The Lusty Man

Claire Wilkshire is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of
British Columbia.

This novel exudes wild energy and an exuberant delight in language,
images bursting off the page at every turn. It begins badly (the first
chapter overwhelms with an excess of character and detail), but
perseverance is rewarded. The Lusty Man is a book about origins, about
where people come from and how things come to be as they are.

The absence of a focal character allows Griggs to introduce the
intersecting worlds of a variety of individuals, each as wacky and
distinctive as the one before. There’s Holmes Stink, the kindly
introvert who spends much of his time “several fathoms below the town
dock” in an underwater room he has furnished with objects salvaged
from the lake bottom. He’s passionate about words and the past:
“Prov-e-nan-ce, Holmes would think, stretching and prodding the soft
body of the word’s meaning like a snail tugged out of a shell.
Origins, beginnings, a fertile loamy linguistic bed out of which
anything could arise, a garden of possibilities.”

Holmes fills in as guardian angel for Rita Cabal, daughter of Victor
the repairer of plaster saints; Rita desperately wants to gain admission
to the Snakes, a boys’ club comprising three of her schoolmates, Greg,
Ronny, and Rob, an “unholy trinity.” Rita survives a number of
initiation rites, not without injury, and learns about her own
provenance in the process. Innis George drives around—accompanied by
his ego and a phallic statue whose provenance he is investigating—in a
fancy car that keeps letting him down: “Glup? Only a car that was
under some sort of molecular stress would say anything like glup. A
Triumph TR4 addressed the world with prevailing and conquering sounds. A
Triumph TR 4 was glory on wheels, it vanquished the road, riding it hard
and close like a swift hand. It tooted its own horn, crowing Veni, vidi,
vici.”

As the characters blunder along in their own peculiar quests, the
language of this funny and thoughtful novel sizzles and snaps with a
rare and delightful vitality.