Sequel is a clever read
Larry Matthew’s latest novel is set in contemporary St. John’s
An Exile’s Perfect Letter: A Novel By Larry Mathews Breakwater Books $19.95 218 pages
“An Exile’s Perfect Letter” is a sequel to Larry Mathews “The Artificial Newfoundlander,” and again it’s a wryly observed, demonstrative, and clever read.
Professor Hugh Norman (the name as carefully calibrated as everything else here), at 62 is on the cusp of retiring from the English Department (Mathews himself is professor emeritus of Memorial University of Newfoundland, with an excellent teaching reputation — check out, if you can, “Hearts Larry Broke” [Killick Press], writing from the Burning Rock Collective).
Hugh is four years into a relationship with Maureen, a poet and fluent French speaker (an ability which ends up driving some of the plot), and with whom he’d had a serious liaison years before. Hugh is divorced; his ex, Sandra, remarried to Keith and living in Ontario, their daughter Emily new mother to a son and separated from her partner, the roguish, feckless Foley.
Hugh is feeling, not old exactly, but aging. He’s starting to have a few medical issues, which he prefers not to discuss. He doesn’t have the energy or appetite for office politics. At the same time, there’s a lot going on, and he tackles these turns of events by being openminded, curious, and keeping a sense of humour. This helps stem any tide of curmudgeonness that might rise at interruptions to his routine.
For example, his new neighbour, Andy Lawson. Andy’s from Calgary, an oil industry executive of some sort, and “basically clueless about anything to do with Newfoundland.” He’s oblivious to lots of social cues, too, frequently knocking on Hugh’s door of an evening.
It’s more than a little irritating, yet Hugh can’t keep himself from finding Andy’s company oddly concerning and engaging. He and Maureen openly speculate whether Andy’s girlfriend Cynthia is an actual person or a figure of Andy’s hopeful imagination. (What does develop from this subplot really lifts the prose off the page.)
More seriously, as the novel opens Hugh receives word that an old friend, Clifford, has died. They were childhood buddies in Ottawa, then reunited at grad school at UBC, forming a slightly pretentious poetic triumvirate with their mutual buddy Rex; none of them have spoken for years. Cliff’s widow, Arlene, has asked Hugh for a story that can be read in remembrance of her husband.
But when Maureen asks Hugh to sum up Cliff’s character he utters “awkward incompleteness,” an unpromising assessment for the type of contribution Arlene is seeking.
Maureen takes off to a writer’s retreat in Saskatchewan, but instead of having the house to himself, Hugh takes pity on Foley, as yet another relationship breakup has left him homeless, and offers him the small bedroom. Again, what could be irksome becomes a circumstance Hugh finds surprisingly agreeable — and possibly a welcome alibi when Hugh’s midday walk around Long Road has him stumbling upon a corpse.
Like most innocent people caught up in a major crime, Hugh feels vaguely but distinctly guilty, unnerved by the questions of Royal Newfoundland Constabulary Detective Gene Brazil (whose repetitive “Wha?” Is one of the few jarring notes of the book). He can’t help seeing himself though the police officer’s eyes:
‘Why should Gene Brazil have such power? Yet his dissection of my life has revealed to him and vicariously to me how absurd and morally shady an enterprise it is in the eyes of any down-to-earth guy like himself. A man drawing a salary from the public purse who doesn’t have to show up at his office, who can sit at home reading books and writing about them at his leisure, who can in the middle of the day take time to wander aimlessly in the woods like a homeless person drunk on cheap wine. Sixty-two years old, holder of a PH.D., and this is the best use he can make of his time?’
Mathews’ writing is unforced, deceptively effortless, moving smartly through a contemporary St. John’s. Set within the university and arts circles, these are two milieus of which it is easy to make gentle — or more pointed — fun.
Although Hugh seems to genuinely mourn the shifting tenor, the changing of the guard, in the English department, which Craddock, the section’s hotshot, has proposed changing from “English Language and Literature” to “Writing in English and Popular Culture,” thus opening it to other “texts” such as video games. (Craddock himself specializes in “The Postscript as Transgressive Apocalypse … its ability to resist and subvert the thrust of the main text of the letter …” Mathews is deft at this sort of parody.)
“An Exile’s Perfect Letter” (the title is from a Leonard Cohen lyric) is both a full, standalone publication and yet promisingly open to its own sequel.