Down to the Dirt

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British
Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and author of The Salvation Army and the
Public.

Mere juvenile delinquency or abnormal rites of passage? However one
describes it, Keith Kavanagh’s progression from the Cove to St.
John’s to Halifax, from a 13-year-old who has just lost his virginity
to a 20-year-old drunk, fictionally reveals an unusual face (although a
somewhat exaggerated one) of Newfoundland society. As related by
Kavanagh and by those caught in his web of self-deceit, this “punk’s
progress” is little more than a litany of sex, booze, drugs,
pyromania, and violence. Nihilism and scatology are its defining
features. Whether Hynes is just trying to shock (something not easy to
do in this day and age) or just misguided in his attempt to overdose the
reader with realism, the novel is fairly unremitting in its depressing
repetition of antisocial behaviour, and is therefore quite tedious. It
lacks any touch of heroism or even redeeming humour, which is a shame
because Joel Hynes is a good writer with an elegant style. He could have
done better than this. One critic suggests that Down to the Dirt
represents a “new wave of Newfoundland literature at a time when a new
wave is so badly needed.” God forbid. If so, such literature will have
more writers than readers.