Glass Houses

Gerald Noonan was Associate Professor of English at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, and co-editor of A Public and Private Voice.

Recently Louis Dudek, in a review of two anthologies, was complaining that the poetry of this decade, despite its fairly frequent artistic execution, leads essentially to much sadness and drabness, to a postmodern Wasteland of the banal and futile. The comment applies nicely to these Tom Marshall stories, all of which come to sad ends: Professor T. slashes his wrists in the bathtub; Harold (an ex-prof writer) dreams of giant-bees-cum-woman and waits “for the first stings to destroy him”; another professor crowns his obsession with Elizabeth Taylor by slipping into reclusiveness; a graduate student in London completes his two-part love tale there by dreaming of his loneliness as a child back in Kingston, Ont.; and, lastly, misfit islanders off Toronto are bundled into a paddy-wagon on the mainland.

The prose is accomplished enough, crisp and dry, as befits, I agree, characters committed to the pursuit of non-life and, often, non-liberty and non-happiness. On occasion, though, it occurred to me that a literature in which the characters become ever more uncommitted demands, for its willing consumption, ever more committed readers.

For example, this paragraph presumably reflects the ordinariness of the particular divorced couple reconvening at a restaurant: “After greetings and some superficial chat about his latest novel they talked about their teenage daughter, Heather. Then they talked about themselves” (p.25). In this revelation of the banal, the author may thereby be victimizing his characters, but isn’t it true that they in turn victimize the unwilling reader who would rather take that as read, and get on with the lunch?

I liked best the last and longest story (52p.), set amid Toronto islanders, even though its ongoing life has a familiar staginess (the last hurrah, with the garden hose spraying the advancing bailiffs, is indeed staged for the TV cameras) and its heroics are neither epic nor comic, just more interesting than what has elsewhere unfolded.

Marshall produces the most consistent, evocative, and authentic sense of life when he conveys the female stream of consciousness. In the current postmodern Wasteland, it may be that life is a touch greener on the female side of the disposal plant or, just as likely, that a writer still needs to be stirred by the point-of-view of an “other” — some vision beyond the actual.