Review by Michael Bryson

"They weren’t the Brady Bunch, they were the fucking Addams Family." So sums up one character’s experience of the family at the centre of this novel. The words are spoken by Marcus, to himself. He lives in the fictional town of Dunbridge, located in an area something like the Ottawa Valley. He has a step-sister, Manda, and a step-brother, Ken. They are all thirtysomething – and caught in the same pattern of life established in their youth. Essentially: poor, depressed, aimless.

The novel records the events of seven days, beginning on a Wednesday. At one point, Manda says she’s not sure she can stand "another week of this." One purpose of the novel appears to be depicting a random week in time. Not much happens. The narrative arc, such as it is, is subtle (not flat, though some readers may think so).

Two days after finishing the novel, I was still puzzling over it. Then I thought: "inheritance." As in, "Nathan Whitlock’s brilliant new novel, A Week of This, is about inheritance, in all its various forms and permutations." I’m not sure this is true, but the novel is about something other than plot and character. The novel is a challenge to read and experimental in form. In my opinion, it succeeds.

Kerry Clare writes:

A fair assessment maybe, but it was out of place in the novel and not sufficiently pursued for such a strong statement. Moreover it opens A Week of This up to criticisms, comparisons that would have been irrelevant otherwise, even unfair.

All I could think of as I read this was Michael Ondaatje's treatment of the working class-- his romanticizing of these men in their terrible jobs that often killed them, and how he rendered them poetry, but this undermining the reality of their lives. Fair enough. But I'm not sure Nathan Whitlock treats his "working class" any better. Like Ondaatje he uses them to make a statement, about the kinds of people we should be writing about, reading about, the kinds of lives that are worthwhile. I say "uses", because I don't believe Whitlock pursues the realities of their lives altogether, their jobs and whole lives at times functioning as props.

If Clare is arguing that there’s something condescending about A Week of This, I agree, but so what? (Popular entertainment, it ain’t.) What Clare misses, I think, is how Whitlock is using Manda’s reading of Ondattje to signal his own aesthetic direction, one that breaks with the lyric lushness of recent prominent CanLit prose. That he doesn’t actually name the Ondattje novel signals that the break is about more than a rejection of In the Skin of a Lion. The break is broader, general, complete.

And good for him. This is one of the mark’s of a true artist, if I might be allowed to go all mushy for a moment. We need to say this more often. We need our inherited tropes to be broken down, deconstructed, challenged to the core, overturned.

Oh, there’s that word again: Inherited.

Inheritance is significant in this novel in a number of ways. The characters form a step-family. They had separate origins, but ended up together. The new whole was formed from fragments, which bonded but never smoothed over. The past contains more than a few traumas, and the repercussions continue to be felt. Everyone is wounded, as Leonard Cohen reminded us long ago. Whitlock’s novel treats these wounds sensitively, honestly. There is the suggestion that wounds can be overcome, but there are also heavy reminders of the costs the wounds have brought.

Later in the novel, inheritance makes a literal appearance. Manda’s father asks her what she wants (i.e., what items of his would she like once he dies). She says she wants nothing, a statement of broad metaphorical significance.

Finally, I want to return to Clare’s argument that Whitlock, like Ondattje, "uses" the working class. In her words: the two writers undermine "the reality of their [character’s] lives … to make a statement [] about the kinds of people we should be writing about, reading about, the kinds of lives that are worthwhile."

This strikes me as a profound misreading. Clare suggests Whitlock’s characters function as "props." But props for what?

Clare writes:

In a novel with so much going on, my criticism would have been a minor point had the argument against Ondaatje not been made so strongly, making me consider the various ways it might connect to the rest of the story. I'm not even convinced it really did connect, actually, and I know the argument detracted from a novel that was clearly substantial enough without it. A novel that might say the very same things but in practice instead, which is a much more of a compelling argument.

I assume she means by "practice instead" that if Whitlock had "shown, not told" (left out the bit about In the Skin of a Lion and simply let the story unfold), the novel would have been improved. And perhaps it’s true that the novel would have been less obviously provocative. It’s the provocation, however, that I think Clare has misunderstood.

She accuses Whitlock of the same fault she identifies in Ondattje: using his characters as props to make a point. Of failing to pursue "the realities of their lives altogether." Novels, however, are not documentaries; they are fictional inventions of imagined worlds. They are performances of language, and the references they make to each other – explicitly or implicitly – are of greater interest than a novel’s photo realism.

Or so it seems to me.

Bob Armstrong, in What’s On Winnipeg, seems to agree with Clare. The message he finds in A Week of This is:

Enough of the elegy for the noble, doomed manual labourer. Let's consider the everyday, contemporary tragedy of the vast suburban and semi-suburban lower middle class.

I resist such sweeping interpretation. Is this a novel about social class? I don’t think so. I read it more as a portrait of a family at a moment in time. Each of the characters is sorting out the relationship between the past, present and future. How does one get from there, to here, to someplace else? The novel is not psychologically obsessed, but neither is it psychologically naïve. It is well-written and ripe for re-reading. (All reading is re-reading.)

Robert Kroetsch, I believe, has written "things happen, then other things happen. That’s all there is to it." Or as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse Five: "So it goes." Canonical Canadian literature has has resisted this post-modern scepticism, preferring to re-propose again and again the possibility of romantic transformation.

Whitlock’s ducks line up against transformation. Given events in the news this week, perhaps we should conclude they all quacked in a poisoned pond in the Alberta Oil Sands. Like noble, doomed manual labourers of old. So it goes.

*

Postscript: Since completing this review, I've read Stepheh Henighan's new collection of essays, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture (Bibiloasis, 2008). I suspect Henighan would criticize A Week of This for lacking specific, local detail. Clare suggests Whitlocks novel suffers for failing to provide the details of Manda's job. Henighan would probably find a failure in the novel to outline the social (i.e., liberal capitalist) forces that shape the characters. Work, in fact, plays a key role in the novel. Manda's husband's sportware store (the business he started to gain control of his life) is in danger of going under. Manda's job provides her with no sense of worth. Ken's job provides the primary structure to his life, but not a grounding identity. Henighan would find in these characters proof of "the afterlife of culture," the void that has opened up in the wake of the 1988 Free Trade election and, ultimately, NAFTA. Small town Ontario communal identity has been swept away and replaced by nameless global capitalism. Whitlock's novel may be read as proof of Henighan's thesis, while also disappointing him in failing to make explicit the economic lever pullers at the root of this existential crisis. Personally, I find Henighan's framework both illuminating and reductive (but more on that elsewhere). A Week of This may well have benefited from being more explicitly local. Then the quotient of socio-historical realism would have increased. In the end, however, I'm content to read this book as a stab at a new type of novel, an articulation of one individual's vision.