#41 – Shelf Monkey, by Cory Redekop

I bought this book for two reason. First, there is the cover. It’s gorgeous! The cover is simple, clean, very dynamic, and in person extremely attractive. Unusually attractive, in fact (it turns out that the cover flaps are too large to be practical, though, and they make the book unwieldy to hold at times; the extra-tight binding and narrow gutter don’t help either, but it still looks pretty). Second, there is a blurb on the back of the book from Canadian author Eric McCormack (no, not the actor) in which he indicates that he appears as a character in the novel. Eric was a professor of mine during my undergraduate years, and though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we are friends, we do know each other more than just to say hello in the hallway. And it’s always cool to see people you know showing up in fiction.

I enjoyed this book despite myself. Page one was a reasonably convincing fake newspaper article, but page two almost lost me, with the immediate launch into what I can’t help but think of as the Canadian Indie Style. Some of you may not be familiar with it (although if you’ve read Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, or really anything else by Jim Munroe, you’ve definitely encountered it), so I’ll give you a brief rundown of what’s involved. It’s self-consciously casual to the point of seeming forced. The authors tend to have large vocabularies, but rarely use them effectively. Technique is virtually irrelevant, with plot and overt character development being nearly the only concerns. The narrators are self-deprecating, misunderstood, inwardly aggressive but outwardly meek. The women who serve as love interests for these characters are uniformly aggressive, beautiful, artistic, sporting an unusual name, and often (though not always) bisexual. Quirky isn’t the word. In many cases, though the books are entertaining and original, that’s all they are, and it’s easy to see why the authors stayed “indie”. I like independent presses, and they fill a need that, frankly, I wouldn’t trust the larger house to fill. But. The Canadian Indie Style is genuinely grating after ten pages or so, and a book has to have a lot going for it otherwise to not outright piss me off before the end. Most books in this vein seem to feel like they’ve gotten almost there, but haven’t quite made it. Shelf Monkey is written in almost quintessential Canadian Indie Style, but thankfully has a lot of things going for it, and I was able to put my hatred of The Style aside and just enjoy the story.

The novel is presented a series of documents (mostly emails written by protagonist Thomas Friesen, although there are newspaper articles and transcripts included) as he tries to explain, to Eric McCormack of all people, why he is on the run from the law. It’s a clever technique, and it works for the most part. It does fall apart a bit when you realize that nearly ever one of the documents, no matter who the ostensible author, is written in more or less the same tone. Thomas is a failed lawyer, and bibliophile much like myself (although we have very different tastes), and he finds work in a big box book store in Winnipeg. There he meets and eventually befriends Warren, Aubrey and (the aggressive, beautiful, unusually named) Danae. Despite being hopped up on pain pills left over from what seems to be a failed suicide attempt, he is extremely lucid, with the exception of an early scene in which he encounters an over-sized mock-up of Munroe Purvis, a talkshow host with a book club more popular than Oprah’s. Purvis publishes all his recommended books himself, and they are apparently the worst book ever published, with no real editorial integrity behind publishing them. The masses buy what they are told to buy.

I think what saves Shelf Monkey from being just another CIS book is how intense the satire actually is. The title comes from the group that Aubrey, Warren and Danae form, eventually including Friesen and others, to work out their frustrations about selling bad books to uneducated and uncaring readers day in and day out. They are joined by librarians and other sort of professional bibliophiles once a week on the edge of Winnipeg, where they gather in a vacant subdivision and burn books they hate. All the participants have secret names (Don Quixote, Yossarian, Offred, even a Gandalf), and present their candidates for burning in a ritualized way. As you can imagine, it devolves into cult territory pretty quickly. The problem here, and it’s the only problem really, is that the setup is so long, and relatively speaking the book is so short, that Aubrey, Warren and Danae begin frothing at the mouth before we get a chance to really understand their characters, and without any real warning signs. If satire wasn’t moving the plot forward so forcefully, the leap from burning books to blow off steam and a calculated act of violence (you’ll have to read the book to find out what) would simply be too great to bear.

Shelf Monkey, ultimately, is a fun book with some problems that are (hopefully) only indicative of the fact that it’s Redekop’s first time at bat. If he gives it another go I’ll most likely pick that one up as well, and good luck to him in the future. Oh yeah, and like all of us, he’s got a blog.

Next: Childhood, by André Alexis.