An Affair with the Moon

Alexander Dick teaches English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

There is something familiar about David Gilmour’s latest novel.
Perhaps it’s the quirky hints of Toronto’s urban landscape. One is
reminded that the Granite Club used to be on St. Clair, that the street
car tracks separate the neighborhoods of Yonge Street like border
crossings, that Spadina Avenue really is too wide. Perhaps it’s the
familiar tone of Gilmour’s stylistic influences. One senses the
laughable drunkenness of Malcolm Lowry and the pitiable self-absorption
of Spalding Gray, the fragmented minimalism of Ernest Hemingway, and the
exacting reminiscence of John Irving.

In the end, however, this novel can be characterized not by Gilmour’s
details and influences in themselves, but rather by his weavings and
meanderings between them. Not only must we sometimes strain to follow
his protagonist, Christian Blackwood, and antagonist, Harrow Winncup
(who often brings along his domineering mother and eccentric sister), as
they chase each other from one end of Toronto to the other, but we must
cope with their frequent and sudden mood swings and character
inconsistencies. As Blackwood tries to clarify his mysterious
relationship with this maddening family, he fluctuates between the
events of a seedy murder and his struggle for personal satisfaction,
between his sexual fantasies and his parental worries, between
bacchanalian frenzy in the Caribbean and coffee and mashed potatoes in
student cafeterias.

Not that such sudden shifts are necessarily detrimental to one’s
enjoyment of the novel. It does capture the sometimes violent flux of
urban living, and no novel should sacrifice its intensity for prurient
political sensibilities. At the same time Gilmour has obviously tried to
develop a relatively focused story line around a temperamental
friendship, a murder, and his narrator’s personal anxiety. But one is
left asking, is this novel intended to be an inquiry into friendship? A
murder mystery? A confessional? Perhaps Gilmour was trying to overcome
every generic boundary in one swoop—as he did the distances between
Toronto neighborhoods.