to be a little jaundiced when a poet--reluctantly, with nose held between thumb and forefinger--decides to go grant-shopping in a longer form.

So…thanks?

Though no poet, Paul Duder has worked in several capacities in the Canadian Film and TV industry. He, too, has some spicy things to say about it. But only if asked.