Flat

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Set in Vancouver’s lower west end, Mark Macdonald’s debut novel
begins with the suicide of a man identified only as “J.” Though he
is only an acquaintance, the narrator is asked to clean up the mess,
dispose of J’s body and the contents of his apartment, and try to
figure out why J died. The rest of the novel chronicles the narrator’s
attempt to discover why he was chosen to carry out these tasks. During
his search, he paws through and puzzles over J’s meagre belongings,
arranges for the body’s cremation, and drunkenly scatters the ashes
during a climactic storm that levels some apartment blocks in the area.

Flat can be read as a paradigm of postmodernist literature. The
storyline is characterized by fragmentation and discontinuity, and the
narrator’s attempts to make sense of events are continually
frustrated. This intellectually stimulating and demanding novel will
appeal to academics, critics, and experimental writers with a taste for
minimalism as a style and postmodernism as a literary movement.