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a compelling, sharply detailed picture
The Quotidian Quest of Living Your Life
Big-box stores on the edges of towns, abandoned houses aging into oblivion, dingy, abused offices without windows, empty, tundra-like fields surrounded by chainlink and staring up indifferently at a sky threatening winter: this is the world of Nathan Whitlock’s A Week of This, a novel of unsentimentalized small-town Canadiana, focusing on the people in the backgrounds of Tim Horton’s commercials, those who just want to get their goddamned double-double and be on their way.
Though it takes place in the expanse of central Ontario, A Week of This captures any town where secondhand trucks and teenaged hockey players dominate. The novel most closely follows Manda, a 38-year-old, formerly rebellious woman who—despite hating the place since she was forced to move there as a teen—still hasn’t managed to pick up and leave her adopted hometown of Dunbridge. Joining her in this quotidian purgatory are her husband Patrick, whose sporting goods store in the mall would be an escape, if the ever-present threat of failure didn’t constantly bring him back to the real world, her half-brother Marcus, who’s attempting to make it through life and a budding relationship while doing as little work as possible, and her brother Ken, a slower-than-average shelf-stocker still living out the trauma inflicted by his and Manda’s wigged-out mother.
Their lives are, with the possible exception of that mother, almost entirely unremarkable, spared even of the tragic nobility that writers—especially CanLit writers—like to inflict on their working class characters. As the title suggests, these are merely people slogging through another week, their minds occupied with questions no grander than whether they should be eating Chinese buffet again, what they’re going to do about the hole in the roof, whether or not their new girlfriend’s son is getting along with them. Whitlock strikes an able balance between desperation and the comfort of the settled life, each character not exactly happy with their lot in Dunbridge, but not exactly sure exactly what would be better. As such, their day to day is filled with the kind of situations that are as mundane as they are crucial, the necessary bits of life allowed to take on their full drama.
Whitlock’s greatest strength is that he manages to restrain both his judgements of and his sympathy for his characters, allowing them to play out, equal parts warts and smiles. Manda is sometimes a shrew, sometimes a tragic hero, oftentimes nothing more than an aging woman wondering if she’s doing it right, trapped like all of us between duty and desire, lofty expectations and stark realities.
As refreshing as his subject matter is, Whitlock isn’t without his annoying tendencies as a writer. He reads very much like someone whose job it is to read CanLit—his day job is review editor at Quill & Quire, after all—and though he’s aware (and feisty) enough to take a few shots at some of the sacred cows, he can’t entirely escape its grasp: like a lot of people raised on a diet of Atwood and Ondaatje, he seems to labour under the impression that metaphors and similes are necessary to the construction of a paragraph, and though he’s got some talent with them, the sheer number of unnecessary-if-clever literary twitches quickly become rote, almost workmanlike turns of phrase.
Still, it’s not enough to diminish what he’s done here: A Week of This is a compelling, sharply detailed picture of a part of the Canadian landscape that is at best stereotyped, and at worst ignored completely. From the mundane, Whitlock has pulled something refreshing and beautiful, something we can say about far too few Canadian writers today. V
A Week of This: A Novel in Seven Days
By Nathan Whitlock
ECW Press
264 pp, $26.95
