A '70S TEEN'S BRITISH LIFE ONE OF FUNNY, SMART TALES
Victoria-based Sonik recalls younger self with mix of tenderness and astonishment
Queasy had me at its title. A queasy adolescence? Consider my curiosity piqued!
The “England in the '70s” part of the subtitle attracted me, too. I grew up with my father's guffaws during reruns of On the Buses and The Benny Hill Show; at best, my knowledge of the era was patchy.
The reading experience was wholly rewarding, from chapters “Criminals” to “Dead Ewes.” By turns funny, smart, distressing and trenchant, Queasy offers strange, twisty entertainment and enticing cultural analysis with Victoria-based Madeline Sonik (Afflictions & Departures) recalling her younger self — chain-smoking, bitter and heart-achingly naive — with a stylish mixture of tenderness and astonishment.
Sonik's history lessons are nonpareil and her evocation of maturation is deeply, wryly funny and prickly with its startling intimate revelations.
Queasy opens with “There was a sawed-offed shotgun.” In 1974 American-born Sonik was 14 and living with her mother in a “cut-rate subdivision” (located in Windsor, Ont., where “furtive crimes had always flowered”). “(A)lienated from the common herd and perched longingly on its periphery,” she was enthralled by a pair of bad influences, including a teenage shoplifting marvel named Elizabeth. Leaving Ontario — which her mother despised for its “bloody cold” and “hellishly hot” weather and “bloody stupid” bilingual food packaging — Sonik believed the hype that England was the very best place to live on Earth. It wasn't, of course.
Each of Sonik's chapters offers a trove of meditations on then and now, on what the teenager didn't know once but has since learned.
The destination is a relative's hotel in Ilfracombe, a decaying seaside resort town about four hours southwest of London. As Sonik's uncle regaled his audience about his “playboy past” (“… one-night stands, two-night stands, dirty weekends, women he lived with, women he knocked up …”) Sonik listened intently to her mother's disillusionment: “Her face is hard and she spits out invectives, creamy memories that have all turned to curd.”
Sonik explored, navigating currency, customs and linguistic novelties. As a “completely apolitical immigrant,” she had much to learn.
“If I possess any wisdom, it remains in embryo,” young, chain-smoking Sonik once decided. Queasy amply illustrates the author as curious, astute and, yes, wise. And witty, too.
Brett Josef Grubisic is the author of the recently published novel My Two-faced Luck (Now or Never Publishing, Surrey, 2021).