The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns

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

The title of Toronto writer David Munroe’s first novel is,
unfortunately, predictive of the verbosity of the story: the sheer
weight of words gets in the way of what could have been a decent plot.
Somewhere beneath all this verbal excess lies a talented author who,
with substantial editing, can craft a thoughtful piece of fiction.

When labourer and wannabe screenwriter Jim Kearns has a punch-up with
an actor on the set of a movie for which Kearns is laying paving stones,
it precipitates a period of change for him and his family—wife Maddy,
son Eric, and daughter Rachel. Kearns’s anger and despondency threaten
to destroy his marriage, and Maddy, the novel’s most complete
character, assigns her husband a series of character-building tasks: get
to know a neighbour, renovate the attic, read the Bible. Kearns attacks
these duties in his own way, circling the wagons, struggling with his
doubts, analysing his motives—not a bad approach, to be sure, but the
reader is subjected to all the circling and doubting and analysing to
the point of exhaustion.

Munroe is in Kearns’s head for most of the book’s 323 pages. Not a
page goes by without the character detailing and analysing his every
thought; Munroe’s apparent rationale for this obtrusiveness is another
task assigned to his hero: Kearns is to keep a journal. “From such a
short time into it,” he says, “I’d started exhibiting copious side
effects from all of my accursed journal writing—one being how, at the
slightest provocation, I could break into analogies, metaphors, and
similes. They flew from my head unbidden and unbridled, with different
tones and timbres, like a cacophony of wino farts in a pre-dawn
flophouse.” Later he says, “no matter how much I wanted to, I
couldn’t capture in full what I wanted to say.” But he tries and
tries, and, of course, that is the problem: the unfortunate
“cacophony” makes it nearly impossible to stay in the room.