Book Review of “Duck Boy” by Bill Bunn

Lynn C. Fraser
Review of

Duck Boy
by Bill Bunn
Bitingduck Press (2012)
ISBN 978-1-938463-37-2
e-book $4.99

Duck Boy is a novel filled with symbolism and Alchemy. The first symbol, “Duck”, is in the title and represents both the derogatory Webster’s dictionary definition of “one that cannot act effectively because of a disablement or other cause” and, symbolically, as a journey of the soul.
      Steve, the main character, starts the novel filled with self doubt. Through a journey of discovery and growth he changes into an able confident young man. Having lost his mother under mysterious circumstances Steve is trying to fit in while accepting the loss, yet he continues to believe he will find her. Will he be able to find her? Can he bring her back? His wacky Aunt Shannon thinks so. Steve doesn’t believe her.
      The addition of alchemy to the story creates a new level of interest. Transformations are not limited to changing one object into another, along the old lead to gold theory line, but, include the movement of the alchemist through space. Steve learns that his mother, along with his aunt are both alchemists, and that perhaps alchemy is responsible for his mother’s disappearance. Aunt Shannon teaches Steve that alchemy is performed through the appropriate use of language and a benu stone. Bill Bunn emphasizes the value of words to change ourselves and the world around us, and gives the reader a clue as to how Steve will change his situation.

You can change a thing with words much easier than you can with fire. I can bend words so many ways, break them, and put them back together again. And when you change a word in just the right way, you change the world.” Aunt Shannon paused (51).

Bill Bunn’s use of language in Duck Boy is superb with remarkably fresh images starting in the prologue and continuing throughout the novel. Images like, “[a] brown pond of coffee on the floor … surrounded by the shark-fin shards of a shattered mug” (2), a part of the scene when Steve discovers his mother has disappeared. Then later when he thinks he sees his mother at the mall, and she starts off “slaloming through the food court tables” (7) while Steve’s progress to catch her is thwarted by a crowd that sprouts up. Steve is awoken from this daymare by “[a] badly dressed frown with legs” (8), his teacher Mr. Pollock. Further on while Christmas shopping with his Great Aunt Shannon, Steve mentally voices the depressing thought, “I’m going to the mall with a cartoon” (64). The wacky aunt character made me laugh.

Symbolism abounds throughout the novel with such instances as Aunt Shannon’s white “1966 Dodge Monaco convertible” (64) being referred to as “the dragon rumbled to life” (65) when it started. Later in the story Steve has to master the dragon — drive the car — to return to Aunt Shannon’s house after she goes missing in the same manner as his mother went missing.

At first Steve doesn’t believe his aunt can change one object into another, until he sees her do it, and then has success causing a transformation himself with the aid of his aunt and her benu stone.
      Once Steve finds his benu stone and starts to experiment, he discovers that perhaps he shouldn’t short change his own abilities. The choice of benu, as the name of the stone that allows for transformations, brings in more symbolism: the Benu Bird (also known as the Phoenix) whose meaning in alchemy refers to a rebirth from its own ashes after combusting voluntarily. By the end of the story we see a new Steve, one who could be said to have returned from his own ashes.
      At the end of the novel Steve proudly refers to himself as Duck Boy with the proclamation that he is master of the world of pieces. “You are my world now…You will listen to me. I am a whole one: I am the Duck Boy” (281).

I expect I will come back to Duck Boy for an additional read in the future.
      In the past ten years a number of novels written for a younger audience have crossed over to the adult market, I think Duck Boy by Bill Bunn has the potential of making that crossover.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

Book Review of “Malarky” by Anakana Schofield

Rea Tarvydas
a review of

Malarky
by Anakana Schofield
Biblioasis (2012)
ISBN 978-1-926845-38-8
$19.95

Some novels are laid out on a grid: turn left at the careful transition to arrive at the next chapter. Others are a tangle of intersecting roads and side streets, and there’s a car wreck on the fast road that’s creating havoc with traffic patterns. Malarky is the latter. Don’t expect detailed directions and a simple trajectory. This is one wild ride. Annabel Lyon said, “Malarky spins and glitters like a coin flipped in the air — now searingly tragic, now blackly funny. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.”
     I agree wholeheartedly.
     Set in present day west of Ireland, Anakana Schofield tells the story of Our Woman, a farmer’s wife, as she struggles to understand both her adulterous husband and her college-age son, Jimmy — and, caught in her thoughts, discovers her own life is unfulfilled. She is obsessed with sex as an antidote to her joylessness and, as she methodically explores her sexuality, comes to understand both her husband’s infidelities and her son’s sexual life as a gay man. Delightfully, she sides with her son “at the same malarky” (21) and explores this through a series of hilarious sexual encounters.
     I loved this book from its opening lines. “— There’s no way round it, I’m finding it very hard to be a widow, I told Grief, the counsellor woman, that Tuesday morning” (7). What captured me was the strong, real voice of a woman who “wasn’t in my ordinary life, I was in an extraordinary moment in my ordinary life” (129). A woman-on-the-verge, you might say.
     Although the reader soon discovers that both husband and son are deceased, this novel is delightful and funny. I was struck by how engaging the character of Our Woman is as she alternates between compulsively caring for a snoring drunk on the bus by wiping his face clean with wet wipes, thinking, “She could bring him home and fix him up” (145), and rebelling against her husband, “I remaining furious, paid little heed. I’d paid so much heed, now I was on strike” (48). I was also struck by the strength and value of her friendships. Our Woman’s girlfriends appear at her kitchen door on a daily basis for a spot of hot tea, provide meddling advice, and the tape measure. Jimmy’s friends are also there for him. When Our Woman escapes to Dublin to get away from marital discord and visits son Jimmy, she sits with them in a gay bar with her knitting in her lap, enjoying their company. “They were young, they were young lads, all of them…[b]ut they were pleasant, laughed together” (42).
     Malarky is an episodic novel and, as such, shifts back and forth through time. Each episode involves tense and point of view shifts, and challenges the reader to follow along. This is not an easy book to read and the reader must have faith. Schofield’s structural choice is perfect for an exploration of loss, and mimics the movement, back and forth, through the messy process. It’s real life.
     Schofield’s strong beautiful prose is compelling, propelling you through this turbulent story.

In the Blue House today she sits on the low Chinese fabric stool amid the rubble and jumble of the life that departed here so inexplicably that day. Those waves from Jimmy’s hand are still with her from the bus and new ones arrive as she sits in the house she is not supposed to be in (148).

     Of interest, Schofield’s prose falls apart as Our Woman falls apart, another stylistic choice that mimics Our Woman’s mental dissolution in the psych ward of Castlebar Hospital. Throughout, her girlfriends are by her side, warning her, bickering and berating one another while Our Woman acts out yet again. Here’s an example:

     Joanie thinks Bina’s greedy eating all Our Woman’s Quality Street. As Bina is blaming Joanie, and Joanie is blaming Bina, Our Woman inquires where does Bina think the woman on the front of the puzzle book lives.
— For the love of God, Bina hushes her, don’t ask me such a thing, or they’ll have the sheets off ya (210).

A gang of middle-aged women looking out for one another reminds us of what’s important in lives — our friendships.
     Malarky reminded me of a rowdy Greyhound bus ride I took in the 90s. A curtain of winter rain triggered avalanches at either end of a mountain town, effectively closing down the highway, and the bus driver deserted us: stoners in the back; a couple of old ladies with asthma in the front; and, me and my seatmate. In the crowded all-night diner, the conversation deteriorated into an admission of a diagnosis of ovarian cancer from my seatmate and a flailing fistfight between the stoners. A love-struck taxi driver deposited me at the train station where a drunken MP and his sober wife argued, loudly, careening from one wooden bench to the next. The train was hours late. I wasn’t sure if I’d make it home but I did. I’ll never forget it.
     I can’t wait to read Anakana Schofield’s next offering.

Anakana Schofield’s Malarkey won this year’s Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Congratulations Anakana.
This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

Book Review of “I Know Who You Remind Me Of” by Naomi K. Lewis

Ryan Stromquist
A review of

I Know Who You Remind Me Of
by Naomi K. Lewis
Enfield & Wizenty (2012)
ISBN: 978-1-926531-51-9
$29.95

Naomi K. Lewis’ I Know Who You Remind Me Of is a collection of nine short stories. Lewis playfully toys with the art of narrative like a clockmaker. Each part is carefully examined but the whole is never compromised. Instead, Lewis invites you into her world: an intimate portrayal of sexuality juxtaposed against sensuality. The tone is set with her first story “Warp,” which depicts the main character, Karen, in a sexual coming-of-age yarn.

Why did Gavin have to be so nice to her, staring hard, like he’d never forget her? Why did he have to sleep with his forehead pressed between her shoulder blades? And why did she never believe him when he reminded her he didn’t love her, was biding his time, waiting for someone real? (24)

These lines show that Karen realizes that her sexuality is intrinsically linked with how others view her, which leads her to an epiphany of loneliness. I love this story not because Lewis paints a vivid picture (she does), not because the dialogue springs off the page (it does), but because each sentence is ripe with insight. Consider the lines: “[h]ardly anything was really her . . . without him telling her, she would never have even guessed that Green Day was okay to like, but Aerosmith wasn’t” (24). Lines like these display the painful truths of the awareness of adolescent innocence.
     In “Weft,” her character Ben claims: “I’ve been questioning the dichotomy between intimacy and loneliness” (134), which becomes a central discussion recurring throughout the stories. Indeed, each of Lewis’ characters are struggling with intimacy in one way or another, whether it’s intimacy leading to loneliness in “Warp,” yearning for lost intimacy in “Nix and Six,” or the desire for intimacy in “Seesaw.” Connecting each story with the dominant themes of sexuality, sensuality, intimacy, and loneliness, I Know Who You Remind Me Of maintains a tight knit narrative that never falters. A story like “Flex,” which is uniquely told through the span of a week, forwards and backwards, walks a tightrope of plot, yet never allows the plot to strangle the writing.
     Referencing the act of writing, Hemingway wrote: “[w]rite the truest sentence that you know;” Lewis’ I Know Who You Remind Me Of is an exercise in the “truest sentence.” Lewis wastes no words; rather, each sentence is imbued with wisdom.

She pressed her pelvis up against his and closed her eyes, lifted her face, lips parted. He ground her hips down against the bottom of the tub, and she grunted in discomfort, but then she smiled. Ben tugged her knees, sliding her until her head dunked under water. She came up sputtering, coughing with her mouth wide open like a little kid’s in a swimming pool. He kept her arms pinned down so she had to hold her face above water with the strength of her neck, and she freaked out, wiggling like a fish. He released her arms. (141)

So much is said here with so little. With very little descriptors Lewis is able to create fully formed characters with movement alone. The characters’ distaste for one another was beautiful. Rarely have I pondered a line, “[p]rofoundly distasteful” (141), and wondered if the character both simultaneously believed and didn’t believe it. It is this indecisiveness that humanizes Lewis’ characters. Lewis writes: “Some things are describable, that’s all, and some things aren’t” (113), but I get the feeling that Lewis doesn’t come across much she can’t describe.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013