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Whitlock's writing style -- restrained, sympathetic but unsentimental, and grounded in sensory reality -- is a perfect match for his story.
A good novel can take you some place you've never been. But it takes a great one to take you some place you've been a thousand times and show it to you anew.
Toronto writer Nathan Whitlock's first effort, A Week of This, shows us the quiet desperation hidden within places we pass without a thought -- struggling independent retail stores, dying small-town main streets, dingy and stinking hockey arenas.
The novel is a week in the life of its characters: 38-year-old Manda, still angry over the family crisis that brought her to Dunbridge, Ont., decades ago; her husband Patrick, owner of a dying sporting goods store; her stepbrother Marcus, an overgrown teenager and kids' hockey coach; and her mentally handicapped brother Ken, who works at the Giant Tiger store.
As review editor for Canada's book business bible, Quill & Quire, Whitlock has certainly read a shelf-load of novels about the travails, usually historical, of heroic proletarians -- fishermen, loggers, miners and subsistence farmers.
With this novel, he seems to say: "Enough of the elegy for the noble, doomed manual labourer. Let's consider the everyday, contemporary tragedy of the vast suburban and semi-suburban lower middle class.
Whitlock's characters are holding it together (just barely) as they work around the fringes of the modern service economy and try to do their best for their loved ones. But fate, in the form of genetic heritage, learned family behaviours or impersonal economic forces, keeps standing in their way.
The book begins with a quote from E.M. Forster that indicates Whitlock's approach: "Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes."
And, indeed, though this is a particularly lousy week in Dunbridge, there is no crisis, no turning point.
When her call-centre boss tells her he'll know in a week if the operation will move to another town, Manda replies: "I can't take another week of this."
But her tragedy is that she can and will. Life will continue like this week after week, year after year.
Whitlock's writing style -- restrained, sympathetic but unsentimental, and grounded in sensory reality -- is a perfect match for his story.
He describes places, such as an aging but not-quite rundown house and a hockey arena, in ways that illuminate the lives of the people within.
"With both parents gone, Patrick had felt the house slump around him. When it rained, the acicular slivers of water would sting the front of the house and run down the living room window like tears."
"The change rooms were in a dank hallway that smelled like oil; Marcus had that smell in his clothes, his hair, his skin. The walls always looked wet, with grey varicose veins snaking up through the concrete."
Whitlock can also be funny, as when a character tries to read Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion after hearing it praised on CBC Radio:
"He made a face like he was reading about some unnecessarily strange and useless animal, something that only lays its eggs every 20 years, or something, and in some ridiculous place like the tears of a horse."
Has anybody better captured the absurdity of Ondaatje's lyrical excesses?
The dig at Ondaatje underlines the audacity of the challenge Whitlock has made to Canada's Giller-garlanded and Booker-bedecked literary pantheon, daring them to set aside the grand themes and examine everyday, contemporary life in our country's countless Dunbridges.
Bob Armstrong is a Winnipeg playwright.
