Word Report http://thomasowain.posterous.com Covering "Poetry and the Avant-Garde" for CBC's The Next Chapter posterous.com Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:45:31 -0700 Michael Turner, 8 x 10 http://thomasowain.posterous.com/michael-turner-8-x-10 http://thomasowain.posterous.com/michael-turner-8-x-10

Somebody told me my on-air review was boring and unfocused, so here's a written version that attempts to be more focused. Oh, and exciting. I think this Michael Turner character is exciting, if you like odd books.

 

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Michael Turner, 8 x 10

 

The temptation Michael dangles in front of a radio columnist – even if the author would rather not dangle it – is to rattle on about the form of what he’s produced. Experienced readers might feel they’re beyond needing to be challenged with form, given that the 18th century novel is so far behind us now and the 20th century novel already had its fun with nonsense. Where that sophisticated yawn occurs, it’s either pretension or complacency. The long narrative told in a single voice dominates today’s reading lists so indisputably that even a novel told in letters now stands out as unusual, a bias absent from the 18th-century reader. Authors write all manner of books, nothing is new under the sun, and yet all other fictive forms – drama, poetry, multi-voiced texts, epistolary novels – have ceded top spot to the single continuous narrator. In the 21st century, the rivals squirm tinily under the victor’s thumb.

 

That’s why, with grovelling apologies to Michael’s excellent characters and their bleeding hearts, their bodily and situational defects, and so on, temptation wins the battle of my impulses now. I treat form as the prominent attribute of 8 x 10. By way of compensation, I dwell on it only briefly in order to address character and behaviour afterwards.

 

8 x 10, the title, describes the form and content of this book. Michael calls it eight lives visited ten times each, although this would produce a total of eight hundred vignettes, whereas the book actually contains seven-hundred-and-eighty-four. Where are the missing sixteen? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

Well, most versions of 1001 Nights don’t offer 1001 stories, and most centipedes do not have one hundred legs, so let’s not quibble over numbers. For the record, I enjoy the point made by Michael in our interview, that “8 x 10” could be read as a series, “8, x, 10” where x represents 9. Now, some fun with figures: 8 x 10 refers to a grid, and 9 is a natural grid number, being the product of 3 times 3. Any writer of an essay called “The Grid in Michael Turner’s Writings” ought to mention this, at least in a footnote.

 

From the outset, the Grid as an Organizing Principle announces its place in the book. We’re used to authorial presences arriving via the voice, directly addressing a reader. Instead, this one’s visual, printed ten squares wide and eight high, above each vignette. A shaded square locates each vignette at a particular x-point and y-point.

 

Imprisoned by this grid, a portrayed something ekes out a life. 8 x 10 is the size of an artist’s headshot. In the theatre, if a stage manager asks you to bring your “eight-by-ten” to work, it means she wants to put your picture on the wall. The portraiture conceit suggested itself to Michael when he saw a window display at a large bookstore where, instead of showing books, they laid out candles and picture frames for sale. He saw an empty eight-by-ten portrait frame and thought, “Hmm…” in that way artistic people apparently do.

 

Michael fills the frame with nameless characters in unnamed settings. This from a writer who’s been loyal to British Columbia throughout most of his work. (American Whisky Bar is a partial exception). He put out a collection of poetry set in a cannery town on the Skeena River, another collection dedicated to the history and geography of Kingsway (a diagonal road through Vancouver that predates the grid of streets and avenues), another poetry-ish book called Hard Core Logo about Canadian road trip by a B.C. band, and a novel, The Pornographer’s Poem, set in Vancouver’s seedy parts. Strong place and unique characters have been the backbone of Michael’s books. Vancouver life. So now, out with all that.

 

This book’s vignettes want to belong to any number of possible cultures, living or imaginary. To apply them to real-life locations and times, a reader needs to plausibly locate tailors, property developers, advertisers, schools, infidelity and war—leaving the field pretty open. Only a few sticky details tie us down; bell bottoms are in style in the first vignette, musicians tour highways in cars, people keep record collections, and at one point someone gets a job as a beer rep for import brands.

 

Movies such as Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan and Last Days of Disco sprung to my mind because they also set out to portray a mood using scenes that show patterns of behaviour. That comparison is only slightly useful, though. Those movies focus on a specific cultural period; the subject of 8 x 10 is less specific, the through-lines less evident, the timeline less chronological, the social group much wider.

 

The hard work isn’t over. 8 x 10 demands pattern-making from the reader. After a first read, I felt unsure about how to use and navigate the grid, or whether indeed the grid was trustworthy as a guide to the book. I read it again, even mapped it out with little summaries this time, and … remained unsettled.

 

When pushed, Michael calls the book a portrait of human behaviour, with actions in focus rather than proper nouns. He had to be pushed, though, and sounded uncomfortable with the grandiose sentiment.

 

That discomfort helps me think about Michael’s writing. He doesn’t like to settle, or let stories settle, or let ideas resolve into focus. His characters’ lives eddy between currents of potential and disappointment. He has a knack for quickly creating strong people about whom one can become excited—the sense I get is: with this character’s talents, with these insights, even with these circumstances, just imagine what this person could do. What comes next is an interruption. The character’s potential does not consummate with achievement. The great Canadian dream of escaping one’s past is dragged down to turbulent, murky reality. For instance, just when we see a potential happy ending for a brilliant doctor/teacher, she suffers a fall into victimhood, her immigrant life story colonized by a powerful man and … what more do we know about her? The vignette’s over. Maybe she shows up in a later piece, another nameless character selling second-hand books, amounting to dignified sadness, the dignity on occasion agitated by fondness for another rogue character who drifts past her life.

 

It’s sad, if you read the book this way. It’s a portrait of a species interrupted, human beings constantly revving, never hitting top gear or passing a finish line with any sense of victory, consistently behaving in ways that send them back where they started.

 

As a result I would rule that, like Michael’s other books, this one is stimulating rather than enjoyable. I do think he’s brilliant, and agree with what one critic said about The Pornographer’s Poem: he’s an exciting writer. Not your common-or-garden novelist. The result of interrupting the characters, of refusing to offer a reader the escapism or wish fulfilment of even a well-told tragedy (and its release of emotion) is to create a reading experience without catharsis. The same is true of The Pornographer’s Poem, by the way, and the book Hard Core Logo. Bruce Macdonald’s movie of Hard Core Logo ends with a release; the book doesn’t. The difference marks Michael’s writing—he doesn’t want to let you go, to let the story go, to ever say that the potential has been reached here so we can move on.

 

Such constipation makes him a frustrating writer because technically he could produce an excellent good-old novel—as in, a long continuous narrative featuring strong characters whose interactions and circumstances entertain an audience. Technically, he could, but temperamentally, perhaps he can’t. The model seems to irk him, at this point anyway. Maybe he’ll come around to it later and offer mainstream readers the satisfaction they desire. Then he may become more popular. In the meanwhile, I bet he stays on the margins of Canadian book culture, firmly in the “one to watch” cultural purgatory. In my own reading life, his writing certainly is to watch, and to read, and I look forward to the next thing he publishes.

                                                                                                                                                                   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