Allusions, epithets and literary devices
In ‘Stella Atlantis,’ Susan Perly shows she likes her words
“Stella Atlantis” is a great book to read on your phone.
Just like “Death Valley,” Susan Perly’s last novel that was longlisted for the Giller in 2016, this book is enthusiastic to the point of being unhinged, its story as loose-limbed as the paragraphs she uses to tell it. It’s like she wants us to know everything she and her characters know about everything, all the time.
And if we don’t know who the de Witt brothers were, who Bebo and Cigala are, that the Simply Red version of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” was a cover, or the labyrinthine inside joke — “Sorry, we have chicken” — that used to be painted on the window of By The Way Cafe on Bloor Street at Brunswick Avenue in Toronto, we can click it.
I didn’t get the sense that the references are the result of work she did specifically for this book, but that the immensity of geographic and cultural details she drops on us like a weighted blanket is the result of a long and extremely engaged life. She has paid attention to things, read books, noticed stairwells, sat in front of pictures. She knows stuff, is not bashful about knowing stuff, and she hopes we know stuff, too.
The Stella of the title is a 12-year-old girl who died near Christie Pits, and the story is of her parents, Vivienne Pinkwood, the heroine of “Death Valley,” and Johnny Coma. She’s a photographer with no hair and no eyebrows, and he’s a writer and sketcher. It’s 12 years after Stella got hit by a bike. Vivienne’s in Amsterdam, Johnny’s in Barcelona. Perly gets very specific about both places, so
specific it can seem at times as if she wants to show us exactly how well she knows Van Baerlstraat in south Amsterdam or the old Barcelona neighbourhood of La Ribera. She may have spent time there. She may have spent time on Street View. In either case, some passages read a bit like a travel blog written by someone who’s been a month in a place and wants to communicate how much she is already starting to feel like she lives there.
I can only imagine what the Perly household is like. She’s married to Dennis Lee, one of the few Canadian poets living or dead you could get away with calling iconic. But imagining it through Perly’s writing makes me think it’s like a three-meal-a-day “My Dinner With André,” or that bit in “Manhattan” when everyone’s talking about the right way to say Van Gogh, except without Woody Allen there to scoff. She likes her words, and her word play, and her literary devices, and her allusions. They’re everywhere: alliteration, epithets, phrasings adopted from “Hamlet” or the Pentateuch or “Don Quixote.” Some of it is used for traditional kinds of meaning, like when she writes, after Johnny has had sex, “he was not exactly sure which part of free will he had exercised. Or what had been exorcised between them.” And some of it seems to be for fun, like “there was a holiday on Tuesday and a holiday on Thursday, and already folks were easing down or leaving town.”
There is just so much of it though. When everything is turned up to 11, you start to pine for an 8, or hope that maybe there’s a 12 somewhere. It’s a glorious kind of monotone, like some painting that’s probably hanging in some other infrequently visited alcove of the Rijksmuseum, but it is nonetheless monotonous and it’s tiring, sometimes infuriating. So when she comes up with truly wonderful things, like describing that same bit of Johnny’s sex as “two flaws f---ing,” you just wish she’d had someone to attach the sort of filter that would have caught them, while letting the rest of it wash away.
The biggest problem with how tumescent the prose is, is that it reduces the sympathy we have for these characters and their struggles; they just don’t seem at all real. When I read “He thought, I want to nurse my grudges. But she makes me feel human,” the only thing I thought was that nobody has ever thought that ever, except maybe the screenwriter of a hastily scripted noir voice-over.
Here’s a hyper-literary way to tell if you’ll like this novel: If you love the language and metaliterary playfulness of John Banville’s “The Revolutions Trilogy,” but could do without the narrative solidity of the stories about people as real as Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, you’ll enjoy “Stella Atlantis” (though you’ll still want your phone in easy clicking distance). But if you liked the bits about the people that actually existed, or if you think this paragraph is way too inside baseball, you probably won’t.