The curative power of laughter
Strube’s dark comedy mines Scarborough circa 2014 as a source of inspiration
The proverbial glass is nowhere close to half-full in “Misconduct of the Heart.”
An astringent and delightful but also harrowing and grim comedy built atop a solid block of despair, Cordelia Strube’s 11th novel doesn’t exactly dwell on reasons for hope as it surveys suburban Toronto (a.k.a. “crappy Scarborough”) circa 2014.
An ex “chaindrinker” and former Walmart employee with a “lacklustre career in Lingerie” who now oversees a kitchen at a Chappy’s, a stingy chain restaurant, Strube’s narrator struggles to manage edicts (and emissaries) from corporate alongside the assorted needs and infinite quirks of a multicultural (legal, illegal) restaurant staff, whom she affectionately calls “rejects.”
She wonders about her ability to experience love or contentment while wrangling with her nearly feral son, the “product of rape” by four men. He’s returned from Afghanistan with untreated PTSD, a thirst for beer and an infinite reserve of toxic emotions reserved for his mother.
In her spare minutes she’s attuned to “mayhem,” news of environmental disasters and far-off atrocities committed in the name of truth, God or profit.
(As for her name, here’s her jaded view: “Post-rape, in search of a new and improved me, I changed my last name to
Tree. Only a nice, positive person could be called Stevie Tree.”)
The novel’s pleasures — such as they are — come from the telling. As introspective Stevie lurches from one disaster to another (all the while racking up debt on her cards) and adds to her tally of mistakes, she’s a marvel of wittily cantankerous observations of a benighted world.
From gloomy philosophizing (“Now I know life gets worse until one day you can’t remember how to use a fork”; “We plod through the detritus ignorant of each other’s suffering, wailing in operas nobody wants to hear”) to a funeral of an ex, a panicked freak-out inside a chicken costume, an unexpected grandmotherhood, a messy drunken relapse, tender attentions from a busboy named Gyorgi, incontinent parents, and a product called a Vagankle, Stevie gets through burdensome days, sure only to expect fresh hells with the following sunrise.
“Never underestimate the curative power of laughter,” Strube’s narrator reflects.
Stevie happens to be consoling another woman by describing a recent regrettable encounter with a man. It’s not exactly “curative,” but it is relieving. And in “Misconduct of the Heart,” it’s particularly welcome because there’s so much else to lament.