UNCOMMON SENSE

advice was in direct opposition to its practical application. But it certainly makes for good reading.

Based on a lecture O’Neill gave at the University of Alberta, this collection, like all of her work, is is filled with humour, moments of joy, sudden bursts of deep emotion and heartbreaking sincerity.

The advice itself ranges from not-great to completely misguided. Learn to play the tuba, her father insists; there’s a shortage of tuba players in the world. A wellmeaning example of supply and demand, no doubt, but one which fails to take into account that the dearth of tuba players is itself due to lack of demand. Make friends with Jewish kids; a pro-Semitic sentiment, although it comes off as the opposite until you learn that O’Neill’s father grew up in 1930s Montreal and admired how well his Jewish neighbours did in life – it stands to reason that you should stick with and learn from more successful people.

Buddy O’Neill’s advice is incredibly specific to his experiences, and often so narrowly applicable as to be effectively useless. There’s no better example of this than the gem, “Never watch a Paul Newman movie.” Based on some sort of that-couldhave-been-my-life, one-sided grudge, the rule extended all the way to the actor’s line of salad dressings.

As a young girl, O’Neill gamely tried to follow her dad’s advice, but often found it wanting. Instead, she eventually finds the sentiment behind the nonsensical lessons. In the same way her dad wrote cheques for absurd amounts of money but never signed them – saying he would once things turned around – she comes to see that his advice was built on good intentions.

If there’s one recurring theme, it’s that her father thought the differences between people were superficial. As O’Neill says, “If you were to change coats with a rich person, you would immediately become one.” This no-one-is-better-than-me outlook serves her father poorly, but is hugely influential on O’Neill’s writing, as she comes to appreciate the value in the world of her youth, the lower-class Montreal of the ’80s and ’90s.

O’Neill’s debut, Lullabies for Little Criminals, is set in Montreal in these years, and St. Louis Square, then a rough park filled with addicts and a regular haunt for her and her dad, features heavily. The book is O’Neill’s “childhood reality and the high art of literary fiction” combined, a story about “happy losers,” as she describes herself and her dad in Wisdom in Nonsense.

In the end, this book is as much about the origin of a writer’s imagination as it is about life advice from a man who substantially lowered the value of a property he maintained by erecting a fence made of hockey sticks he’d been hoarding for years. The lesson in Wisdom in Nonsense is how a writer uses autobiography to inform fiction.

O’Neill’s father liked to give her presents of small, odd items. They were worth nothing, but her dad would always make up a fantastic story to go along with them. The author keeps a shelf of this clutter in her apartment, which often prompts firsttime visitors to ask, “What is this tacky stuff ?” She then tells their stories, elevating each piece of junk to something else: an item of value. Her dad’s advice, spelled out in Wisdom in Nonsense, is like her collection of this junk. At first glance, it’s nothing of value, but once you get the story behind it, there’s something special there.