Sentimental Exorcisms
by David Derry
Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009, ISBN-13: 978-1-55245-224-0, 192 pp., $18.95 paper.

I wanted to dislike David Derry's Sentimental Exorcisms, I really did. Where to begin my litany of adverse reactions? The sextet of neurotic narrators, perhaps, with their grating personalities and self-consciously well-spoken (and long-winded) inner voices. Living in their heads and abhorring the corporeal, Derry's male protagonists are most comfortable when quoting--and misquoting--other books: from grammar tomes to psych textbooks, to corporate financial reports, to dictionaries and postage-stamp encyclopedias. The overt intellectualism of the characters spills over into the annoyingly conceptual nature of the stories themselves. One reanimates a minor character from the work of Austin Clarke to tell his side of the story, another is a fiction based on an art show by a real-life Canadian painter, a third is based on the work of Nabokov. Too clever by half.

But Derry's cohort of misanthropic, sexual-repressed anti-heroes possesses a spooky ability to get under your skin. And he is undeniably a talented prose stylist capable of complex storycraft. This is most notable when he manages to break out of the psychological labyrinths of these personae, animating their misadventures with vivid references to the sights--and often, delightfully, smells--of their surroundings, to humanizing effect. As cautionary tales about the perils of punctiliousness, this half-dozen set of longish short stories is potent and comic.

"The male body is repulsive" (16), says the undergraduate who's found a replacement pastime for chess games in "Just Watch: An Apologia." But if men are gross to him, he can only bring himself to experience female beauty surreptitiously, through a pane of glass--having developed a hobby of roaming through Toronto's back alleys with a ladder in hand to peer into others' bedroom windows. His efforts are most frequently unrewarded, despite his nerdish cataloging of the results in a neighbourhood map tacked to the wall of his own, otherwise unshared, sleeping quarters.

The self-absorption and ornate phraseologies of Derry's characters are intentional devices, yet they still have the effect of distancing the reader from the dramatic action of their physical worlds. But just often enough, he'll deliver an observation that cuts through to resonate sharply with the reader. In "Just Watch," it's a simple but elegant capture of a shared moment on a crowded subway: "The train screamed into Coxwell, and we all leaned as one against the braking speed, then popped erect." (20) These delicate touches leave one far more tolerant of cutesy comparisons such as that of a narrator's ex-girlfriend's gamely sphincter to a winking asterisk.

Despite Derry's strongly satirical bent, his characters' absurd predicaments often inspire empathy. In "Distance," financial analyst Trevor Spates winds up in hot water after he, in the words of his psychiatrist, "threw a bottle at a prostitute." (115) Note: This is not exactly what happened. In fact, Trevor was defending the virtue of a stripper whose stage shows helped inspire his own fortnightly sexual performance with his wife. When the anguished accountant learns that the only model of calm, romantic masculinity in his family, hippie brother-in-law Clarence, is a former rapist who derives his air of tranquility solely from an experimental medication, life seems hopeless.

"Semicolon, Comma, Full Stop: A Treatise on Punctuation" is the strangest story in Sentimental Exorcisms--and the most deeply affecting. It recounts the reunion of a curmudgeonly, obese, dying elderly homosexual with the now-married straight student he first mentored, and fellated, over four decades prior. Sinclair, who comes to visit former poetry student Ted and never leaves, is so obnoxious to Ted's wife Marjory (whom he dubs Margarine) that she vacates the premises, abandoning what transforms into an extremely Odd Couple. This chronicle of abiding mutual love shot through with shared hatred is the collection's beating heart, and saving grace. By the end of its forty-plus pages, Derry does everything right in terms of pacing, character development and emotionally charged conflict, literally making me forgive all the other aspects of the book that had so irritated me until that point. It's truly lovely.

Shawn Syms has written fiction, essays, reviews and other writing for three anthologies and more than two dozen periodicals.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.


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