Off-line and on point
Andrew Szymanski’s powerful voice ignores the surrounding chatter
The Barista and I
Andrew Szymanski (Insomniac Press) $19.95
Doomsday predictions for the art of the written word are nothing new, and they’ve been ramping up as faster forms of communication gather speed.
Douglas Coupland, who has been doing a fair job of diagnosing the zeitgeist since the days when Kurt Cobain still walked among us, was once heard to lament that “the Internet is sucking young people away from literature.” In some of my darker moments, I’ve thought he might have been right. But I’m over it now.
If anything, the oft-derided instantgratification generation has been producing a small but hardy core of throwback wordsmiths determined to swim against the social tide.
Andrew Szymanski, 27, is from Ottawa. (“I moved to Montreal because I like the city,” he says.) His debut collection, The Barista and I, shows a young writer feeling his way to a voice before the reader’s eyes, arriving at a place that promises a lot more even while it satisfies in the here and now.
Szymanski revives the old sympathy-versus-empathy debate by presenting a character with no apparent redeeming qualities (The Recruit), minutely dissects a near-wordless encounter between two strangers at a party (Body Language), presents a worst-case scenario of a dumped young man encountering his ex (After the Silence).
On Wanting to Look Like You Have It All Together can serve as a representative Szymanski scenario: a young man sits alone on the bleachers by an outdoor rink, having a quiet moment of personal reckoning, wondering whether the fact that he can contemplate quitting smoking — not actually quit, just think about it — means that he has changed. Get that guy off the bleachers and in front of a writing desk, and you suspect you’d have someone a lot like the author.
“I know a lot of people who can’t seem to do just one thing at a time,” Szymanski says during a recent interview in Montreal. “They can’t just sit and eat, for instance. Or you’ll go to their place, and they’ll be watching a hockey game and a basketball game at the same time. For me it’s too much noise. Some people have certain types of brains and can do that, I guess, but I need to concentrate on some things sometimes, you know?”
Szymanski is quick to clarify that he’s not placing himself above his non-writer cohorts. That could be because he remembers well when he was among their number. Growing up, he wasn’t a bookish kid. The change came, he says, “when my selfconsciousness turned a corner, at 16 or 17. Then I went through what I guess are all the standard stages: The Catcher in the Rye, the late-teen Kerouac thing, Hemingway. Bukowski was my guy for a while, but pretty soon the romance gets taken out of that hard-drinking thing. There’s so much misery in that.”
That awakening to the possibility of writing, as Szymanski describes it, happened in a vacuum: even while doing his undergraduate English degree at the University of Waterloo he didn’t know anybody who was writing.
“None of the English students were actually my friends,” he recalls. His writing attempts at that time were journal-type exercises, done daily. “I would often do it at night. I’d title each document with a number, so by the end of the summer I’d have documents 1 through 50, and some had a kind of story. It wasn’t a character — it was me, how I was experiencing things.
“A lot is going on at that age; you’re away from home for the first time. And I was quite unhappy, so I think that probably helped. It was also just a matter of wanting to be serious about something. The idea that anybody would read any of it felt about 20 years away.”
It happened a lot faster than that. After a period in Montreal working as a technical writer he was accepted into the creative writing program at Concordia University, where his teachers included Man Booker International nominee Josip Novakovich. The stories in The Barista and I are mostly part of a larger group written toward a thesis.
The title story, first published in Matrix magazine, predates Szymanski’s formal writing studies. It’s a work that all but dares the reader to call it ironic, but it functions just as convincingly when read as a perfectly sincere imagining of a classic contemporary urban archetype: lonely café patron, cute café worker.
In the book’s acknowledgments, Szymanski cites David Foster Wallace as an influence on a specific story.
“That was an anxiety thing, to be honest,” Szymanski says. “I kind of wish I hadn’t done it, but at the time I had this fear that I’d be called some kind of copycat.”
His DFW anxiety now past, Szymanski is finding inspiration in another icon deceased before his time. “My big guy now is (Roberto) Bolaño. He has this conviction about writing, like ‘This is the thing, this is important.’ He helps restore my conviction.”
As Szymanski proceeds in his Bolaño-aided groove, his creativity is further facilitated by some fundamental life choices: He is off Facebook, off Twitter and doesn’t carry a phone with Wi-Fi capacity. “Why would I want to be plugged in all the time?” he asks quite sensibly, as if the Internet had never happened.
Hear that, Mr. Coupland?