LIFE SENTENCE
ANDREW KAUFMAN PORTRAYS THE HELLSCAPE OF SMALL CLAIMS COURT A LITTLE TOO WELL
Small Claims By Andrew Kaufman Invisible Publishing 176 pp; $ 19.95
Andrew Kaufman is a hell of a writer. He seems like a pretty good guy, too: earnest and kind; keeping up with only the sweetest breed of self- promotion online; funny — for want of something more clever to say about his humour — on Twitter and elsewhere between. But whatever success Kaufman has enjoyed as a byproduct of that affability and skill seems rather in spite of his luck than because of it, merit all the author’s own but his life a litany of circumstantial slights that make the man’s literary laurels a wonder in themselves.
His common moniker hasn’t been kind to Andrew Kaufman’s publicist, I’m sure, with at least two others of the same name displacing our pal’s online prominence lately: one, a crime writer from California, has already manoeuvred Google’s algorithm to Kaufman’s best domain; the other is dead, which helps, but SNL stardom has a way of monopolizing search results anyway. Luckily this one has a sweet heart and selfdeprecation on lock, no stranger to owning life’s bad hands.
Kaufman’s personal bio serves its purpose twice over, saying a bit about his CV while flaunting the dry wit that’s built it. He might be an internationally bestselling Canadian author, but if Kaufman’s birthplace sounds familiar, his name probably isn’t the reason why. Wingham, Ont., is a town of less than 3,000 people, home to a half- decent minor hockey team and mediocre museum; but 30 or so years before Andrew Kaufman published his first book, one Alice Ann Munro beat him handily to the punch, stealing a proverbial spotlight her 2013 Nobel Prize win isn’t doing much to dim.
If Wingham is a place Kaufman’s cursed to share, he’s made a career writing his way well out of the world that delivered him there.
Kaufman’s debut novella All My Friends Are Superheroes has been translated and loved the world over; his third, The Tiny Wife, won the 2015 ReLIt Award; a Waterproof Bible and one Weird family later, the author might as well hand himself a bronze beacon for titular genius, too, each book’s subject as quirky and eccentric as their names so suggest.
Writing tinted by unapologetically ironic humour as entertaining as it is addictive, Kaufman’s fiction is laced with fantasy and layered so expertly you’d swear it’s set next door — and often it is, but the author’s remarkably welldrawn Toronto geography is about the only thing tethering his earlier stories to rationale. His is a style that asks a lot: fluid logic and patience, investments earned back in whimsy and quirk happy company for the magical realist’s ride. They’re tall orders for tight fiction but go down easy — too easy — a good clip in Kaufman’s early writing prone to inadvertently devour an afternoon.
Small Claims does not, by comparison or itself alone, ask for much. I’ve wobbled on webbed feet and watched babies poop paper to live in Andrew Kaufman’s world, but his sixth book needn’t beg readers to oblige anything at all: a few blocks in a better direction from my grandmother’s house in North York, Kaufman writes us into the back rows of Ontario’s Small Claims Court, a grey- brick Sheppard Ave. eyesore boasting nothing but a bad view of Ikea when the weather’s good. The book is a spin off Kaufman’s Hazlitt magazine series Petty Justice, serialized dispatches from the urban atrocity and a legal-minded master class in domestic passive aggression, their columns good home for Andrew Kaufman’s wry prose.
I’d walk to Wingham and back 10 times for Andrew Kaufman, but 176 pages later find Small Claims has been a stretch. The essays that laid blueprint to this book are excellent as- is; here, broken by the story of a middling 30- something in slog- stage marital crisis, their grab’s a little looser. Kaufman has crafted a special hellscape of mundane middle age; one man’s haphazard pissing contest with Rip Van Winkle in a battle his to lose, but the narrator’s voice womps and wallows its way through this story without due relief.
I can’t knock hard truth, but told in fiction these mid-life musings need something more compelling to offer companionship alongside. This is criticism I’m doubly bummed to deliver because I suspect it might swing personal, too — a rough appraisal places Andrew Kaufman in just the right bracket to be Small Claims’s narrator himself: both guys have one wife, two kids, and a couple novels under- belt; if the book’s story isn’t gumption, it’s coincidence risking offence on everyone’s behalf.
Nothing said here is to assume Andrew Kaufman and his wife, acclaimed film editor Marlo Miazga, are sleeping in separate beds; I sincerely hope Andrew Kaufman hasn’t had himself a mental break smearing daughter Frida’s vomit in the Northbound 400’s gas station restroom, either. I’d rather imagine Kaufman’s life rosy — or a notch above this book’s low bar, at least — but a pinch of truth might help explain the authenticity that rings through in Small Claims’s intermittent ranting, and somewhat excuse the curmudgeonly whine those rants are prone to throughout. It would be easier to swallow the narrator’s complaints knowing they’ve at least offered their author some relief in retelling.
Kaufman remains a gifted writer and a good guy too, I’m sure. The little genre swap this book takes on doesn’t diminish his talent and says nothing about character, of course, but Small Claims’s straight story makes clear why fantasy plays well in Kaufman’s earlier writing — magical realism’s wander offers the author some respite from whatever seems to woe and weigh on him here.