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Stripmalling
by Jon Paul Fiorentino
(with illustrations by Evan Munday)
Toronto: ECW Press,
2009, ISBN 978-1-55022-859-5 178 pp., $24.95 cloth.
Jon Paul Fiorentino is an ex-Winnipegger who escaped the empty blue skies and streets of downtown Transcona, a suburb of Winnipeg, for the gentle sweep of Mount Royal against the horizon and the pedestrian-filled streets of Montreal. This is his fifth book (if indeed this is a book, but more about that later), after four collections of poetry and a collection of well-received short fictions called Asthmatica.I, on the other hand, am the hometown reviewer with the unenviable task of reviewing Fiorentino's book.
Stripmalling is an odd book that is neither fish nor fowl. ECW Press calls it "A misfit book" but the front cover bills the book as a novel. The problem is that the book is not constructed like a novel and the competing texts suggest it should not be read like your traditional novel. The book is part journal, part failed comedy routine, part graphic novel, and concludes with a fragment of a workshopped script for a play or movie, which includes comments by an imaginary writing instructor. We are clearly reading an experimental text, and one that comes with all the trappings we can expect from an après post-modern book: satire, puns, playful erotica, a self-deprecating unreliable narrator whose tongue is firmly planted in his cheek or wishing it was in someone else's cheek, and a variety of literary genres, including illustrated scenes from the book in graphic novel style.
It's a novel in many voices--all of them mine: the character Jonny, the writer Jonny, and the miserable real-life Jonny. But please note that, as usual, all three Jonnies are fictional. The real Jonny can found on Lavalife under the tag, sweaty4u2009.(14)
The playful mixing of fact with fiction and the deliberate confusion and unwillingness to separate one from/form the other is a well-worn post-modern conceit. But in this story the hyper-self awareness--a kind of "look ma no hands" gesture (or "look at me I am a writer writing about writing") sometimes gets in the way of the storytelling.
Nevertheless, the whimsical off-handed humour and tone do make for some outrageously funny scenes that remind one of the sixties poet Richard Brautigan, who effortlessly, it seemed, mixed pop-culture references with highbrow ideas. Fiorentino's tone and pose is equally casual and deceptively simple.
The pose in this case is that of the writer as loser and one who wants to be womanizer but is hopelessly inept as a lover of Dora or as a gas-jockey for Shill or later as a store clerk for Hypermart.
The voice and character of Jonny also brings to mind how Woody Allan blended together his 'real' neurotic self with the imaginary one we watched in such film classics as Annie Hall. The problem here, however, is not one of being unable to distinguish reality from fiction but the writing and how the story unfolds.
Here, for example, is Fiorentino describing a character called Darren, the man Dora invites for a threesome: "Darren was hypermuscular, had tattoos all over his hairless arms, and both of his nipples were pierced. He had long, flowing, curly brown locks and the face of a cherub." (20)
Firorentino is not afraid to write cliches, in this case what appears to be a porn cliche. But whatever happened to elegance and grace in a sentence or--dare we say it--beauty or craft or the power to render a scene accurately and with precision? Perhaps we are asking for too much from a story that is essentially a sardonic tall tale.
The book basically tells the story of Jonny's quest to become a writer. The humorous thing is he lives in his car on a strip mall in dull and boring Transcona. There is also the attendant desire for a relationship with Dora (the explorer) and to simultaneously escape the fate of a gas-jockey for Shill (corporate evil incarnate) and later his job as a store clerk at Hypermart. (Please note the use of puns and the easy targets of corporate evil, Shell and Wal-Mart.)
Jonny, however, is a buffoon. His failure as a gas-jockey has some ludic moments but he is eventually fired for selling drugs on the side as well as being insubordinate (he refuses to tuck in his shirt) to his boss. Jonny's innocent and naive voice has its funny moments, and there are some funny one-liners sprinkled here and there throughout the text like confectionery, but one cannot shake the feeling that for the most part his dumb naivety is contrived and condescending and represents a type of contemporary hipness. In other words, his voice and character are the pop culture cultivation of the nerd or loser as hero.
Jonny's character and mock-heroic ambition to write, his hapless jobs and love life, and his mid-life crisis do not elicit our sympathy in part because he is grounded in this contemporary pop culture cliche and therefore comes across more as a cartoon character than a fully drawn fictional character. It may be fun to be dumb and fun to write and mock the pretensions of the dumb (and the soul-destroying evils of banal jobs) but there is not much to latch on to after you have finished reading the book. The book is the literary equivalent of Chinese food; initially satisfying but after awhile not very filling.
This is a book that aspires to be fresh, cutting edge in its use of genres, and droll and anarchistic in its attitudes, all the while looking over its shoulder and seeking approval from the very world it mocks. Alas, I guess that is called being an artist these days.
Carmelo Militano's latest collection of poetry is Feast Days (Olive Press, 2009).
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.