Hitting the Charts
by Leon Rooke
Biblioasis, 2006
Read the TDR
interview with Leon Rooke
Reviewed by Michael Murphy
If Walter Benjamin is right, and the
art of storytelling is dead, then Leon Rooke’s Hitting the Charts
is surely an anomaly. While most books are meant to be read in private,
this collection of short stories begs to be read aloud, in front of a
live audience. From "The Deacon’s Tale" to
"Biographical Notes," the theatrical quality of Rooke’s
stories, combined with his merciless attention to form, presents the
reader with a corrective to plot-driven, stale prose. For anyone who’s
had the pleasure of hearing Rooke perform, the reading experience is
only slightly less intense.
Hitting the Charts spans across
almost three decades of Rooke’s career. Yet, the stories feel as fresh
and inspiring as any current writing in Canadian fiction. Rooke’s
sentences seem to come from the mouths of caffeinated children,
unwilling to stop for breath, stretching across entire paragraphs and
pages. The effect can leave a reader bewildered. But Rooke’s humorous
manipulation of language never fails to invigorate, enchant, and, most
importantly, entertain.
In "Sixteen-year-old Susan March
Confesses to the Innocent Murder of all the Devious Strangers who would
Drag Her Down" (one of many brilliantly-titled stories, second only
to "Winter is Lovely, isn’t Summer Hell"), a
sixteen-year-old narrator recounts a tale of frustrated, unrequited love
with a fitting lack of periods and commas. "Mr Reeves," she
imagines herself saying, "I know it’s crazy and absurd and out of
the question even but I declare myself I yearn I ache I love you Mr
Reeves for god’s sake don’t let me keep sitting here too fragile in
this instance even to remove my eyes from your face O tell me what I
should do how I might give myself help me Mr Reeves because this has
never happened to me with those others I shall show you in our lake for
I am my father’s virgin." Susan March’s verbose narrative seems
to take place entirely within her teenage mind, one too frenetic for
line breaks or verbal restrictions. "O! O! O! to catch my
breath!" she cries, mimicking the breathlessness of her weary
reader. As wearying as Susan March’s narrative might be, if the story
were told any other way the young girl’s teenaged, scatterbrained
urgency would be lost. Many of Rooke’s better stories demonstrate a
similar reliance upon form, including the last one in the collection,
"Biographical Notes." Told through brief biographical
statements, "Biographical Notes" is about a controversial
filmmaker and the different people he has met and influenced throughout
his life. Here, as elsewhere, Rooke takes a good story and makes it
better by telling it in a new and energizing way, with a definite focus
on the telling.
Although I am calling Rooke’s works
stories, John Metcalf insists in the foreword to Hitting the Charts
that Rooke’s stories be thought of as performances. He writes that
the "most fruitful way to approach Leon is to think of him as a
jazz musician in full flight of improvisation … Sometimes the story
takes off; sometimes, it peters out" (9). Indeed, there are few
stories (or performances, improvisations) in this collection that peter
out. The rare exceptions to this rule are the stories that seem to
sacrifice content too readily for the sake of form. For example,
"Hanging Out With the Magi" and "The Problem Shop"
both begin strongly, but end without purpose. The former tells a
confusing story about a family that lives with ghosts, and ends with the
reception of a baby in a box, and a man in a tree. Although the reader
wishes to make sense of these events, the conclusion fails to pull them
together, and the story loses impact as a result. "The Problem
Shop" suffers from a similar lack of cohesiveness. The ex-con
protagonist seems to want a longer story than he gets, and when his
problems are solved by heading out to sea on an ancient schooner, the
reader cannot help but wonder if heading out to sea, into an open
environment, is not simply Rooke’s way of telling us he couldn’t
think up a better ending.
While some of Rooke’s less
satisfactory pieces leave a little to be desired in the way of content,
it helps to remember that these stories take on entirely new shapes and
directions when read aloud. On the page, "Gypsy Art" is a
condensed, hard-to-follow car accident of words, chronicling the
misadventures of the wandering Fazzini. But if you’ve had the pleasure
of hearing Rooke read the same story aloud, the story’s wandering
becomes Fazzini’s wandering, and you begin to get a sense of what it
means to "hit the road."
Benjamin may be right — storytelling
may be a lost art form. But Rooke presents a pretty strong
counter-argument. There’s a history to each word he pronounces, each
sentence he constructs. At times, his stories are tender and engaging.
At others, bawdy and irreverent. Mostly, though, Rooke just knows how to
tell a good story well. With him, it’s the telling that matters.
Michael Murphy has
contributed to filling Station, The Windsor Review, and
All Rights Reserved. He teaches writing in London (the Canadian
version) and is a compulsive used book shopper. |
