Juxtin Pose: Five Stories

Description

214 pages
$16.95
ISBN 0-9682200-1-0
DDC C813'.54

Year

1998

Contributor

Reviewed by Geoff Hamilton

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

Review

The five stories in this collection by Toronto author Duane Hewitt are
linked by a thematic concern for marginal men and women with optimistic
temperaments. The first story involves an ill-fated attempt by two young
men to raise money by selling shrunken heads. The last story follows a
lonely woman across Ontario as she discovers self-love in the great
outdoors. In between we meet a corporate lawyer slipping into psychosis,
a hot-tempered Wild West outlaw named Deadly Dan Fowler, and the
unflappable idealist Johnny Orster, who lives his life loving everybody
no matter what, even if they beat him and cheat him and deny him his
inheritance.

There is a great deal wrong with this collection: the clichéd events
and phraseology (astonishingly marshaled in the final story, producing
an intensely cloying effect beyond even unintentional humor), the
repellent sentimentality (a gooey film adheres to nearly everything),
and not least the bad editing (typos, malapropisms, and grammatical
gaffes abound). Juxtin Pose is meant to be about hope, about the
possibility of achieving happiness in spite of grim circumstances.
However, all the rosy thinkers in the collection struck me as impossibly
naive, cognitively barren, and above all utterly uninspiring (if Johnny
Orster had been brutally tortured by a gang of pessimists to the point
of admitting that evil exists, the fourth story just might have been
saved). Nothing is convincing here, and the narration of the
characters’ epiphanies, particularly the lonely woman’s, are akin to
the arguments of a grossly incompetent defence attorney who either says
nothing to exonerate her client or actually incriminates him further
with every negligent word.

Yet Hewitt is an unusually forthright storyteller, and his naked
enthusiasm makes smidgeons of this collection briefly appealing. The
author’s expressed faith that “somehow, in the end, everything
[will] be all right” is unlikely to be contagious, but he does give
the impression of being a true believer himself. With cynics so
plentiful, that must count for something.

Citation

Hewitt, Duane., “Juxtin Pose: Five Stories,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed February 17, 2025, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/608.