Bold Statements
Stunt
Claudia Dey
Coach House Books, 2008
220 pages, $19.95
Claudia Dey’s debut novel, Stunt, is written in the present-tense first-person semi-omniscient. That first person is Eugenia Ledoux, nine years old for the first two sections before doubling in age overnight to eighteen for the final three. In meandering flashbacks, she gives us her history, including conception and birth. This knowledge about events she could never remember, in other parts of the city, or in the hearts and minds of characters she passes on the street comes across as absolute fact. Eugenia admits few maybes, few I imagines into her narrative; everything seems to come from a wise and literate oracle, and is often too beautiful to be doubted.
This is a novel of bold statements, beginning with the first line, “It is night.” The night in question is one like any other in Eugenia’s nine-year-old life: her father wakes her in the dark so he can bike them (Eugenia on the handlebars in her nightgown) down to the lake to fish. They catch nothing, and on the way home, they stop at construction sites and abandoned warehouses so that Eugenia can perform acrobatics for her father: handstands on cranes, leaps off abandoned sewing machines. Her secret nickname is “Stunt” and her father’s name is Sheb Wooly Ledoux. Her mother is Mink and her sister Immaculata. It’s a bit reductive to say of that list of names, “It’s that sort of book,” but in some ways, it is. Stunt is a book where everyone has a strange name, each embodying a personality: Ingenuous Eugenia, Pure Immaculata, Foxy Mink. Sheb Wooley has the same name as the guy who recorded “The Purple People Eater” in 1958.
The genius of Stunt is that, simultaneously with the word games and magic, runs a very sad, very tough story about a girl searching for her father: the morning after their last fishing expedition, Sheb disappears, leaving behind only a cryptic apology note, some cutout birth announcements, and fish (he didn’t catch them; they jumped into his pockets). The note is its own kind of bold statement, addressed as it is to Immaculata and Mink, but not Eugenia. She chooses to interpret this as meaning that he meant to take her with him but was somehow prevented. The rest of the book is about how Eugenia tries to end their accidental separation.
Though for almost all of the present tense of the novel, Sheb is absent, he is the heart of the book and its subject – literarily; his pronoun through the novel is not he but you. This book, like so many great love letters, is a description of the loved one to himself, in the gleam of the speaker’s affection. Sheb seems to be a brilliant but unstable artist, prone to self-destruction, but it’s hard for a reader to truly discern his outlines in the face of Eugenia’s fierce love. He’s the one who told her to love bold statements, after all, and she uses them to great effect in describing her dad. When Sheb launches a multi-day rant about white sugar and white bread, Eugenia says only that she and her sister
are not afraid. If one of us interrupted your sermon and said ‘Hold me,’ you would. And you would do it so well that we would wish you stood on our street corner with a sign that read FREE HUGS and that all the sorrowful people with sleep lines on their faces could go to you and be mended by your good grip.
Eugenia knows all is not as it should be, somewhat; she “think[s] for a second that you are bad for me.” But though the book centres on this nine-year-old’s preternatural insight, she is in many ways only nine, and she loves her dashing, creative, complicated father and there’s nothing she can do about that.
Stunt is set in Parkdale, in Toronto’s West-End, a neighbourhood where people carry “grocery bags filled with stale bread for the pigeons and peanuts for the squirrels” and “[a] heap of wedding dresses lies on the stairs of The Salvation Army, exhausted swans.” Dey’s Parkdale is a gritty paradise, and Sheb is a Parkdale hero – a portraitist who screens old films on the wall of his studio and, watching them, cries “for a thing downed, a thing won. . . .” The women of the neighbourhood crave his paint-spattered, erratic company almost as much as Eugenia does. Everyone he meets feels his manic warmth, but only the family sees the dips of the sine wave, when he locks himself in his studio or bedroom and cannot be reasoned with, spoken to, or even fed.
Eugenia has always tried to protect her father, and when he slips her grasp and disappears, she trembles to imagine him, “in the Rosedale ravine, blinkless and shivering . . . the last of your kind.” She has to find him, and so begins her quest, typical of the Bildungsroman: trying to find the other, and in doing so, finding yourself. As Eugenia moves down her own street to wider Parkdale and finally into all the wild and distant tendrils of Toronto – Scarborough Bluffs, Ward’s Island, the Lakeshore – she loses her nine-year-old body, her mother, her sister, and whatever shreds of innocence she still possessed. She never loses her hope or love or mordant wit, but still, this isn’t an easy book – there’s a lot of tubercular coughing and burnt skin, a lot of loss and sadness.
And yet, somehow, to read Stunt is a breathless joy. Dey’s great triumph is to be able to stun readers with tragedy and comfort them with beauty in the same sentence. Eugenia’s losses are no less horrific for being beautiful, but we are somehow better able to take the news in words so striking, so strangely lovely, and often, so blackly bleakly funny. Eugenia’s mother runs away naked after being seen without her wig, driven not only mad but vulnerable by the disappearance of her husband. And the fate of the creepy next-door twins is too Gothic to be described in any words but the artful lunacy that the author uses.
In interviews, Dey has said the writing of Stunt took about five years, and I can well believe it – this writing is burnished, and there are very few sentences that are merely serviceable. It seems to me that the sparkle of a wonder in Stunt comes much more from the language inside the narrator’s head than anything else. I was deeply involved in the plot, but it is confusing, and I found it worth reading the book twice to get all the nuance of sound and sense. This is a book you should open at random: “[she] wants to touch me as though she paid admission”; “When she did come to bed, she would not wash. In the morning, when she picked up her pastry, her hands were those of a chimney sweep”; “I know she was in [her house] because as an unemployed existentialist, she had no reason to leave.”
Recently, I’ve been hearing the term “poet’s novel” used in an almost pejorative, certainly dismissive way. Maybe there’s some cause for this: in the worst-case scenario, a novelist with poetic leanings will freight dozens of sentences in a row with minutely perfected imagery, elegant and strikingly original language, forcing the reader to acknowledge the writer’s skill in every word – often without even getting the characters out of the car. This makes for an exhausting reading experience – if the writing is more important than what it conveys, the reader will likely sink into despair, or perhaps a nap.
It took some time to work out why Stunt is not like this. Maybe it’s because Dey is not a poet but a playwright, and thus there’s far more action and dialogue in this book than description and reflection. So when we learn that Eugenia “hear[s] Immaculata . . . in her too-small white slippers . . . lumber along the hallway . . . the mariner battling smoke and fog,” we get a strong image and Immaculata gets closer to the door. Even though there are many swirls of flashback and memory (probably a couple too many, in truth), Stunt’s quest-structure speeds along – this book moves, and something unexpected or tragic or funny is always happening. Same goes for the gorgeous language – it’s there in such abundance, but always in service to the characters and plot, so you’re free to ignore it if you like – there’s always more.
The semi-skew of the book, the way it takes place in Toronto seen at seventeen degrees counterclockwise, is never more apparent than in the dialogue. Not all of it is realistic, tinted as it is with fairy tales or film noir or fantasy, but somehow that unrealistic dialogue does allow us access into the recognizable and relatable characters who speak it. And, often, it’s damn funny:
“How did you break your nose?”
“I didn’t break it. Somebody else did.”
“Why?”
“He said he didn’t want me to forget him.”
“He must have said it a few times.”
Some might say that humourous digressions like these contribute to some of the confusion readers might experience. Same goes for the catalogues of everyone who lives on a given block, the history of the Toronto Islands, and the backstory of almost every character encountered. Me, I would rather have the incredible wealth of detail even though I got to the end of my first read thinking several characters were dead who weren’t. I also had considerable trouble figuring out what exactly happened on Eugenia’s first night on the Island.
Stunt isn’t a perfect book, and things get a little murky at times. The many sidebars and loops in time could probably have been smoothed out a little. Most events can be figured out, though it does take a fair amount of work. Dey has a lot of faith in her readers, and she’s given us options of what to focus on – gorgeous prose, compelling characters, a vivid city and a heartbreaking plot. Each creates the others – these characters, so unique and alive, could not live elsewhere than this mythified Parkdale, and these wild events are organic to both the place and the people. And a slightly confusing narrative structure can’t help but fit Eugenia’s noble and unknowing struggle to find what is missing, repair what is broken, with only the insufficient tools of grim wit, cowboy boots, and endless love. When the real world intrudes on her dreams, Eugenia’s weapons are not enough to defeat it. But the real world was there all along and can never be defeated anyway, though Claudia Dey’s Stunt is a bold and welcome re-imagining of it.
Tags: Claudia Day, Issue 76