Digging the Vein
By Tony O’Neill
Contemporary Press, p. 219, $11.00 (US)

Review by Matthew Firth

Tony O’Neill’s novel Digging the Vein jolts readers with its naked honesty and unflinching gaze centred directly on the perils of heroin addiction. In short – it’s a blunt and bold junky novel. And, yes, junky novels have been done before but so damned what. What’s relevant is that O’Neill’s novel is frank, passionate, non-judgemental and superbly written. This is one of the best novels I’ve read in recent years.

The prose is fluid and perfectly paced. The novel gets claustrophobic at times, which is understandable, given it immerses the reader in a world of hard drug users and abusers from word one. The reader is drawn deeper and deeper into a realm of need, violence and treachery, so deep that it feels there will be no reprieve; that this book will end in bleak death and certain destruction. It keeps you pressing on, morosely curious to know when death will creep onto the page, only occasionally thinking that survival is possible. 

The narrator is a one-time successful musician from London living in Los Angeles. He married in Las Vegas in the throes of a drunken binge. He bounces from band to band, the gigs getting smaller as the drugs get harder. The marriage collapses. There are more relationships with women, but those centre more on drugs; sex is part of the background. Eventually, everything in his life fades to the background, is shoved there by heroin, which demands he have no other dance partner but smack:

“I looked at the clock; it was quarter to nine in the morning. A time when people all over the world, except in Hollywood, were heading to straight jobs, completely divorced from my reality of shit, sweat, vomit, and heroin. I didn’t know if I’d swap my place for theirs, but then again over the past months, I’d started to believe that I was a little crazy.”

O’Neill gives a lucid insider’s take on heroin addiction’s punishing punch. The narrator loses it all. He does go crazy. Then he tries detox and rehab but only gets his head above water momentarily, before heroin drags him back under, smothering all the earnest 12-step jargon with one quick jab to whichever shrivelled vein the narrator can find. Hell returns. The only question is whether Hell is where the narrator stays.

Digging the Vein is a beautiful plunge into an ugly world of harsh reality. It draws on Burroughs, Selby, Bukowski and Dan Fante but O’Neill has his own style and vision. This is a solid, uncompromising novel. Read it wide-eyed with your salve of choice at hand – you will need it.

The Work of Mercy By Stephen Guppy
Thomas Allen & Son, p. 240, $24.95

Review by Salvatore Difalco

A blurb from The Globe and Mail on the front cover of this otherwise attractively designed book published by Thomas Allen, with its luminous image of a blonde child on a swing in sunlight, and a lovely blue-screen thing going on, declares that Stephen Guppy is a “beguiling writer” – something that made me wince a little. Add to this that many of the stories were published in some of the most illustrious Canadian journals out there, Prism International, The Fiddlehead, Event, New Quarterly, and so forth, which told me pretty much what to expect when I started reading them, and undermined for me, unfortunately, any possibility of beguilement. One of the stories “Downwind” appeared both in Prism International and The Journey Prize Anthology, something that also put me on alert. But I tried to put all these considerations aside and be as objective and fair as I could be when I started reading the very competently written short stories in The Work of Mercy.

The book starts reasonably well with “The Light of Distant Planets,” no jarring flaws or stylistic lapses jumped out at me, though I must confess I forgot every single detail of the story within minutes of finishing it, a peculiar thing. Same with “Motels of the Northwest: A Guidebook,” a ruthlessly competent and completely forgettable story. But perhaps I’m being unfair. I’m too cynical and too outside the sensibility that engenders stories like those to pass comment without sting. But like the scorpion, I can’t help myself when I run across stories like “Downwind”, a retrospective tale told from the perspective of an old woman. It seemed like just a silly story at first – frigid, false, with something nuclear combusting (literally) in the middle of it. It was like running into a transvestite with long blonde hair and nice breasts but with five o’clock shadow and a bulge in his/her pants. But I can even get around this sort of thing if it’s done with a sense of irony or humour. But “Downwind” is a very serious story.

I know, I know, I’m being too harsh. I’m sorry, Mr. Guppy. You’re a fine writer. But I cannot be restrained and cannot be nice when I read lines like this:                  

“Like all inhuman things, they wait, their bodies changing form, abandoned in the arid light of heaven.” 

This, the last line of “Downwind”, refers to the “leaves” of the previous sentence, “floating motionless in the pool.” It’s an astonishing sentence, probably the one that clinched the story’s place in The Journey Prize Anthology. But, read it. What’s wrong with it? The same thing that’s wrong with the rest of the stories, I guess. The read like they were written in the arid light of heaven.

Strange Ghosts
By Darren Greer
Cormorant Books, p. 174, $24.95

Review by Bill Brown

While the inexperienced need not head back to square one, a few 16th century essays by Michel de Montaigne might help situate Darren Greer’s efforts. Or come closer and dip into the likes of Julian Barnes, George Orwell, Alberto Manguel and John Raulston Saul. What about the American essayist, Phyllis Rose, who calls Montaigne, “The father of jazz”? (Alluding no doubt to him being the first to let one thing lead to another, thereby kick-starting this most fluid of literary forms.) Joseph Epstein reminds us that the personal essay is not meant for the barricades; it is rather a stroll through someone’s mazy mind.

So the subject of a personal essay, no matter its title, is the author. But unlike most other forms, this one is unrepentantly personal. The competent essayist, in addition to showing us about the rooms of an interesting mind, must stitch their contents into something of universal interest. But to pull this off they must, among other things, establish respect, an amiable link with the reader, and the reader’s trust.

Darren Greer, in his opening sentence, sets a clear pitch to his no-nonsense voice: “In 1995 I checked into a drug and alcohol treatment centre in Ottawa … ” Very quickly he also reveals his love of “Hollywood crap.” He makes no “claims to have the kind of mind Wittgenstein had … ” And to this day the fellow has trouble publicly identifying as Aboriginal.

Do I hear, so what?

And you’d be right, save for his thoughtful reflections and all the unforced references to Homer, Tennyson, Dostoyevsky, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, Oscar Wilde, Felix Partz, Tennessee Williams – a hallmark of essayists who assume a cultivated readership.

But Greer’s references are more than name-dropping. He marshals them to his greater cause. He muses, “If I want to tell my coming-out story, I have to find another way into it … ” And, it seems, that’s what Strange Ghosts is all about. Through Greer’s mind’s eye, we look down on the world from Paris to Phnom Penh. We dip into literary and historical lives as well as his own in the service of revealing a few threads: the alienation and isolation we all feel and the “coming-out” story as a never-ending experience for each of us. He might have come-out as gay, as HIV positive, as an addict, but how many of us continue to come-out as failed lovers, as flawed fathers, hopeless dreamers, or the activists Greer refers to as naïve and angry “corn-fed young men and women with bees in their bandanas” about the state of the world. As he says in his closing sentence: “We carry our prisons with us.”

Humour, while common in the personal essay, is downplayed here. It comes in drops. Greer’s collection, as a result, comes across as very personal and extremely touching, although it may also read at time as too earnest.

And while I’m inclined towards Epstein’s notion that the personal essay is best left to “the middle-aged and beyond” with their vast store of experience and reflections, Darren Greer has made a fair case for the opposition. He speaks honestly and entertainingly. We believe him. This reader, at least, feeling a bond of understanding and affection, will be looking for more from this not-too-young man.

Read reviews from Issue #14