Four novellas by four writers are presented in Blasphemy and Other Ancestors: “The New Book” (Padgett Powell), “Aunt Katie’s Tales” (Darius James), “The Werewolf” (Lee Henderson), and “Insolite” (Jean Marc Ah-Sen). What unites them isn’t theme or situations. Instead, each author has taken up a challenge to write something, with a general slackness or complete disregard for story (the embarrassing thing, as William Gass said, that most writers fall back on describing when asked what their book is about), that allows for a focus on language (what all books are truly about) and whatever ideas come to them.
In a tale that lurches from the feelings “The New Book” itself has on its sudden existence to introducing, apparently randomly, a small cast of characters yoked together in rough fashion, as if a deux ex machina was in overdrive, Powell’s well-known disregard for literary conventions is made clear by the narrator who broadcasts to the reader the aesthetic behind this novella and, to a fair extent, the others: “There will be fifteen hazards of improbability, most breaking rules, from which anyone may choose a set of improbabilities to deem probable … You should be prepared to take over. See you in a bit. Maybe. We’ve broken some rules. You try it.” Anyone looking for a story arc, character development, or that mouldy old rule that goes show don’t tell will finish “The New Book” disappointed; anyone wanting to see Vanna White in fiction will be delighted.
Those who like absurdism and folk tales mingled might appreciate James’ extended riff on the following casual remark by the narrator’s “pigtailed aunt”: “I was the descendant of a people who could climb the air as if ascending a case of stairs.” What follows this is nothing at all like an explanation about a kind of inheritance, but instead a melange of stories told, in almost a monologue, by Aunt Katie to the narrator that includes a pair of dancers, a freak show, the actress Claudette Colbert, and an Aunt Jemima-like figure. This quasi-vaudeville routine of funny woman and straight man relies on increasingly bizarre explosions of words. Perhaps because I was never introduced to folk tales at an impressionable age that aspect of “Aunt Katie’s Tales” leaves me cold, and I also think the humour is laboured, but others may find it amusing.
“The Werewolf” takes place in some year in Cannes during its annual movie festival. Three of the four characters are involved in the movie business and the fourth is a disturbing remnant from the Second World War. There is a well-done tiresomeness about one of the characters who brings a “model wooden synagogue … to pitch meetings. It’s embarrassing enough in Tel Aviv,” thinks another character. The weaving of past horrors and present movie business, spiced with sudden fear, is succinctly presented. There is a fine edge of menace amidst the slapstick as one man is pursued by the werewolf of the title while navigating a hotel kitchen and worrying if the crockpot he nips from it is kosher. Henderson’s is the most plotted tale in this collection, but the plot is slight. What is emphasized, and where the humour and tension come from, is in the contrast between a Nazi camp and the lush life of Cannes.
Fans of the United States author Alexander Theroux will appreciate Ah-Sen’s entry for its baroque language and the metaphysics of past lives and spirits reborn. “My name is Acton Quennell”, begins “Insolite.” “I am interpellated by various conditions of my existence, which have all conspired against my personal fulfillment. Orphan-morosity, bibliolatry, vocational instability, and a lifelong embroilment with palingenesis have all marred my life.” Those are only the first Latinate utterance and cumbersome sentences, deliberately muddy thanks to the exotic words, yet meaningful on examination, spoken by Acton, long ago made “a Crown ward at Notre-Dame-de-la-Merci Orphanage in Huberdeau, during what would be called the Duplessis Orphan years post facto.” Acton becomes involved with a few other equally half-drawn characters in a pursuit of a certain truth found only through death-in-life. “‘Hundreds of families write me,’” says one, “‘asking if my sortilegic sensitivity can discover some as of yet dormant Insolitic potential within their genome.” To give away more would give away the joke entirely. As Powell says, his narrator, the royal “we,” is having fun, “which is the most important thing to us, much more important than the reader’s fun, which we pretend is foremost.” Readers interested in Blasphemy and Other Ancestors would do well to contemplate that when considering what their next book purchase might be. Life’s too short to be stuck with dire writing that’s meant to be good for you and for the nation.
Lee Henderson is the author of four books, including two novels, The Man Game and The Road Narrows As You Go, and a short story collection, The Broken Record Technique, and most recently a novella in the collaborative book Disintegration in Four Parts. He teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria.
Darius James (aka Dr. Snakeskin, born 1954) is an African-American author and performance artist. He is the author of That’s Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadasssss ‘Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury), an unorthodox, semi-autobiographical history of the blaxploitation film genre, and Negrophobia: An Urban Parable, a satirical novel written in screenplay form.
Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, three story collections, and one non-fiction book. He has retired from a long career of schoolmarming which was necessary to pay for things to live.
Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, and the forthcoming Kilworthy Tanner. His work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Maclean’s, Hazlitt, The Comics Journal, and elsewhere. The National Post has hailed his writing as an “inventive escape from the conventional.”
Publisher: Gordon Hill Press (April 1, 2024)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 138 pages
ISBN: 9781774221464
Jeff Bursey is a Canadian fiction writer and literary critic and author of numerous books.
