[Previous entry: "Iowa City & Minneapolis Readings!"] [Next entry: "House of Leaves + MPR Interview"]
11/21/2005: "New Review + Nerve.com Excerpt"
This review was sent to me by a friend in Vancouver. It's from the Vancouver Sun. Gotta love the "knuckle-duster fist full of cheap death’s-head biker rings" line.
Also anyone who is interested can check out an excerpt of my short story "Friction" at Nerve.com. They've published fiction from some great writers lately, including Chuck Palahniuk and Jonathan Lethem. So needless to say I am grateful to be included in such fine company. Addy is www.nerve.com.
The review can be found in the "more" section.
All best, Craig.
A man who doesn’t pull his punches
Double-distilled prose goes down easy
BY JOHN MOORE
DEBUT FICTION
If you caught the Nov. 5 Pong match in these pages between columnists Sara O’Leary and Pete McMartin over the collection of confessional essays, What I Meant to Say: The Private Lives of Men (edited by Ian Brown), you may have formed the opinion that male writers have become, on the whole, a lame bunch.
Ms. O’Leary found the essays revealing, but the contributors ultimately as non-threatening as “a bunch of chatty girlfriends,” while Mr. McMartin implied they were dull stiffs he wouldn’t want within earshot of his favourite bar stool.
Both of them should probably instead have read Rust and Bone, the first collection of stories by a young Calgary writer, Craig Davidson.
“Men, I have always thought, are candid, or just as candid as women,” McMartin observed tellingly in his conclusion. “They just speak a different language. You have to listen more carefully to make it out.”
That language is fiction, and when it’s written by a writer of Davidson’s uncompromising fierceness and talent, you don’t even have to listen carefully. Because it’s going to hit you like an overhand right sucker-punch from a guy wearing a knuckle-duster fist full of cheap death’s-head biker rings.
After a decade and a half of male writers attempting the oxymoronic feat of “getting in touch with their feelings” in a politically correct fashion, his appearance is as welcome as the ring debut of a young heavyweight with championship form on a fight card fluffed out with waltzing welterweights.
In the tradition of the great writers of early modern fiction and a few stubborn B.C. hard-asses like Jim Christy, Robert Strandquist and Dennis Bolen, Davidson pulls no punches. His spare, double-distilled prose recalls the young Hemingway. His insight into his characters is unforgiving; his exposition of their weaknesses is made beautiful by its sheer ruthlessness.
Davidson doesn’t have to deck his characters out in postmodern quirks to make them interesting. The tough but sad repo man with the terminally ill wife, the yuppie couple who train fighting dogs, the natural athlete who abandons sport to rob his flawed father of his investment in dreams of glory, the boxer who fights in illegal bare-knuckle matches to punish himself for a tragic accident he was too young to foresee or prevent — these are people you ride the bus with, work with, meet in passing a dozen times a day.
With a rounder’s slight nod to postmodernism, Davidson has some of these characters appear in several stories to reinforce the theme of lives tragically blighted by a single mistake or mischance. The effect is to make Rust and Bone one of those intriguing books — not quite a novel, but decidedly more than a collage of prize-winning short stories.
With this scaffolding, he is experimenting with a meta-fictional form increasingly adopted by writers trying to push the structural envelope of narrative fiction.
Like fiction itself, this experiment is not gender-specific. The experiences that make the accident of being born male or female beautiful and terrifying may differ subjectively, but as a mode of expressing them in a powerful and cathartic fashion, no essay or memoir dressed up as “creative non-fiction” can go more than a round in the ring with fiction and drama at its best. Can you name one essayist or journalist who has made you feel the classic tragic emotions of beauty and terror the way you feel them in Antigone, The Trojan Women, Ajax or Oedipus Rex?
If you miss the kind of story that makes you start to cringe halfway through as a terrible realization begins to dawn, Craig Davidson is a guy you’ll want to get into the ring with.
John Moore is the author of the novel The Flea Market (Ekstasis Editions).