Recent reading: Keith Maillard, Looking Good (Difficulty at the Beginning, v.4)

My favorite Maillard to date, the fourth part of a bildungsroman variously set in West Virginia, Boston, and (for a page or two) Toronto's Pearson International Airport. Maillard's books used to perpetually occupy the remainder tables down at Duthie's and Book Warehouse. I came, early on, to the book-collector's snobby and ignorant conclusion that anyone remaindered so often couldn't possibly be any good. Then I met a couple of Maillard's former creative writing students from UBC, including one with particularly acute critical taste, who described his Gloria as one of the best books she'd ever read. A few months later, a US trade paperback of Gloria showed up, unexpectedly, on a new supplier's remainder list, and I tagged a single copy onto the order. A very strange book, a sprawling "literary" novel written in a style not much in evidence these days, a 1950s social potboiler plot full of sex and emotional disintegration written in a mercilessly clear just-the-facts-ma'am style that immediately put me in mind of older American authors like John Cheever, Philip K. Dick, and Don Robertson: "literary" writers who deliberately chose to "refunction" popular genre models. There are set pieces in Gloria I don't ever expect to forget, including a memorable climax in which the relentlessly spunky and resourceful twentysomething protagonist hammers a volley of arrows into a sexual predator's sports car.

The Difficulty at the Beginning quartet is Maillard's extension -- and, in many cases, wholesale rewriting -- of two of his earliest books, The Knife in My Hands (1981) and Cutting Through (1982). Each of the quartet's novels is written in a noticably different style, and the tone of the sequence as a whole darkens as it focuses on the social and psychological disintegration of the late-60s American left. Maillard's blackly comic evocation of doper's paranoia easily withstands comparison with novels like Robert Stone's A Hall of Mirrors, Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, and Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. And two of the novel's characters -- Pam Zallman -- anorexic; rogue cultural theorist; ex-ballerina -- and Tom Parker -- Vietnam vet; dealer; ostensibly "crazy," yet capable of clear, sustained and accurate reflection on his far worse off countercultural comrades -- are drawn with a compassion and psychological depth that has much more in common with nineteenth century literary realism (with Dickens; with Balzac; with Tolstoy) than with the present moment's relentless focus on style, or ironic pastiches and mash-ups thereof.

Very few people will probably read Looking Good; it's a thick and densely written novel from a hole-in-the-wall Canadian publisher which more or less requires reading the first three (and to my mind, somewhat less good) books in the quartet -- 600+ pages!-- as a set-up. But it's a major work of literary realism that held my attention for two weeks solid and deserves your close attention.

(Image: Keith Maillard, looking good on a West Vancouver beach)
- posted by cjb @ 8:56 AM