Baroque-a-nova

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Vancouver’s Kevin Chong writes about what he knows—good advice for a
young novelist. In his first novel, he displays a sense of place, good
characterization skills, and clever use of dialogue in telling the story
of 18-year-old Saul St. Pierre, the only child of a successful 1960s
folk-rock duo. Saul’s mother, Helena, has committed suicide in
Thailand. The young man is living in a suburb of Vancouver (Chong
acknowledges the village of Ladner as his model), spending some of this
time with his father, Ian, and his estranged stepmother, Jana. Two
groupies, Marina and Louise, a couple of German TV journalists, and some
of Saul’s school friends round out the cast of characters.

Strewn about the novel in varying degrees of verisimilitude are
references to the music industry and television production, but the
thrust of the novel is Saul’s attempts to deal with his mother’s
death and his father’s lapses of character, as well as his own
brooding angst and teenage sexuality. It is difficult for a mature
novelist to speak with the voice of adolescence. When the writer is
himself young and uncertain, the task is much more daunting. Chong
succumbs to unruly metaphor (“the dark ponytail bobbed like a shiny
fishing lure,” he says at one point, and, a little later, describes a
stage as being “as dark as a witch’s cauldron), and Saul’s
ambivalence toward his father and dead mother is not clearly shown.

Despite its faults, Baroque-a-Nova is a strong effort, and Chong will
be heard from again.