Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life

Description

367 pages
$34.99
ISBN 0-7710-2262-X
DDC C813'.6

Author

Year

2004

Contributor

Reviewed by Matt Hartman

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Review

“Every emergency is, by its nature, temporary,” surmises the hero of
this award-winning first novel. Bray is an aging Toronto actor in
dinner-theatre productions and, until he is replaced, the voice of Tiny
Taxi, a Saturday-morning kids’ TV show. Norman, out of work, remains
insufferable, pompous, egotistical. The emergency with which he must
deal is the imminent foreclosure of the house he was left by his late
common-law wife, Gillian, whose adult children are among his fiercest
critics. Cole performs a remarkable feat: through clear, unheated prose
he succeeds in creating an intolerable bore in whom the reader
nevertheless invests considerable affection and who, despite the
alienation of friends and family and an almost complete lack of social
skills, manages to elicit more than ridicule.

There is a point at which the artistic temperament becomes its own
caricature. If the artist in question is lacking in talent, such a point
is reached almost immediately. It is to Cole’s great credit that he
succeeds in investing his protagonist with a nobility transcending his
faults—no mean feat with someone as self-centred as Norman Bray. One
of the roles Bray had in the past, and mentions again and again
throughout the novel, was that of Don Quixote, in the musical Man of La
Mancha. In life as in art, the tilting at windmills, carried to its
illogical end, can render in a man a kind of honour—and Cole’s
talent makes this point again and again. A successful first novel.

Citation

Cole, Trevor., “Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed February 18, 2025, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/16230.