Games, Dreams and Paper Bags: A Novel in Seven Stories

Geoff Hamilton is a Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

Games, Dreams and Paper Bags is the second novel by Dan Walsh, who has
also written two volumes of poetry. In seven interconnected
“stories” (loose chapters, really), we travel here through a
nightmare city of the dispossessed, crossing paths with drug pushers,
condemned street kids, hopeless dreamers, a supremely talented musician,
and a man trying to learn Esperanto. The back cover dubs Walsh “a
postmodern Melville,” but he seems more akin in style and substance to
William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon. The city we encounter is a
paranoid fantasy, a gallimaufry of roving outsiders who grasp at
salvation while the “government,” “law-makers,” and “ruling
systems” oppress through obscure but viciously effective means.

Written in a kind of manic prose poetry—brisk, abrupt, and
maudlin—this work is unpleasantly overwhelming in its stylistic
exertions. The aesthetic payoff is minimal and the effort required to
sort things out rarely feels justified. The following sketch of a woman
named Connotate (everybody has odd, clever names) gives some idea of
what the reader is in for: “One notices, when addressing her, her
eyelashes exude a natal mascara, & raise eyebrows that linger a whole
gamut of cosmetic effect. Thin black lifelines that exert her features
benignly around the whitely rouged skin, a unique contrast to the lit
borders of blue and green which christen her eyes.” And a little
later: “The twill of [her] eyes collects a sadness, rippling into a
tear, wiped away by the beacon of her movement towards composure.”

The book does, however, deliver some fine moments, particularly those
involving the musician Scales, who at one point plays labor songs to a
construction crew and has them unionized “after twenty-seven chord
changes.” There is real talent lurking beneath the novel’s own gamut
of cosmetic effects, and one comes away with a feeling of buried
potential (a feeling reinforced by the fact that the author is three
years shy of 30). Walsh’s imagination is impressively fertile but
needs, one feels, to be subordinated to a clearer vision and more
disciplined hand.