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A candid and often hilarious look at a typical week in the life of a few ordinary working stiffs . . . he breathes fresh narrative life into the most mundane details . . . For those who don’t flinch at honest portrayals of the way we live, this is as good as it gets.
"I can't take another week of this," 38-year-old Manda says on page 184 of an impressive first novel called, appropriately, A Week of This.
She is talking to her boss, Sean, in a Dunbridge, Ontario, call centre, and she's referring to the suspense caused by the company's rumoured move of the office to Orillia. But she could be referring to any number of anxiety-causing aspects of her life: the latest guilt trip laid on her by her mother; her husband Patrick's struggle to turn a profit in his store, Active Sports; the lousy weather; her stepbrother Marcus's potentially explosive relationship with Kelly, who has a four-year-old son and a lurking ex-husband; her brother Ken's aimless wanderings.
None of these items is monumental--just the kind of nagging day-to-day things that all of us have to deal with.
Nathan Whitlock, Toronto-based review editor of Quill & Quire magazine, takes a candid and often hilarious look at a typical week in the life of a few ordinary working stiffs. Though his prose is uncluttered and straightforward, he breathes fresh narrative life into the most mundane details.
Here's Manda waking up on Friday: "Manda wanted to give the bedroom ceiling the finger for staring down at her first thing in the morning." (43) Manda in her cluttered basement: "She found a brittle garden hose under a stack of lampshades and decided to drag it upstairs and out to the garage. When she shook the end of it, a long, slinky centipede crawled out, and . . . she shrieked . . . . She left the laundry where it was and headed upstairs. The basement hated her. She couldn't wait til Patrick got home and she had an ally against the house." (108)
Whitlock gives us a minimum of background, just enough for us to understand how these people got to this stage of their lives. What he concentrates on is the now, whether it's the flood at the mall that forces Patrick to close his store or an evening at the pub. His dialogue, often spiced with sarcasm, is bang-on. Here's Manda's reaction, as she's driving their truck home, to Patrick's suggestion that someday they conceive a child and have it delivered in their house:
"You'd want all that going on in our room, in the room where we sleep, with all these people in there, and me screaming my friggin head off? . . . And all this blood and everything going all over the place? That sounds good to you?"
"We'd cover everything. With paper or whatever."
Manda started laughing. "You don't put paper down when you're having a kid! You're not carving a jack-o'-lantern. Come on, babe. Haven't you ever seen a kid being born?"
"No. Not yet."
That was low, her face told him. A low blow. They didn't speak for the rest of the ride home. (42)
Whitlock's accomplishment is that he jumps right into the middle of a few lives, shows us a typical week with only minor highs and lows, and yet exposes the ennui and the anxiety--the horror and the comedy. At the same time, you feel compassion for virtually every character.
There are those readers who will balk at a book like this, saying, "I live domestic realism every day. Why would I want to read about it?" Which explains the popularity of fantasy. But, for those who don't flinch at honest portrayals of the way we live, this is as good as it gets.
