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10/01/2005: "Globe and Mail"
This review ran in the GLOBE AND MAIL. I hope I can post it here. If not, it may be yanked down shortly. I fall back on my total ignoarnce of all things relating to posting of published material.
Anyway, it's overall a very kind, and very honest review. I agree with it, especially the Jones comparison. You see, in the book publishing world, it's important for first-time writers to be compared to other writers; sort of like, if you like so-and-so, you should like this person, too. Which is all fine and good, and I understand the sense in it, but for me, who thinks Thom Jones is one of the top-5 writers I've ever read and a huge influence to boot, it's a rough ride. You're constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for someone to say, "Well, how DOES he stack up in comparison?" It's like you've got a master watch-maker and his apprentice watch-maker, and off in the distance someone's saying, "Hey, they're a lot alike! Heck, they're almost the same---take a look; you'll see!" And the apprentice looks at his watch---which is a decent watch, okay, sure---then he looks at the master's watch, which is much more refined than his own. But still, off in the corner, the voice: "Take a look...compare...trust me, you won't be able to tell them apart!" And the apprentice is sitting there going, "I don't think I'm nearly as good...really, I don't...I never thought that." But anyway, that's the biz, and I'm just happy to be in the mix.
I was fortunate enough to trade a few emails with Thom Jones regarding his first publishing experience, and discovered he was forever being compared to Ernest Hemingway. Whoa! So I guess it's something every first-time writer needs to go through.
If you haven't read anything by Jones, I again reccomend him without reservation. THE PUGILIST AT REST (National Book Award finalist), COLD SNAP, and SONNY LISTON WAS A FRIEND OF MINE are his collections.
Also the reviewer, MT Kelly, wrote a great boxing book called SAVE ME, JOE LOUIS. I read it a few years ago, and was very impressed.
---Craig.
Those who cannot heal
By M.T. KELLY
Saturday, October 1, 2005
Rust and Bone
By Craig Davidson
Viking Canada, 256 pages, $30
The stories in Craig Davidson's Rust and Bone belong to a tradition: the book about those on the edge of crime and desperation, like Newton Thornburg's Cutter and Bone and Flesh and Blood, Jim Christie's attempt to journey into the heart of boxing. Comparisons will inevitably arise with the work of Thom Jones in The Pugilist at Rest, though there is nothing in Davidson's work to quite compare with Jones's masterpiece, Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine; the characters in Rust and Bone, for all their vulnerability, are not as sensitive as those in Jones's work.
There is no room for decent fathers or kind girlfriends in Rust and Bone, as there certainly is in Jones's great story, though Davidson obviously cares about young people. Overall, the characters in Rust and Bone, hard men in trouble, are looked at with, if not compassion, certainly grave concern. His vision is described as "dark," but it is not hopeless. No one who puts pen to paper sees the world, and all the chaos and difficulties of living in it, as completely black.
The unity of Rust and Bone depends upon a controlling consciousness: There is not much gap between the author's, and the narrator's, voice and that of the people he writes about, giving the stories a powerful familiarity.
The title story begins with a boxer's problem. "Twenty-seven bones make up the human hand. . . . Some primates got more." The thing is, however, "Break an arm or leg and the knitting bone's sealed in a wrap of calcium so it's stronger than before. Bust a bone in your hand and it never heals right."
Not healing right is a problem not only for Eddie Brown Jr., the protagonist of this story, but for nearly everyone in the book. Brown's hand gets "badly broken: knuckles split and flesh peeled to the wrist, a lot of blood, some bones." Brown is heroic in that he shatters his hand "like a china plate" in trying to rescue another. He is tragic in that he can't forgive himself for having failed. His guilt over the incident when he broke his hand, trying to rescue his nephew who falls through the ice, are almost like hallucinations that occur while boxing, where the story begins, ends and offers its only salvation: "I'm torquing my shoulder, throwing everything I've got into it, kitchen-sinking the bastard, and, for a brillant splitsecond in the centre of that darkening ring, we meet."
There are eight stories in Rust and Bone, and their titles define their themes: A Mean Utility, The Rifleman, Rocket Ride, On Sleepless Roads, Friction, An Apprentice's Guide to Modern Magic and the especially aptly titled Life in the Flesh.
The ride in Rocket Ride is when an orca trainer gets his leg bitten off by the supposedly tame killer whale he is putting on a show with. Davidson is good on broken bones. "Nishka's mouth opens. My left leg slips inside. Thigh raked down a row of teeth, shredding the wetsuit. Rocketing upward, faster now. My crotch smashes the crook of her mouth and something goes snap." What has snapped from the "immense pressure" is the trainer's tibia below the hip. He loses his leg, and nearly all of his psychic composure, if not sanity. Yet Davidson plays on this primordial force to come to a moving resolution: "Nishka's dorsal fin dips below the surface. Give yourself over to the current, its power and possibilities. A locking sensation, all things in balance."
Life in the Flesh is another powerful story, although so macho as to seem surreal. The narrator, who is the most sensitive person in the piece, begins his tale: "Two months shy of my twenty-eighth birthday I beat Johnny 'The Kid' Starkley to death in Tupelo, Mississippi." The story takes place far from the United States, however, in Thailand, and concerns brutal Thai boxing, involving kicks as well as punches. The narrator is robbed by a protégé he trains, but like all of Davidson's characters, he is reconciled to it.
All of Davidson's stories of fighters, sex addicts, a policewoman who accidentally shoots a child and "fighting dogs" present a world without obvious hope. Yet they are all so carefully crafted that the prose itself offers some kind of redemption. Sometimes so tough as to be volcanically sentimental, unreal, sometimes acutely accurate and tender, they represent a powerful debut.
M. T. Kelly's novel, Save Me, Joe Louis, deals with, among other things, boxing.