Floating City drowns in details
Author struggles to find story’s groove and makes puzzling plot choices
SPECIAL TO THE STAR There’s a modest trove of ideas, ambitions and inspirations evident throughout the pages of
Floating City, Kerri Sakamoto’s first novel in nearly 15 years. Buckminster Fuller as a freewheeling, utopian-minded thinker, for instance. Plus: a barge-hotel for immigrant workers; a makeshift theatre in a Japanese-Canadian internment camp that performs Our
Town; a visionary modernist architect in Toronto who lives in a residential masterpiece called the Kidney with a sickly wife who studies kabbalistic texts and dispenses wisdom of her own.
Despite these intermittent and strikingly cinematic moments, though, Sakamoto’s novel struggles to find its groove, making puzzling choices in regard to pace, plot and characterization.
Floating City covers significant decades in Canadian history, opening on Vancouver Island in the late 1930s and closing half a country away just after the highs of Expo 67.
An inventive tale of what “might have been” rather than a “precise history of what was,” the framework of the novel features the lost soul of Frankie Hanesaka, a boy in rural British Columbia who grows up to be a mover-and-shaker cluttering Toronto’s lakeshore with apartment blocks and towers.
In mill town Port Alberni, B.C., the Hanesaka family experiences poverty and local racism; Frankie grows up learning to hustle and appreciating the power of money. Pushed out by a notorious governmental policy of the Second World War, the family starts over by being assigned a rickety shack in Tashme, an abandoned mining town.
Sakamoto’s Hanesakas are potentially fascinating, but because there are so many family members and so many diverse plot strands for a 272-page novel (including deaths, tragedies and triumphs) the scenes often feel sketched for a later development that never occurs. Frankie’s eventual romance and personal losses, for instance, barely register before new developments move the plot along.
At the war’s end, the internees are given a restricted choice of where they can reside (and Vancouver Island isn’t among them).
Although his family remains in Tashme, Frankie Hanesaka winds up in Toronto, a penniless outsider.
He meets a modernist visionary and his American friend “Bucky” Fuller by happenstance. And soon enough he’s scraped together enough money to begin his own shady business — building towers and apartment blocks along the lakeshore. But when his family finally arrives as planned, Frankie’s split loyalties — there’s family, tradition, capitalism, generosity, materialism, power, among others — result in further tragedies.
Similar to the scenes in Tashme, Sakamoto overstuffs her plots with characters, events and ideas.
By introducing so many figures shaping and influencing newly coined Frank Hanes (including his wife, father, sisters, mother, a corrupt city official, a visionary architect, a mystic, and, of course, Fuller-the-philosopher) while also addressing a man seeking to understand his “significance in the universe” and the cumulative effects of everyday and systemic racism, Sakamoto produces a novel with much on its mind and no real ability to adequately express it all.