03. Forgive Us Our Eccentricities as We Forgive the Eccentricities of Others: Part one

 

Another possible source of my anger and frustration, something to explain why my optimism is no longer strong enough to sustain belief in the limited eighteen-month warranty for the Quizz #2-17 Performa Vacuum, why everything tastes bland and flavourless, and why nothing excites me, is that my fourth novel, the one that was supposed to reinvigorate my flagging literary career, is terrible. It’s simply bad. I’m not exaggerating or being my own worst critic. As a work of fiction, the book undeniably fails to come together. I have published three novels and certainly there have been sections within these published pages that I feel failed to express my talents fully, swaths of twenty to thirty consecutive pages that were certainly not written from the top of my game—but never have I felt this way about an entire book.

This is the first time I’ve deemed an entire manuscript unpublishable. I know, without doubt, that the defects and deficiencies of this novel cannot be redeemed by vigorous editing, a reimagining of plot, or a deeper understanding of the characters’ needs and desires. This is not just a novel that needs work: this is a novel that doesn’t work. It’s just fucking bad. I know this in my heart to be true, and that has never happened to me before.

That being said, there are some really good moments in it. I think it starts off well. This is the opening paragraph…

 

I’m not going to say exactly what I was running from. It was the same thing you are. Different numbers in the same equation, that’s all: x (chases) y = y (runs). Maybe you don’t even realize you have an x. You should find that very frightening, because it means your x is so big and terrifying you can’t even find the nerve to look over your shoulder. So steel your courage and search your heart and ask yourself what your x is.

Is it the lover you’ve fallen out of love with, but can’t seem to leave? The best friend you abandoned in their moment of need? Perhaps it’s just the undeniable knowledge that grabs you by the throat late at night and shakes you awake, screams silently in your head how somewhere along the line you made the wrong decision and now the life you’re living is a complete and utter lie.

We all have an x. So it doesn’t matter what my x was, even though mine caused me to stand on the gravel shoulder of the southbound lanes of the Don Valley Parkway trying to hitch a ride to anywhere else.

 

Not bad, eh? The novel goes completely to shit very shortly, two or three pages after that. The book is weird, but the weirdness is forced, not allegorical or metaphorical or fabulist, but just weird for weird’s sake. The story follows Simon, a man in his late twenties who was born with green skin, webbed hands, and webbed feet. Doesn’t that sound marketable? In a literary landscape ruled by realism, where no book with a fantastical premise has even been shortlisted for a major award—and don’t give me that shit about Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, because that’s simply the exception that proves the rule—I have no fucking idea why I thought, why I was so stubbornly and absolutely convinced, that a character who’s little more than a giant talking frog would resonate with readers.

But that’s not the worst of it. The book quickly turns into a surrealistic coming-of-age story, a narrative format and arc that work together in much the same way that bicycle tires and glass do. The plot, such as it is, follows Simon, the talking frog, who was raised by his human mother and who never met his father, as he sets off to find himself and, hopefully, others like him. I think it was an attempt to stand out, to gain recognition through originality rather than artistic merit, the literary equivalent of a gimmick. This ultimately led to the creation a sort of semantic new wave band, turning me into a CanLit version of A Flock of Seagulls or Men Without Hats, but without all the sales and cool haircuts.

Two years ago, when I started Forgive Us Our Eccentricities as We Forgive the Eccentricities of Others, I thought it was going to be my breakthrough. But the novel’s simply unreadable and, even worse, boring. It’s not just me who thinks this. My best friend Zach, who’s been the first reader for all of my books, thinks it stinks.

I wish I had the strength to burn it. I am so aware of how bad this book is that I can even see the rare passages, the three successful paragraphs tucked amongst twenty pages of shit, where it’s not. I think the third chapter ends well. Our green-skinned Kerouac starts hitchhiking, but near the end of his third day he still hasn’t made it out of Ontario. Of course, his failure is the result of him having green skin, although this is never explicitly stated in the text. Why? Because I believed it would be more literary not to do so, as if being obscure was a narrative virtue.

It’s afternoon when a car pulls over for him. Simon runs up to the tinted passenger window and it lowers: there is a green-skinned man behind the wheel. Can you believe it? Same webbed hands, hairless head, the whole bit. The other giant talking frog, the one driving a fucking Buick Electra, offers Simon a ride. For hours they drive north in silence. Once again, I choose to leave the character’s motivation for this silence “open.” Simon remains in the passenger seat, heading east on the Trans-Canada Highway when…

 

The driver suddenly took the first exit we passed. It was 7:15 in the evening and the sun was three inches from the horizon, spilling bottles of orange and yellow paint. There was a high ridge of hills to our right, but he didn’t drive toward them. We passed a gas station and he pulled in, drove around to the back, and parked the car pointing at a brick wall, the front bumper less than six inches from it.

Apprehension and fear filled me—here I was sitting in a stranger’s car, nobody knew where I was, and I didn’t even know this man’s name. I had put my trust in him simply because his skin was green. As these undeniable realities struck me, I turned my whole body, picked up my knapsack with my left hand, and found the door handle with my right.

“Go if you have to,” he said. Both of his hands returned to the steering wheel and he stared out the front windshield at the brick wall. “But it might be worth it just to sit here, quietly, for the next several minutes before you do. All I’m asking you to do is sit here and watch the sun set.”

There was something about his voice, calm but serious, that made me pause. Although I kept my hand on the door handle and my knapsack on my lap, I stayed in the passenger seat. I stared ahead, thought I’d give it a try, matched my breathing with his. I did everything just like he was doing. I just didn’t get it. Once he’d mentioned the sunset, I’d assumed he would restart the car, find a different location, at the very least reverse so that he wasn’t parked directly behind the back wall of a gas station. When I looked through the front windshield, all I saw, all it was possible to see, was a brick wall. “I can’t even see the sun,” I said.

“Who said you had to see the sun to watch it set?”

I stared ahead, unblinkingly, and after three or four minutes I began to see how the light changed, and the colours with it. I watched the red brick turn to rust, and then to an almost-brown before it became a dark, dark red. I saw the dashboard turn purplish-blue and then to coal. My own skin turned more shades of green than I had ever seen before. Every second that passed brought out a new colour to my skin, each one so rich, so deep, it seemed like it should have had its own name, not just be considered a shade of something else.

“Wow,” I said.

“There ya go.” He breathed out a breath I hadn’t noticed he’d been holding. “You’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna be just fine. My name is Ást.”

“Simon.”

We shook hands, our mutual webbing making this awkward in a most endearing way. Ást turned on the headlights, started the engine, backed away from the wall, and returned to the highway.

 

I think that one of the reasons Forgive Us Our Eccentricities as We Forgive the Eccentricities of Others is such a total and ultimate disaster is that it was written from a place of wishful thinking, a novel that wasn’t a story I needed to tell, but a collection of pages with words on them sequenced to impress. Even this scene, which is honestly one of the best in the book, is a minor observation, something that could have been distilled to a throwaway comment by a minor character. It would actually have been stronger, created a greater impact on the reader, if it had been presented within the narrative as a minor turn, something that allowed the reader to discover a small piece of wisdom on their own terms, instead of me shoving it in their face like some oversized phallus in a bit of poorly lit pornography. As it is, the only comfort I can take from Forgive Us Our Eccentricities As We Forgive the Eccentricities of Others is that, as failures go, it is a spectacular one.

This is small comfort and does little to quell my fears that I’ve lost it, that I will never write another piece of worthwhile prose in my life, that the very thing that used to make me feel safe and secure has been taken from me, like a beloved stuffed animal pulled from the arms of a toddler in a well-meaning but unwise effort to prepare him for the first day of school.