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His characters are individuals with beating hearts and wounded histories and sentimental hopes for the future. Before long, we sink unresistingly into their stories.
Nathan Whitlock makes us care about ordinary people
The people in Nathan Whitlock's debut novel, A Week of This, inhabit a dying town north of Toronto called Dunsbridge. Like similar small towns across the country, the downtown core has been given over to pawn shops and dollar stores, and much else there has been boarded up because "the new Wal-Mart mall has sucked everything out to the highway."
The name Dunsbridge proves apt, too. A grey-brown miasma has taken hold during this last week of October, "as if the whole town were painted onto cement." All the outdoor colours have faded, the parks are deserted, snow's on the way. Everyone's hunkering down for six months of indoor gloom.
The family we soon meet are in their late 30s and early 40s and (dys)function together like "some kind of emotionally broken Brady Bunch." There's Manda, who works at a call centre; her husband, Patrick, who owns a failing sports outlet at the mall; Manda's slacker stepbrother, Marcus, who gets by coaching boys' hockey for a small honorarium; and Ken, her brother, who lives in a group home and works stocking shelves at a big-box store called Giant Tiger. In the first pages, a neighbour refers to him as "some big retarded guy."
Manda and her crew are "gripped by a willful paralysis." They're exhausted from trying to maintain their lower-middle-class existences and only a couple of missteps from full-blown poverty. Fights about money claim a lot of their emotional time. That, and the messes that arise in their lives because "no one wanted to live with the consequences of their own actions."
Whitlock gives us so much "real life" here that the reader would cry, "Enough!" if his story weren't so funny in places. It's as if he's transplanted a group of rough-edged, foul-mouthed "folk" from reality TV to the printed page and completely blown off the shallowness and the stereotypes attached to them. His characters are individuals with beating hearts and wounded histories and sentimental hopes for the future. Before long, we sink unresistingly into their stories.
How might our own lives be revealed over the course of a week's scrutiny? No doubt they'd be filled with many of the same banal details that occupy Whitlock's characters.
Mandy, Patrick, Marcus and Ken spend a lot of time with the remote control, watching cartoons, fishing shows, the daytime soaps and Saturday night hockey. They sleep, shower, take baths, brush their teeth, have sex, get drunk, drive the pickup, get on one another's nerves and worry about one another.
There's a lot of food in this novel, as well. Everyone keeps gazing into their various fridges and finding nothing there, other than a couple of cans of Coke or some sour milk. When they do eat, it's crap: crackers and marmalade, chocolate bars, spaghetti and canned sauce, greasy nachos at the Flamingo Bar, donuts, flaccid onion rings. And crap happens to them over the course of seven days, and keeps happening. It makes little difference whether or not it's caused by them or by sources beyond their control: "They seemed caught in some kind of buzzing current that kept them permanently off-balance."
A relentless tension drives this novel, although nothing "extraordinary" occurs. Whitlock tells his story seamlessly, without condescension or judgment, and this is a fine thing because it allows the doors of our empathy to remain wide open. His dialogue is spot-on and often hilarious: another strength. So are his walk-on characters, who threaten to steal the show.
The novel's title may be ironic, as in, "You think you've got it bad? Try a week of this!" But it's also acutely perceptive: This is the way things are for a lot of people. By the book's end, you get the feeling that the "buzzing current" that dominates the inhabitants of Dunsbridge will continue. Maybe something will happen to change their lives for the better, but probably not. In the meantime, you can only wish them well.
Nathan Whitlock is the winner of the inaugural Emerging Artist in Creative Writing Award and a runner-up for the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award. It will be interesting to see where his talented gaze falls next.
