by Cole Nowicki
NeWest press
2024/$21.95/160 pp.
The first line of Laser Quit Smoking Massage is also, conveniently, its thesis statement: “Small-town pride tends to be a desperate thing.” This combination of desperation and pride can come from the town itself, often in the form of an engine for tourism dollars (e.g., the town of Vulcan reverse-engineering itself into a haven for Star Trek fans who otherwise wouldn’t leave the highway). But it can also come from the residents, eager to convince others—and themselves—that the place where they live isn’t as bland as it might seem.
A lot of people recoil from this pride/desperation cocktail, in either form. But not Cole Nowicki. On the contrary, the Alberta-raised, BC-based writer seems to seek it out wherever he goes. Laser Quit Smoking Massage collects some two dozen of his short, unabashedly odd essays about overlooked pockets of the Canadian West.
Nowicki, the author of an earlier book about the video game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, is drawn to low culture and scenes of urban paradox and disconnect. In Vancouver he contemplates gentrification while standing in front of a neglected, seven-foot-tall statue of a poodle (“The Big Dog in the Sky Is Dirty”). In Saskatoon he puzzles over a series of home businesses with signs in their windows offering increasingly inscrutable services (the title piece). And in his native Lac La Biche he recounts getting assaulted and robbed in the dead of winter—by a man who turns out to be his neighbour (“The Pile”).
The second half of the collection shifts away somewhat from geography to the online world. It also contains some of the book’s funniest moments. While playing a VR game set in the North Pole, for instance, the Santa character mechanically asks Nowicki what he wants for Christmas. But Nowicki stays silent. “My desires are my own,” he writes. “I do not require help to attain them.”
Another essay, investigating the phenomenon of insects crawling into people’s ears, is propelled by equal parts disgust and fascination. Reader, it happened to him.
There’s no doubt the pieces in Laser Quit Smoking Massage can at times feel slight, especially when the author attempts to stretch past deadpan observational humour and reach for a profundity that isn’t there. Yet despite its shortcomings, I find myself charmed by the collection all the same. Nowicki has the eye of a true local, and his tone captures the absurdities of small-town life without ever being condescending about it. Even he can’t disguise his sense of pride when he recounts the day Boston Pizza finally arrived in Lac La Biche: “We’d made it, and we had the Jambalaya fettuccine to prove it.”
Michael Hingston owns Porch Light Books in Edmonton.
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