Comic turns clash with regret, discontent in latest Vicar novel
The Vicar Vortex
Vince Ditrich | Cormorant Press, 2024 $21.99 | 304pp
Starting with Tony Vicar's humiliation — which involved a deeply inebriated wedding performance wearing Vegas-era Elvis drag — volcanic lunacy has been a hallmark of Vince Ditrich's Vicar series.
With a massive cast of comic figures near or inside the newly refurbished Vicar's Knickers Pub, The Vicar Vortex showcases Ditrich's return to a comfort zone: the more-is-more plot.
As the novel's short, busy chapters gradually built momentum, Vicar's seaside home in southern Vancouver Island reveals itself as a magnet for “poltergeistian activity” and UFO sightings, not to mention sparking romances, a band reunion, a revenge scheme by Serena De Medici — the “ragingly beautiful” sociopath who became fixated on Vicar in Ditrich's first volume — and the taping of The Extra-large Mediums of Littleton, an American reality TV show hosted by obese psychic sisters.
Less expectedly, and quite discordantly, the novel brims with sourness. Complaint, regret and dissatisfaction surface over and again. In Vortex, Ditrich's reflexive impulse for wacky scenarios appears to war with this outflow of negativity, resulting in a comic novel that's strangely unfunny and yet not serious enough to support the weight of its intermittently sombre state of mind.
Now famous near and far for his run-ins with paranormal phenomena, Vicar takes stock as Vortex begins. An “eccentric but big-hearted fella,” Vicar's “life had taken such a sharp turn in the last few years that he had begun to wonder who he really was.” He's disgruntled and feels stymied.
Comfortable in his own mile-aminute style, Ditrich soon populates his antic tale with dozens of walk-on parts, from Anna Tenna and Beaner Weens, squabbling cooks, and Beulah O'neil, a gin-tippling mother-in-law and “cheery, sex-starved social menace who got away with blue murder again and again,” to Hotchkiss Cooper, an “old fart” who “hoovered booze like a sink and couldn't have given a rat's arse what anybody thought,” Margaret Morrison, a tartan-dressed harridan and “disdainful old bat,” and Merri Crabtree, “Tyee Lagoon's purveyor of hot sauces and unbending positivity.”
In Vicar's “nowhere-ish town” oddballs reside at every address.
Yet this former “freewheeling bachelor,” who was “disorganized, unkempt, unshaven, and prone to flights of fancy better suited to an eleven-year-old,” has become a family man with innumerable obligations and responsibilities.
For him, the workday life has “gotten as appealing as unclogging a garbage disposal with his bare hands: another of the s--t jobs he had to do.”
Ditrich often returns to Vicar's glum assessments: “Vicar, distracted and overloaded, was irked at yet another irritation, another unwelcome surprise that seems to be a major feature of running a pub. So typical, so standard, so normal. Normalcy was going to make him puke.”
Later, “toothless normalcy” beckons Vicar, “directing him with an icy-cold grin toward the hamster wheel of responsibility.”
Ultimately, the novel suggests a writer who, like his protagonist, is in the process of working out who he is.
As I read about a middle-aged guy drowning in regret and self-loathing and who sought either an authentic existence or to reach a fulfilling goal, I wondered why he was in a novel whirring with silly, featherweight satirical stuff — a ghost giraffe, cynical reality TV stars, and an attempted kidnapping. Vortex might portray two dominant impulses of a writer. If so, the balance between them eludes him.