Goodnight, Sammy Wong

C. Stephen Gray is Director of Information Services, Institute of
Chartered Accountants of Ontario.

This is a novel that is difficult to read, and for several reasons: its thin plot, uninteresting characterization, and tedious manner. The book appears to be an attempt to merge the subterranean aspects of life in Lethbridge, Alberta, with those of the novel’s main character, Peter — a down-and-out, soon-to-be-divorced, hard-living pool player. Just as Peter’s whole existence is bound by the claustrophobic anti-universe of the Dallas Hotel Bar, the O.K. Confectionary, his basement apartment, and his old Chevvy, so the novel itself is bound: in time — to the past, present, and future of Lethbridge; and in space — to the inexorable circularity of a small town’s daily monotony. The author has tried to bind his work together around a central metaphor of pain as a form of existence.

Peter is in severe pain, for example. His appendix is about to burst, and he apparently refuses to acknowledge it as anything more serious than a bad ease of constipation. All his memories, too, appear to be painful—his failed marriage; his daughter, to whom he is a stranger; his friend, who sings outdated songs at the Dallas Hotel Bar; and, most important, his painful memories of his first love affair. Almost all of the novel is devoted to a study of Peter’s pain: the pain in his lower regions comes to symbolize the pain of his — and of others’ — existence.

The only really interesting characters in the novel are those about whom the reader isn’t allowed to care, for they are included only superficially in the novel’s structure. They are always present, but they are not really anywhere, except perhaps as symbolic representations of the pain which Peter is continually experiencing. Such are Napi Running Water, Sammy Wong, Doctor Doe, and Walter Coglin — minor characters who are allotted too much space and two few characteristics. The mystical Abrana, Peter’s first-ever love, lives in the pages of the novel as a potent sexual symbol but not as a realistic character.

It could be argued that the book is not intended to be realistic, and that what has here been characterized as confusing and insignificant are in fact complexities and subtleties of a high, poetic art. Perhaps it is so. But either way, the book seems a tremendous self-indulgence; its assumption that the characters and the incidents which it contains are of universal interest and significance is fanciful, to say no worse of it. At the very best, the author had a small conceit that might have served as the basis of a single short story — or perhaps a series on growing up painfully in Lethbridge. But the attempt to integrate his subject matter into a unified work of art with some relevance to a reader of at least an average sensibility seems to me to have been, in the case of Goodnight, Sammy Wong, unsuccessful.