Matt Duggan
Toronto teacher and screenwriter Matt Duggan has already published a well-received novel for kids. Presumably, it's not about drugged-up fratricide, the open-throttle engine driving Cherry Electra. Duggan's first novel for grown-ups is pitched at those who will carry on despite (or because of) the yucky prison assault on the opening page. What could be more personal than a mug of hot urine?
Still reading? I might have guessed.
Duggan's drenched prisoner is an alleged murderer awaiting trial. He calls himself E and comes to us in lively letters pleading innocence to his girlfriend, T, who believes he offed a friend's dad and is set to say so in court. E has an epistolary eloquence uncommon in a jailbird. He cuts words like "germane" and "turgid" and "sagacious" in with enough asshole this and effing that to curl any schoolmarm's hair.
His legal counsel, "the softest, most furry, plush-toy pinky-ringed lawyer ever to crawl out from the Yellow Pages," says the girlfriend's evidence bodes "on the bad side of bad." He suggests a plea bargain, but E wants the drama of a full defence: "stern old judge... bosomy court reporter... a quick-kill sketch artist to render my charcoal image... as a hard-eyed psychopath with an unshaven asymmetrical face, Guilty as Shit."
But enough sampling of the steel-toilet potty mouth. Let's talk story. Now that girlfriend is in bed with the Crown, E's letters can't be sent without incurring a charge of witness tampering. No matter, the serial epistle is more a therapeutic monologue. "I mean to break your heart with these things," he tells T.
In the back-story narrative of his defence, the dad he didn't murder in cottage country is Harry, "a multipley divorced manic-depressive alcoholic Lithuanian who'd made a mountain of money selling automatic garage door openers," also father of E's best friend, Teddy. On the holiday weekend in question, E and T bumper-to-bumpered their way out of sweltering Toronto in E's rusty Hyundai, in a plan to meet up with Teddy at Harry's cottage and squeeze production funds out of him for Teddy's next weird art film. They arrive to find Harry painting the driveway stones, "clad only in dazzling white Reeboks and a simple black Speedo avec cellphone fanny pack."
Way back as a fatherless 13-year-old, E had latched onto Harry as a kitschy power-dad figure, "stepping out of an Arctic White Cadillac Seville...reeking of Brut, booze and Belmont Menthol Special Milds, and carrying a stainless steel briefcase that looked like a chunk off a fighter jet." Duggan has a gift for wickedly pinning characters to their property, clothing and accessories. Coke-head Teddy's wardrobe alone is a delightful, recurring cringe-maker, but it's the big American cars that really steal the show. A massive '70s "gleaming golden barge" of a Chrysler Cordoba cruises the suburbs like "the wheeled burial sarcophagus for a disco era Aztec king." The titular cherry-red Buick Electra, captured in meticulous and loving detail, grows in faux-tragic stature to become a sadly, badly used partner in crime.
Back in the jailhouse present, homicide dicks Banning and Marcucci interrogate the snarky, then terrified, E. Duggan's telegraphic cop talk is just this side of parody, funny in a fresh, intricate, genre-bending way, the sort of way it might be in film only if casting and direction were flawless. If a film is made of this book (we must hope), market-driven casting or script-tampering could easily kill the galloping, grotty artistry of it. Duggan's effects are not easily described or adequately quoted. They soar on the miracle spirit of cold lake bear boners; on a roaring hot south wind over Georgian Bay as Duggan marshals weather like you've never yet encountered it: "a steady flat relentless blast that felt false and forced, as though manufactured in hell's own factory discount wind outlet, freighting freeway grit all the way from downtown Detroit."
These asides are consistently delicious on their own yet rarely gratuitous, supporting the whole. While Harry is still alive, E stands with him beside a bulldozer that's just hacked a construction clearing out of pristine forest: "The sweaty work smell of the machinery hung like a pleasant greasy fart in the fresh morning air." The compressed irony, sensory verve and sardonic bite of that sentence sum up Duggan's voice - except where E is about to lose his girlfriend, when his desperation, it must be said, raises a lovely twinge of the heartbreaking.
Review-speak can't tell you. You've got to read it. If you're an inveterate plot person, you may find the steady pressure of whiz-bang observation somewhat crowding the story arc, but never mind. The voice is true.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.