Book Review: Satisfyingly gritty reading
Deanne Beattie, The Peak
Despite myself, I devoured Christian McPherson’s Six Ways to Sunday like an issue of the National Enquirer: in utter self-disgust and in total fascination. Reading this collection of short stories is like trailing behind a Mardi Gras parade through every dim back alley and grimy trailer park of your darkest imagination — everything dirty, lewd, and crass is made spectacular.
The stories — 12 in all — range from the mischievous, to the shocking, to the downright depressing. They scoop the basest of human behaviour from the gutter and put it on display in neon lights: arrogance, revenge, lust, gluttony, and blatant self-pity feature prominently in this sordid and all-too-seductive indulgence.
The stories begin their dumpster dive with “The Plastic Garden,” the story of Rumford, a retired model builder who is obsessed with recreating St. Paul’s Cathedral in his living room as a six-foot-tall exact replica model. Rumford spends day and night in fevered pursuit of creating this perfect model until he unexpectedly forges friendships with a family new to his neighbourhood. The emotional high of cracking open his dark, lonely life to the light of new friends dissolves into a conclusion of surprising violence in the sudden bubbling over of his “rage of seventy years” — his life that didn’t turn out as planned.
From this story with some emotional depth, the collection flip-flops its way through pool halls and greasy restaurants to a small fiction halfway through the collection about the fated creation of the almighty chilidog: a motor vehicle accident that involves a chili canteen truck and a hotdog vendor. The author writes, tongue firmly in cheek, that “sometimes in life there are accidents. Sometimes they render greatness. This was one of these moments.” An implausible and eye-rolling dénouement pairs chili and hotdog for the title phenomenon, “Chilidog Love.”
Literary masterpiece, this is not. McPherson is an engaging and entertaining writer, but his characters are one-dimensional caricatures (everybody in mullets) and his plots often fail. McPherson is quite successful at ramping up the energy early on in his stories with the obscure and the eccentric, but cannot maintain the pace to finish strong — more often than not, the reader is left hanging with an indeterminate or unlikely conclusion.
This is the first book-length collection of stories from the Canadian writer. McPherson has been published in the noteworthy publications Kiss Machine, Queen’s Quarterly, The New Quarterly, and dANDelion. He has been the recipient of many short story and poetry awards in various Canadian competitions, including the Canadian Poetry Association’s Poetry Competition. It will be interesting to see how McPherson’s obvious talent as a truly entertaining writer will develop as he begins to produce more work.
The verdict: read this delightful romp through the dodgy part of town when you’re feeling a little bit trashy, and stash the evidence at the back of your bookshelf.