by Mark Anthony Jarman
BIBLIOASIS
2023/$26.95/320 pp.
“Hidden gem” is too easy a description for an outstanding Canadian writer. Other than Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, all our authors are either permanently hidden or temporarily buried, dug up for a bit and then reinterred in the frost-hardened soil of our literary history. So I won’t say that Edmonton-born Mark Anthony Jarman is a hidden gem. But I will say that his book brings gems to mind—the stories here are brightly coloured, sharp-edged and shatterproof.
Jarman’s work is possessed of a straight-fella manliness that is increasingly and lamentably absent from Canadian literature. He takes tough guys, failed tough guys and would-be tough guys seriously, giving us the voices of broke truck drivers, luckless cavalry scouts, at-fault divorced dads and small-town teenage rebels. Not—thank God—to critique them but to turn their travails, observations and at times confused thinking into the literary equivalent of the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna if they featured regular men instead of saints and emperors.
“What does that even mean?” you might be asking yourself. “Are we talking here about poetic prose, that darling of reviewers everywhere?” We’re not. We’re talking something much, much better. Jarman eschews the plain style not to give us something pretty but to give us something explosive. Something like this, from the gloriously named “Assiniboia Death Trip”: “Sausages and honeycombs, her blossoms, corn cakes and rum, her bosom, potted meat, mouths open or grimacing like dancers, shouting and swearing, salt tongues stuck babel and broth breath, in battle all of us pushing toward forest and fence.”
We’re in a kind of poem, clearly, with the drumbeats and diversions, and the attention to sounds and syllables, but it’s a poem that doesn’t stand alone but combines with all the other sharp, paragraphed explosions in the story to create, finally, a perfect fusion of captured moments and propulsive narrative.
Where the narrative begins and ends is always a contested issue when it comes to short stories, particularly when, as here, the narratives are part of longer story sequences. I found myself wondering what, for example, made the several stories set in Italy and featuring the same protagonist and his cousin, individual narratives, rather than chapters in a larger narrative. With other stories, such as “Righteous Speedboat,” the central plot (guy doesn’t make the NHL draft) is so meagre that Jarman ends up creating a scene in the painterly sense more than in the theatrical one. You find yourself wanting something bigger to happen. Rest assured, something bigger will happen, if not in this story, then in another one. And when it does, you won’t be only an observer, you’ll be a participant.
Alex Rettie is a long-time reviewer for Alberta Views.
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