~

perfect for
fireside read

TRE NOTION of the
megabuck best-selling novel
is mostly hype — while a few
do generate big profits, most
serious fiction doesn’t earn
back the advance money and
any bookseller or publisher
knows it’s a solid nonfiction
list that pays the bills.

Despite the economics, publish-
ers like Vancouver’s Douglas &
MclIntyre fortunately remain com-
mitted to bringing out good fiction
by emerging writers and even tal-
ented unknowns. Here’s a trio you
can put on your fireside table for
the chiily nights ahead. -

Australian transplant Gayla Reid '
arrived in Vancouver in 1967 and
mostly stayed. The stories in To Be
There With You just deftly tran-
scend autobiography, reflecting the
turbulent latter decades of this cen- *
tury from the awakenings of girl-
hood in staid ’50s Australia to the
disillusionment of the Vietnam war,
(in which Australia played a more
active role than we did) and the on-
going ambivalent attempts to forge
new kinds of tuman relationships.

Though Reid’s sparse style has
obviously been influenced by
American minimalists, these aren’t
the bland inconsequential blurbs
that pass for fiction in pretentious
American magazines. Reid has a
gift for understatement that picks
out the nuances that define unortho-
dox emotional relations, like love
between an orphan girl in the care
of her ne’er-do-well Uncle, —*
expressed through their exchang
of lines frorn the old fashioned
verse of Henry Lawson and Banjo.
Patterson. (Aussie counterparts of.
Robert Service.)

Vancouver writer Pete
McCormack's Shelby has his own
problems with relationships.among
the self-centred Geiteration Xers of
the '90s. When he:Grops.¢

school, terminally’ "disappoinithig his “2fo' ‘her, scribbling away. th Her faith”

Revelstoke parents, and his grand-
mother, the only person who under-
stands him, dies, he slips his cable
and drifts, playing occasional guitar
with a dubious rock band called
Smegma Bomb!

A sort of 90s Holden Caulfield,
Shelby wallows at length in the
-histrionic and onanistic self-picying
uncertainty of youth, which

John Moore
BOOK REVIEW

were at that age.

The inescapable emptiness of
the Prairie landscape has produced
some wonderful tales of small insu-
lar communities that offer a micro-

’ cosm of human frailties and foibles;

“life's rich pageant” presented as
the Fall Fair Parade complete with

-4-H floats under the sponsorship of

all-powerful Hereford Breeders
Club in the all too likely town of
Likely, Alberta in Gail Anderson-
Dargatz’s The Miss Hereford
Stories.

Technically a collection of short
stories, told from the point of view
of Martin Winkle, growing up in

- Likely during the 60s and °70s,

The Miss Hereford Stories come as
close to a novel as possible without
using the word. Anderson-Dargatz
hasn't done anything radical here;
using the viewpoint of a boy to give

* ironic perspective to portraits of

adults and a small rural town as a
stage for universal human drama
isn’( new. W.O. Mitchell set the
benchmark with Who Has Seen the
Wind?

But the test of a writer isn’t the

_knack of coming up with something -

“original”; it’s the ability to take a

“well-worn formuia and make it
"’ seem as new as this. morming’s dew.

Fortunately, Anderson-Dargatz
seems totally free of the stylistic
pretenses that afflict most emerging
“writers. She has the modesty ofa,
great writer;.she wants You.to listen
to the narrator, : the storyteller n nots
kitchen on Vancouver Island:

. Lately the reader’s world seems
to‘have been taken over by Writers,
a neurotically self-obsessed tribe of
bores who presume you must be
more interested in their grotty dys-
functional existences than in any
story they might care to tell.
“Creative Non-Fiction” is fast

becoming a euphemism for Failure

McCormack renders with energetic = Of Imagination. Gail Andersen-

authenticity. X-dated readers will

x, identify dfrectly while us Jurassic
classics uncomfortably recall what
“; awful whining wankers we too

Dargatz is working on a novel:

’ while you’ re waiting for it, re-read

The Miss Hereford Stories.
Repeatedly.

MOUNT SEYMOUR UNITED CHURCH

Saturday, October 22,
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LIONS GATE HOSPITAL

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MOTORISTS & CYCLISTS
i LIONS GATE BRIDGE
SINGLE LANE TRAFFIC / SIDEWALK CLOSURES

The Ministry of Transportation and Highways advises motorists that there will
be single lane traffic in both directions on the Lions Gate Bridge from Sunday,
October 2 to Monday, November 7. Cyclists are advised that one sidewalk on
the bridge will be closed 24 hours per day during this period. Single lane
traffic and sidewalk closures are needed for the replacement of sidewalk
paneis on the bridge and will be in effect as follows:

Sunday to Thursday
11:00 P.M. - 5:30 A.M.

Motorists and cyclists are asked to obey the construction zone speed limit
and signing while work is in progress.

Province of
British Columbia

Ministry of Transportation
and Highways

FE served for years as a Cabinet Minister under Bill ea oe
Bennett. He joined CKNW in 1984. But he never left the .Q.

Benne Ie 0:35 AM — 11 AM WEEKDAYS
Nick-named “Dr. No” for his tough stand against the Meech Lake Accord, his
opinions were seen in thé Globe & Mail, The Montreal Gazette and The New York
Times. It became the strongest ‘No’ vote in BC’s history, a resounding 68%, and many
feel he had a major impact.

in 1993, the BC Association
of Broadcasters gave

Dr. No a resounding “Yes",
as they named Rafe Mair
‘Broadcaster of the Year’
But it was, after all, a
purely political decision.

We Make It News.

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