POLITE but not nice
IN RUSSELL WANGERSKY’S THE PATH OF MOST RESISTANCE, FRUSTRATION LURKS BENEATH THE CANADIAN DEMEANOUR
THE STORIES IN THE PATH OF MOST RESISTANCE DEAL WITH VARIOUS DEGREES OF AGGRESSION.
The Path of Most Resistance
By Russell Wangersky House of Anansi 240 pp; $19.95
Rage, the first story in Russell Wangersky’s new collection, The Path of Least Resistance, ends with a driver punching another in a fit of road rage. It’s the sort of violent moment you would read about in a three- line news story before thinking briefly what a lot of troubled people there are in the world, and then getting on with your life; just a quick reminder that the world can be a brutal place.
But Wangersky goes deeper, detailing the build- up of the character’s years driving across Newfoundland for work, constantly adjusting for other drivers, saving them from themselves and their own inability to simply follow the rules of the road. But then his life is thrown into disarray by the loss of his parents and some bad health news: What appears to the outside world as a man losing his grip, the character sees as regaining control. “See?” he tells his arm as he begins to pummel the other driver, “That’s what you’re supposed to do. You do exactly what I tell you.”
The stories in The Path of Most Resistance deal with various degrees of aggression, f rom the passive to the outright violent. That rage often stems from failures of communication, as Wangersky’s characters misunderstand, misinterpret or ignore the cues others provide.
In Armenia, everyone but the main character knows that a relationship is doomed. Baggage features a husband who misses all the obvious cries for attention that lead his wife to have an affair.
No matter how obvious people think they are being, no one can ever know what another is really thinking, and that leads to a frustration that is itself just a few steps removed from hostility.
Often this comes in the form of competition. In Snow, one of the highlights of the collection, two men face off over a woman by competing to shovel her walk.
They invent an unspoken competition with a complicated set of rules regarding fair play between them: they must each, for example, finish their own walk before they move on to the young neighbour’s, so as not to seem like they are go- ing out of their way. The story ends with a game of chicken, the two men bearing down on each other in order to impress a woman who is unlikely to care – and who, besides, could certainly handle shovelling her own walk.
In The Revolution, the competition is more overt. Barry works the weekend night shift at a TV station in Newfoundland. The job is slow and he works alone, reading out hourly updates straight from the news ticker: traffic, weather, a bit of international news. It’s a deadend job he took with the promise that it wasn’t, and he’s now stuck. He knows this because he’s taken to reading his boss’s emails ( after figuring out his password), which clearly indicate that the station doesn’t want to promote or transfer Barry because it would be too hard to find someone else willing to work his horrible shift.
Finally, after watching colleagues promoted ahead of him, Barry stages a protest and refuses to do his job. During the hourly updates, he just stares at the camera, transmitting dead air across the region. He does this all through his shift and then waits for the inevitable firing. It doesn’t come. The very thing he was protesting — indifference to his suffering — was truer than he knew: no one cares.
Newfoundland features in most of the stories of this collection, and it’s tempting to think Wangersky is drawing a parallel between his characters’ inability to be understood and the province’s oftenignored needs. But the feeling of being ignored is, if anything, a national trait: people in the suburbs feel like downtown gets all the attention, Southern Ontario feels like the GTA is favoured, Northern Ontario feels ignored by the south, and the rest of the country agrees Ontario is the worst.
By tapping into the frustration that comes with being ignored or misunderstood, Wangersky is writing stories that speak to a very base emotion in all Canadians: we’re a more aggressive, competitive people than we like to think. But in The Path of Most Resistance, this is tempered by Wangersky’s humour and honest treatment of his characters — a group that readers will recognize in their friends and neighbours, people going about their lives, knowing that no matter the frustration, there’s nothing to do but keep on going.