Alan Reed
"Fiction must justify itself in every line," Joseph Conrad said more than a century ago. Editors have quoted it to writers ever since. Rules, of course, can sometimes be broken with impunity, even with panache. Consider Alan Reed, a Montreal poet and student of semiotics. His stylistically audacious first novel jettisons the notion that every word and sentence must be necessary.
Isobel and Emile opens in an attic room with a bed and sink. A young couple are side by side, naked, on plain white sheets. Early-morning sun filters through dust motes. They gather their scattered clothes, dress and leave the room, exchanging only scraps of conversation. Together, they walk through small-town streets to a station, where Emile boards a train. Alone on the platform, Isobel watches the train disappear into the distance.
Isobel knows a Mr. Koch, elderly proprietor of the small grocery below the attic bedroom. Isobel returns to the bedroom late that night, to a forlorn sleep. The next morning, she begs Koch to hire her. He objects that she's too young, but finally relents. Isobel begins working mornings in the store, stocking shelves. She takes up Koch's smoking habit. Her nights are spent missing Emile and sleeping fitfully in the bedroom upstairs.
A love story unfolds in the brooding, listless days of separation. Isobel, younger and more vulnerable (though apparently of legal drinking age), clearly became smitten during the fleeting passion with Emile that preceded their first-chapter parting at the train station. As Isobel falls into a serious depression, Emile, a puppeteer, hangs out in an unnamed big city (it has streetcars) with a male friend and frets about how to channel his unfinished business with Isobel into the progress of his work as an artist. His eventual strategy is to construct puppets of Isobel and himself and make them talk to each other.
Later, he makes a short film of their melancholy parting. Like his author, Emile creates an Emile and an Isobel that he can omnisciently control, but with paint and wood and strings instead of words on paper.
The ache of abandonment in Isobel (the real puppet, as opposed to the wooden one) is touching to observe. Just as she reeled with budding love, it was snatched away by Emile's silent absence. Her lament goes into letters to Emile, written almost nightly but never posted. The notes form Reed's unfiltered missives from Isobel's battered heart. I wanted to sneak in, steal the envelopes from under her bed and mail them off before her wounds grew too large to heal.
Reed bracingly flouts conventions - for one, use of the comma. He goes for total banishment. The absence of the little impeders feels like fresh air wafting from the page. Adjectives appear sparingly and adverbs almost never: "She rests her head on the edge of the bathtub. She lets her mouth open. Her hair is over her face. It is tangled around her shoulders and floats on the surface of the water. She is cold. She can feel her skin shrivelling. She can feel herself starting to sleep."
Repetition, joined to spare, sharp images, is the hallmark of Reed's style. Often it's effective; you feel as if you're sharing the physical space of the characters' world. Still, as things progress, the redundancy tends to stall the narrative: "The cup is on a saucer. There is a spoon on the saucer. It is beside the cup. There is a bowl of sugar on the table. Emil puts the spoon into the bowl of sugar. He puts some of the sugar into the coffee." Several ensuing sentences continue to recycle saucer, cup and coffee. This mantra of reiteration runs right through the book: "She dries her face with the towel hanging next to the sink. There is a towel hanging next to the sink." In two separate passages, pages are devoted to the banal back-and-forth action of unloading crates of food from a truck. You finally have to ask why. I wondered if Reed had asked himself the same as each draft progressed.
The current of passivity and futility in these lives is part and parcel with Reed's larger theme, which is nothing less than the clash of free will and determinism. Are we all (author-puppeteers included) essentially puppets, our strings yanked by custom, duty, lovers, invisible gods, smoking grocers, sly novelists and our own hungers and blunders? Reed's puppet players seem to indicate yes. I wanted Isobel and Emile to break free of their controlling author, of his insistence on the aimless and the passive. I wanted, I think, for them to lead him and us to something more surprising. Call it my lapse - or my ornery will.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.