THE PUSH & THE PULL
By Darryl Whetter
Goose Lane, 322 pages, $21.95
Darryl Whetter's first novel occurs in a relentlessly figurative world where everything is heavy with significance. It's not enough, for instance, to tell a boy that his parents are splitting up while they are at the dog pound. In order to make the symbolism clearer, an innocent puppy's "unbelievably fluffy chest" has to be crushed by a passing car.
The Push & the Pull is the story of that boy, Andrew Day, and the long bike ride he makes years later from Halifax to Kingston, Ont. It's also the story of his relationship with Betty, which starts promisingly but ends in a dispute over her desire to go backpacking in Europe, and his interest in doing an MA about bicycling culture at the University of Nova Scotia. In a third layer, it recounts Andrew's struggle to care for his father, Stan, victim of a rare degenerative disorder.
Many of the themes - masculinity, sex, the father-son relationship - of Whetter's 2003 story collection, A Sharp Tooth in the Fur, are explored here. But much of that collection's urgency is gone, giving way to longer meditations which are rarely as resonant.
Whetter weaves his three narratives together, rotating among them over the course of 132 short chapters. The novel's structure keeps things moving, but its success depends on the three narratives being equally interesting. In this uneven novel, that's not often the case. Though the Betty and Stan chapters are often illuminating, one is less enthused about the cyclical return to Andrew's bike-seat philosophizing.
Whetter peppers Andrew's odyssey with irrelevant episodic incidents. He is burned by a cigarette. His gear is stolen. He steals some pepperoni. Finally, he has sex with a man named Glen in an act that, despite some bisexual foreshadowing, seems uncharacteristic since Andrew spends the rest of the book lusting for Betty. It's not that the two experiences are mutually exclusive. It's just that Andrew Day isn't a large enough creation to contain them; they read like forced attempts to add dimension to an otherwise limp character.
Whetter's prose is weighed down with heavy-handed metaphors and superfluous descriptors. STDs are compared at length to Greek gods. An application of Gold Bond powder to Andrew's testicles finds his private parts described as an "incomparable scoop of anatomy," "island fruit," the "slack-furred butt of a tailless rodent," a "raccoon mask," and "long scarves, fluttering prayers." Stan's sentences are likened to "that mogul skier's descending bounce off felicitous adjectives and judicious verbs."
Despite these excesses, Whetter is a skilled writer. Nowhere is that clearer than in the chapters about Stan and Betty, which are so moving and true as to make the long trip almost worth it. While the writing is still self-conscious, these sections dissect the two relationships into the small gestures that make up our intimate lives - a jut of a chin here, a nod of the head there - and show the possibilities of Whetter's prose.
Betty and Stan are fine creations, each easily more interesting than Andrew. Betty's undergraduate enthusiasm is endearing, while Stan's ornery wisdom is a welcome diversion. Because of the novel's focus on Andrew, neither of them is explored in the depth one would like, but their presence still lends a welcome complexity.
Throughout, much is made of the novel's title and central theme. Andrew, caught between the past and the future, is pushed and pulled by memory, language and time. But the real push and pull is between the novel's desire to seem profound and the necessity of relating its story. In the novel's last 50 pages, however, the distance between these two objectives narrows, and the book improves. The action quickens, the prose becomes tighter, the metaphors less involved and the story more affecting. Had it spent less time spinning its wheels up front, The Push & the Pull would be a much better ride.
Jared Bland is the managing editor of The Walrus, and writes the magazine's books blog at walrusmagazine.com/theshelf.