The Mountain Clinic
Harold Hoefle
Oberon, 2008
111 pages
$34.95 Hardcover
$18.95 Softcover
The Mountain Clinic is tagged as a novel, though both at first glance and after close reading Harold Hoefle’s book reads more like a wanting collection of linked stories. Going Dutch is usually an amicable decision, but inevitably there will arise some disagreement over who foots how much of the bill. When a book is assured and self-contained such an argument becomes flimsy. As Mary Swan put it to me, sheepishly and exhaustedly, when I pressed her if The Boys in the Trees was either a novel or a book of short stories (a question I suspect she was forced to field often during all that Giller fuss): “Can’t it just be a book?” A simple plea, but one with which readers and critics seem increasingly dissatisfied. Hackles get up and we strive ardently to delineate: to keep fiction and non-fiction in their respective camps, to prevent poetry and prose from chumming around too heartily, and to occlude any funny business between the novel and the short story collection. But when a book works – like, say, when Coming Through Slaughter works, and when Go Down, Moses works, and when [insert whichever recent is-it-fiction-or-non-fiction? publication you think works] works – then I couldn’t care less about the form, so beguiled am I by this book, by this fully-functional, self-reliant, world-encapsulating thing. That said, a story can also borrow an inch and run a mile by associating itself with a genre, can fall back on or feed from those true and tried elements inherent to and indicative of the form, and come out an exceptional novel or collection of stories. While a lot works in The Mountain Clinic, what doesn’t work has much to do with this generic kerfuffle, with this awkward divvying-up of the bill.
Walter Schwende is a first-generation Canadian, born to parents who came separately from postwar Austria, met in Toronto’s Edelweiss Club, and finally settled in Scarborough. His father’s “proud achievement” is F.S. Windows, Ltd., a framing business opened in early 1965 and $60,000 in the red by the summer of ’66. After not coming home from work one night, the police find Franz Schwende’s car on a street near Lake Ontario, and though the dredged lake yields no body, he is assumed drowned. Seven years old when his father ankles, Walter himself beats it after finishing university: hitching to Vancouver, where he lives in a building with two recently divorced Czech immigrants, taking a security job “up north” at an asbestos mine on the verge of losing its labour to cheap South American work, and eventually popping up at a Nicaraguan communist coffee farm under constant threat by the Reagan-supported Contras. In each environ Walter takes a position at the feet of an older father-surrogate, a man who shows him how little he knows about life while providing him with a new sample to dip his moral litmus strip into. Somewhere between his youthful bouts of diarrhea in Central America and his 37th birthday – a decade-or-so period of narrative lacunae over which he does not visit or phone his mother enough – Walter becomes a teacher and finally settles in Montreal – sort of. His father’s leaving all those years ago dislodged something in Walter, so that he will never be satisfied being still, always preferring “to be between places.” Thirty years after his father’s disappearance, Walter – now the same age as his father was when he fled and slavishly obsessed with ordering the facts and possibilities of the events surrounding the disappearance into a cogent whole – travels to Austria to celebrate his Opa’s 100th birthday, and there discovers the true fate of Franz Schwende – sort of.
At its best, The Mountain Clinic is an unapologetic pageant of how, as one of the asbestos miners puts it to Walter, “the world just wants to fuck you.” Each of the six stories/chapters in the book reveals a new position life can take to stick it to a man. Anton and Jan, the two Czechs Walter befriends in Vancouver, claim to exemplify the male immigrant’s experience: they carry their wives from oppression to freedom in Canada, but are reduced to the level of naive children by the new world. Inevitably, their wives leave them for more accomplished immigrants. In the mining town of Clayton, Walter meets Bren O’Hearne, a dubious acquaintance who shows him that “behind almost everyone you see there’s a broken marriage, a broken country, a crime, a drug or drinking problem.” Ernesto, who made a living burying people – his children among them – before coming to the coffee farm, explains to that “fucking idiot” (Walter) that the reason no one else swims in his favorite secluded lake is because there are freshwater sharks there, figuratively and literally. Each harsh truth serves to partly explain why his father might have felt the need to flee: the burdens of a man, or the burdens of a German in Canada, or both. It’s as a frank tally of life’s merciless polings, witnessed but not experienced by a young Walter – the “kind of Western guy Lenin called ‘useful idiot’” – and as the search for some respite from this unmitigated fucking that The Mountain Clinic excels. But when it comes to organizing and presenting its findings, the book finally falters.
Where the novel becomes sloppy is in its frame of a mature Walter in Montreal spelunking this vast cavity created by his father. The loss of anyone, explains Walter, will open up a hollow in those they left behind, and “the hollow must be filled. Quickly. The person left behind will fill it with anything: memories strong and weak, guesses, rumours, other people’s stories. He can substitute what he wants to recall for what he can’t or for whatever happened that he didn’t like. Or that embarrassed him. All that matters is filling the hole.” At his desk he tries to see through the blacked-out lines of a police Occurrence Report and glean meaning from poses in old photos: tropes that come close to being mawkish, means that feel overly familiar. This egregious talk of hole-filling and reassembly – this hiccupping restatement of the novel’s thesis in the first and final chapters – undermines the subtlety of those middle chapters that so exactly resemble short stories, where Walter’s father glimmers in the narrative’s periphery instead of filling the frame like some bratty kid at a birthday party. Practically speaking, Walter talking about what he wants to do is so much less useful than Walter actually doing it. In these instances it feels as if Hoelfe is talking about the book he wants to write instead of just writing it. What results is the underlying tension of The Mountain Clinic: Walter Schwende’s intentions, as Narrator, are novelistic, while Hoelfe’s means of telling the stories, as Author, resemble most closely the aspirations of short fiction.
Who Do You Think You Are? keeps coming to mind: one of those “books” that work, where the major events of Rose’s life occur between the stories. Her father’s death, her divorce – the events on which a novel would tend to dwell and tirelessly explore – are fully felt, but not exploited. What the short story can do better than any form is romance the effects of life without having to belabour the causes. What Hoelfe does by cobbling together a novel from short stories is apply a narrative trajectory to the whole that the parts do not support. The threads of Walter’s itinerant experiences in Vancouver, Clayton, and Nicaragua make for fine short stories, but as chapters they shunt and hobble their way toward the end, animals forced into labour they were not meant for. And, for the book’s resiliency as a novel, that decade or more gap between Nicaragua and Austria seriously retards the emotional and technical momentum of the story. Finally, when the problem raised by the novel-structure comes to be resolved – that is, when the holes get filled, when Walter either finds or invents answers to the whys of his father’s actions – the truth about Franz Schwende falls flat, regardless of whether it’s a satisfying or unsatisfying answer for Walter, as there hasn’t been a sufficient or convincing enough preparation for it.
“The point I’m getting at,” to let Clark Blaise say it better than I can manage, “is the essential short story gesture, as opposed to the novel’s. We are not in the business of establishing any of the whys… The story traces what lingers after the whirlwind, after the fracture. Or before it. We’re not in the business of establishing the reasons… why things happen. They’ve already happened.”
A Week of This
Nathan Whitlock
ECW Press, 2008
264 pages, $26.95
Nathan Whitlock’s first novel, A Week of This (A Novel in Seven Days), is one of those book-books I was talking about. One of those books that work. I’m reluctant to put a stamp of sui generis on the thing, but at the same time don’t know what other books to shelve it with. Summing it up is difficult, as it so aligns itself with the detestation Flannery O’Connor always expressed when pressed to describe her stories: if you can encapsulate your story in just a few lines then there would have been no need to write it. As the title suggests, A Week of This is a week of this: 254 pages of sorting through the abstract “this” of life. Life that is not bombastic, or careening, or dramatic, but which is also all of that.
Dunbridge is that grey Southern Ontario town north of Toronto that most Canadian readers will know from either reading about in its endless and not always monotonous renderings in our literature, or from having driven through or lived in it themselves. A town where “only the pawn shops near the old movie theatre… and the dollar stores [are] thriving – the mall and the new Wal-Mart having sucked everything else out to the highway.” A town which, like so many of its inhabitants, may once have aspired towards some use, some nobler function, some success, but which over time has settled into just being there.
Nearly-middle-aged married couple Amanda and Patrick live in the house Patrick grew up in. Amanda is determined they remodel it into something that is solely theirs – “to chew through the layers of used-up life deposited everywhere by Patrick and his parents in their four decades of living in the place” – but they aren’t getting anywhere as most of their energy is drained into their jobs and most of their money is sunk into Patrick’s floundering sports store. Aside from a crazy mother and checked-out father, the only people in Amanda’s life are her husband, her brother Ken, and her stepbrother Marcus. Marcus hasn’t got it together enough to keep a plant alive but is dipping his toe in a relationship with a young single mother anyway, and Ken, who is “not quite fully retarded, but unable to get his brain moving sometimes,” keeps busy with grunt work at the Giant Tiger store while striving towards self-sufficiency. Having moved from Toronto halfway through high school, Amanda is different from these other characters in that she knows a life outside of Dunbridge, a more engaged, less constraining, less dun life; as with someone who has lost the use of their legs halfway through life compared to one who had been born that way and knows no other way of living, her lot seems all the more insufferable.
Over the seven days little of note happens: the week Whitlock chooses to show us is as humdrum as any other, lived out by characters who all suffer from a “willful paralysis.” Amanda has a run-in with her nutbar mother during a visit to Toronto; the mall with Patrick’s sports store in it floods; Marcus is confronted by the father of his girlfriend’s baby; Ken gets flack for taking too long in the tub from his equally slow roommates; Patrick and Amanda have sex one and a quarter times. That’s about all – not to give too much away. Essentially, A Week of This is a book about nothing, though not in the quirky, overly analytical way that stories about nothing became in the wake of Seinfeld. It is a chronicle of all that which we would never think to record: the vast, overwhelming nada of Hemingway. Amanda “used to feel as though every minute that went by left its mark on her, cut her as it ticked over, but now it was as though days and weeks were just a muddy flow. It didn’t seem to matter what she did – throw herself into some job or just stand there letting it go by – nothing left its mark anymore. She was all scar tissue, like one of those thousand-year-old whales that wash up on a beach to rot.” This world is not fucking anyone, in that violent, abusive, rapacious sense of The Mountain Clinic, but rather there is an overall feeling of being mistreated, misused, made to feel dirty, and taken advantage of in the supposedly consensual congresses and intercourse of living.
Besides the form (which we will get to), it is Whitlock’s devotion to the banal that is praiseworthy – a devotion more often found in American literature than in Canada. For a first book it evinces a profound trust of both his subjects and his readers; some might call this Whitlock’s “voice,” but I’d simply like to call it remarkable writing. Here there is a sturdy investment in the vague and inarticulate signals of life, an exploration of the nagging and the nettling felt by all of his characters, a feeling they all share but can’t quite put their fingers on. Whitlock’s real triumph is that as author he never puts his finger on it either. A constant trap of overly-realistic fiction is the author’s need to go out of her way explaining things: exposing the complexities of the seemingly simple only to simplify them again, to raise the low unreasonably high. Whitlock, instead of explaining, presents.
It’s nearly impossible to explain how technically accomplished, nuanced, fully-felt, and flat-out-fine a book A Week of This is without having praise sound laborious and monotonous. Whitlock’s prose is unassuming but never boring, stripped of any flourishes that would alienate his characters from the voice describing them. The action almost always takes place in the present and Whitlock rarely relies on exposition to justify the movements and choices people make. His images are tactile and telluric, dialing the reader immediately into the experiences of his subjects: a visit from his stepsister leaves Marcus feeling “as if he’d had his hair violently combed the wrong way,” Patrick’s stifled temper is “nothing more than a sick animal inside him that snapped impotently when roused.” The accomplishment of suburb writing is in making us re-notice all that which we have learned to ignore and take for granted, in the way a punch to the stomach makes you pay attention to every single breath. In the end, the only way I can think to describe A Week of This is as a 254-page short story. It looks like a novel, walks like a novel, but it quacks like a short story.
To return to Blaise’s point about the essential gesture of a short story, A Week of This never attempts to ask, let alone answer, why. There are tangible circumstances that have brought the characters to where they are – dead or crazy parents, too much drug use in their youth, poor investments, laziness – but none of them is able to investigate seriously why they are where they are, as they have no concrete notion of where exactly that place is. For an epigram Whitlock chooses a line from Howard’s End: “Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes.” A Week of This is a book with no significant conflict, about people without specific wants, that somehow still manages to work.
The modern short story has achieved the ability to suggest without defining, to show without explaining, to transmit – the way poetry has always done in spades – some fundamental truth that can hardly be articulated but is acutely felt, so that as a reader you are aware that something essential has been passed on to you, but God help you to say exactly what. “The novel is exhaustive by nature,” points out Steven Millhauser (in his essay “The Ambition of the Short Story,”) “but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.” Whitlock understands the futility of the novel’s ambition in a way that Hoelfe doesn’t, and manages to braid that futility of form with the futility of his subject. He uses this exhaustive nature of the novel as a means of cementing the reality of his characters and of Dunbridge, filling all that sprawling novel-wide space with intimate detail that finally becomes live flesh animated by the gestures and specific vagaries of a short story. And what results is not a short story and not a novel, but “just” a book.
Tags: Issue 77