Backyard Gene Pool

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

To write experimental fiction is a perfectly legitimate aim; to bring it off is an extraordinarily difficult feat. In the eleven stories of Backyard Gene Pool, Mr. Decker scorns such exhausted devices as characterization and linear plot, and instead labours to produce the impression of “a text intuitively spilled from a typewriter.” This is, perhaps, all very well as theory; in practice, Mr. Decker lacks the discipline which his enterprise demands. One who abandons the traditional resources of prose fiction must find something to put in their place if his work is to have an organic centre. However, Mr. Decker’s intuitive typewriter is not equal to the task of reflecting chaos without participating in it. Technique collapses into gimmickry, and the stories into exercises in a mannerism raisonné. Those who revere James Joyce just this side idolatry can no doubt find something of interest in Backyard Gene Pool. Those who disdain Finnegan’s Wake as the greatest prodigy of literary narcissism since Rousseau’s Confessions will find in Backyard Gene Pool an author undone by his own cleverness and lack of discipline.