BOOKS: PORTRAIT OF THE MIDDLE- AGED ARTIST
Subtle and elegant account of classic underdog’s quest for fulfilment commands attention
Say “It’s a coming- of- age story” and any listener will probably imagine a young person ( a Frodo, a Jane Eyre, a Stephen Daedalus) and picture the setbacks and victories they encounter on the more or less sure- footed route to maturity. They navigate the pitfalls of childhood and adolescence, survive education and family and social environment — learning and growing all the while. And then they’re ready, at the grand old age of 19 or 21, to tackle adult challenges with the proper set of equipment.
But what if 21 passes, and 42 too, and the creased former youth has only discovered romances that fizzled out, family members to battle with or resent, and careers that fit poorly? Who has potential that’s never quite realized? Has this character merely come- of age as a failure? Or can “late bloomer” apply here? After all, is there any law of nature that dictates that maturity must occur by a highly specific sellby date?
To help answer these questions, consider Cyril Andrachuk’s hard- luck story.
When the affable but unblessed hero of Grant Buday’s The Delusionist asks Connie Chow, a crush he’s just sketched in high school art class, to Psycho ( the “weird and horrific” Hitchcock original, that is, not the Gus Van Sant remake), he’s delirious with excitement that this unorthodox and talented classmate and out- of- his- league girl has agreed to a date with lowly him. Maybe she’d glimpsed the thoughtful soul beneath the shy exterior? But while Connie looks old enough to sneak into the R- rated film ( and so does, of course), Cyril’s held back and misses the cause célèbre. A few weeks later, Connie skips town altogether without so much as a note. She’s turned talk of leaving backwater Vancouver for the glamorous studios of Tinseltown into a reality. Flummoxed and deflated, Cyril doesn’t follow. From then on, fortune doesn’t smile much upon him. In his nimble but wide- spanning 10th book, Mayne Islander Buday ( Dragonflies, White Lung) captures scenes and moments from a stalled life that drifts and lurches, portraying whole decades in which happiness, contentment, and direction are fleeting or denied altogether. Over the novel’s four parts — set in ’ 62, ’ 72, ’ 82, and ’ 95 — Buday presents Cyril’s unsteady quest for, well, his best true self.
Our sympathies triggered by this classic underdog, we only hope he gets there.
But between family ( a gloomy immigrant mother who brought terrors and miseries from her Stalinist homeland that continue to haunt the family and a frail coldhearted brother who resents his younger sibling), a scheming and untrustworthy best friend, a long series of unfulfilling jobs ( including house painter and taxi driver), and careless choices that take him further from his artist core while also landing him in legal trouble, Cyril’s prospects are anything but promising.
As relayed by Buday, Cyril’s deep- seated and family related insecurities and remarkable run of bad luck effectively hamper his personal growth. Yet despite those sobering circumstances, Buday injects welcome moments of humour and levity ( such as a road trip that has Cyril and his buddy seeking drugs in psychedelic- era San Francisco and coming up empty- handed).
He also gives a picturesque tour through Vancouver’s changing face.
Although Connie’s occasional appearances as her acting career steadily erodes introduce a small problem ( insofar as she’s a natural scene stealer since both her character and trajectory are more sensational than Cyril’s), Buday has crafted a fascinating portrait of the artist as a middle- aged man.
Subtle and elegant, his account of one’s man’s stumble-filled movement toward his fate commands attention and gives readers new ways to comprehend the process of maturation.