Montreal Gazetteer
The city is the most dynamic character in John Lavery’s linked collection of stories
BY Adam Lewis Schroeder
Photography by Wanda O’Connor
In his book of connected stories, Quebec writer John Lavery concentrates, for the most part, on the myriad trivialities that constitute the lives of police officers and criminals, and ends up with one of the year’s weightiest and most ambitious works of fiction. You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off (ECW Press) is a linked collection, and it’s often the reviewer’s quandary to concentrate on individual stories or the arc of the whole. As strong as both elements are in Kwaznievski, it’s Lavery’s style that conquers all.
A number of characters make repeat appearances over the course of the novella and seven stories, the most conspicuous being Paul-François Bastarache, who rises from police sergeant in the first story to superintendent in the last, but more prominent still is Montreal itself. The city emerges as the most generous of Lavery’s characters, scattering second chances like so many snowflakes—a junkie becomes a successful businessman, a taxi driver gains both a priceless stamp and enlightenment, a child star rebuilds his career via the FLQ crisis.
Seldom is anyone in the book as angry as the title might suggest, despite its recurring plot motifs of euthanasia of elderly women, prenatal misadventure and middle-aged policemen carrying on quasi-sexual relationships with quasi-homeless women who they vaguely suspect might be guilty of something. (If that sounds Kafkaesque, it is.) Lavery’s characters are too multi-faceted to bog down in as straightforward an emotion as anger, just as his prose is complicated yet virtuosic, as when he describes two people in “The Third Patient”: “Jane receded into her headache, resisted the variegated exuberance of her neighbour whose paraplegia was all the more arresting in that it seemed to enhance rather than dampen her vitality.” The sentence is as good an introduction to Lavery as any—I had to read it twice but was more than happy once I had. I can’t remember the last time my dictionary got such a workout; heavyweights like acarpous, apneic, blepharitis, chevaline, maillot and sidereal make frequent appearances (the last one was my favourite, go and look it up).
Some readers, therefore, might find Kwaznievski hard going in terms of both content and style, and I admit that I had my reservations at times, as in the opening story’s description of a humble raincoat, “so eroded by time and the sun it appeared to have been chiselled from a quartziferous formation with a naturally greenish mud-blue hue.” Yet for every line that stumbles more than it elucidates there are a dozen that succeed brilliantly, as in the title character’s admission that a glimpse of her favourite garbage man “might cause her heart to leap out of its hiding place … and tear off down the street after him, barking idiotically, nipping at his feet.”
For most readers, the appeal of a collection of linked stories is that not only do they get a set of tales, each well-crafted enough to stand on its own, but recurring elements throughout lend the collection a heft and a resonance that a single story cannot attain. And on these terms, Kwaznievski for the most part succeeds; “Two Bass Birds” and “The Chocolate Dick” are both wonderful stories in their own right, but the manner in which they echo each other—a similar violent event mirrored in each, enacted by a desperate punk in the former and a police superintendent in the latter—gives the second story a weight that makes the reader lean forward with a tingle in his scalp, and makes “Two Bass Birds,” 150 pages earlier, loom larger in hindsight. The title novella, which incorporates nearly half the book, neatly utilizes the main characters from the five stories that came before it, and as fun as it is to watch them trot across, this piece is not nearly as strong as the individual tales. It’s a detective story—inasmuch as the central character is a detective and there are secrets to be uncovered—but at the end of its meandering plot, Detective Inspector P-F discovers only a fact that readers already knew. The stories that bracket the novella, “The October Tree” and “The Man on the Stamp,” are two of the strongest pieces, Canadian or otherwise, that I’ve ever read, tipping the scales firmly in Kwaznievski’s favour.
