A Horse At The Window by Spencer Gordon

“So often fictions that experiment formally do so at the expense of feeling,” writes Jane Alison in Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (2019). “They toy on surfaces or are purely cerebral affairs, don’t explore human complexities.” A reader of Spencer Gordon’s new work of fiction may initially view it as words simply sprayed across the page as from an uncontrolled firehose of the imagination. Examined closely, it shows itself full of compassion and predicaments that stress the minds of its narrators. A Horse at the Window isn’t a set of short stories but of short fictions. It’s a book of extravagant fancy and heightened language with an occasional patch of straightforward prose, self-referentiality, and allusions to pop culture. Gordon presents ruminations in prose pieces that aim for poetry and, at times, philosophical acceptance of what is. “A novel is the precise accessory, a charm in a wallet full of my parents’ money,” says one narrator in this choral work of nearly 25 pieces. It’s not possible to do justice to each in a short review, so a few will stand in for the rest.

Any reader familiar with the blathering in a certain Canadian magazine will endorse a sharp judgement in “Sandōkai, Non-binary”: “Don’t get trapped like a critic in The Walrus, guessing far and wee, calling it objective, making mountains sprout and rivers roar—doomed to be a loser for this life and the next.” The gentler narrator of “Aperture II” prods us to find “a clearer way, to see the fern shaking and see the fern shaking and it is to see the fern as a product and blessing of your vision, which occurs for you only…,” as the fern only exists inside you. Almost every piece encourages us to reflect, at first on the meaning of what we’re reading, and then on its potentially wider application. “The mind is simply magical!” starts off “Late Capitalism,” a ringing endorsement rare in the grey world of CanLit, and throughout A Horse at the Window the narrators pause to take in their feelings, other people, and the world.

A Horse at the Window is a pleasing work of ideas.

Such a pursuit might lead to earnestness and, therefore, humourless. Not here. “I was not nice. I was not nice enough. I was not nice enough to the right people. My niceness was too casual; my niceness was designed for acquaintances and so it had no lasting impact.” Those are the opening lines of “Reasons for My Success” (you’d share my error if you thought it was narrated by PEI), and over four pages comprising one long paragraph the narrator simultaneously puffs himself up while berating himself for a deficiency that undermines him. His attempts to be nice end up as “wisps of vapour, empty of content or memory; clear and lovely as a glass held up to clouds filled with rain.” The narrator of “This Thing I Believe” leaps from the presence of Twitter (or X) in our lives to a self-evaluation that contains quiet egotism: “I convinced myself that having legit enemies was important to the truthiness of my thinking even as their barbs soared past my bulwarks and wounded whatever you might want to call the essential ‘me.’” Look at that sentence’s mixture of low and high vocabulary. The narrator speaks like anyone of his generation and is also, unconsciously, pretentious. It takes effort to write a sentence so well-proportioned. Then there’s the matter of the “essential ‘me.’” We are never anything less than multiple, as we are different people depending on who we’re with. As Fernando Pessoa said, in a remark that’s relevant to Gordon’s book, “I am not conscience-stricken, but consciousness-stricken.”

A Horse at the Window is a pleasing work of ideas. “So I thought I could direct you somewhere better with an enormous act of intention,” confesses the narrator of “Memorial Prayer.” Serving as pier and anchor for these fictions is Buddhism, “even though this book is a work of poetry and fiction and has absolutely nothing to do with the truth of Buddhist teachings.” As a trope it’s certainly not as worn out, in Western literature, as having a male lead of 33, yet part of me wishes that, for an experimental fictionist, Spencer Gordon could have been edgier right down to his core.

Note: The Pessoa quote comes from The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, page 237

SPENCER GORDON is the author of the poetry collection Cruise Missile Liberals (Nightwood Editions, 2017) and the short story collection Cosmo (Coach House Books, 2012). He co-founded and edited the literary journal The Puritan for a decade and has taught writing at Humber College, OCAD University, George Brown College and the University of Toronto. He works as a principal associate for Blueprint, a non-profit research organization dedicated to solving public policy challenges. Follow him on Twitter/X at @spencergordon and visit his rudimentary website at spencer-gordon.com

Publisher: House of Anansi Press (June 18, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 6″ | 144 pages
ISBN: 9781487012502