Sep. 11, 2007 - Issue #621: Sex in The City 07

Gillespie gives a novel take on Alberta with Shyness

With Crown Shyness, Curtis Gillespie has produced a jewel for Albertan literature. Since the Alberta government has been attempting to kill off our indigenous publishing industry, it’s surprising that our province still has novelists at all. Calculated on paper, every new, professional novel produced within our provincial borders should win a prize for existing despite the odds.

But Curtis Gillespie’s wonderful first novel should win accolades for refusing to shy away from the sociopolitical landscape that makes literary work here so difficult. Exploring the uneasy cohabitation of demographics that makes our province so unique, Crown Shyness stands in small company as a warts-and-all literary confrontation of Albertan society.

It’s a book that manages to express the striking contradictions of an arts-bashing province that still produces art, a right-wing province that contains a vocal left-wing population, a stereotypically red-neck province that boasts three universities and a population just as educated as elsewhere in Canada.

This is pretty radical, in and of itself. Running contrary to the sort of Albertan literature that, save for the insertion of Albertan place-names, could just as well have been set in any other Canadian urban centre (read: literature with Toronto-envy), Gillespie sets out to portray the decidedly less glamorous elements of Albertan society. There’s no feel-good multiculturalism, no elegant exposition on the wonders of social welfare. Instead, Crown Shyness opens with protagonist Paul Munk travelling by car with his parents to pick up his brother, Rick, from jail. It’s hardly a quotidian scenario, but Gillespie soon paints in universally relevant (by Albertan standards) details: Munk is the left wing son in a family of conservatives. The title refers to how trees crowded together grow to different heights in order to share resources. It’s a metaphor for the family dynamic between the three siblings of the Munk family. They, in turn, can be read as representations of the different demographic elements in Albertan society.

There’s Lisa, the academic, who reroutes all emotional responses into intellectual analysis. Rick is a ne’er-do-well just out of prison who, in the action of the novel, is attempting to start anew with his prison-pen-pal girlfriend, Tammy. Then there’s our protagonist Paul, the magazine writer who is writing a profile of Daniel Code, a Christian fundamentalist politician in a new Albertan right-wing party.

Since the profile is for a struggling left-wing magazine (what other sort of political dissidence does this province sustain?), Paul faces the challenge of portraying Code as an enigmatic individual whom he finds personally agreeable, yet whose politics Paul finds utterly reprehensible. Add to this dilemma the fact that he’s painfully attracted to Code’s daughter-cum-publicist (whose politics are decidedly more cosmopolitan than her father’s) and that Munk has unearthed some seriously tarnished elements in the Codes’ family history.

It’s a novel tension, artfully presented, and infused with experiences utterly unique to Alberta.

Gillespie profits from writing from Paul’s perspective: the disparate demographics incorporated in Crown Shyness are judiciously presented, allowing the flawed humanity of each to shine through. The strategy is credible partially because of Paul’s devotion to his journalism work, and partially because Paul occupies the middle ground between his sister’s austere intellectualism and his brother’s thoughtless corporeality.

Paul is no doubt something of an alter-ego for Gillespie, whose back-page biography reveals him to be an Edmonton-based magazine writer who has been well-lauded over the course of his career. So, though this is Gillespie’s first novel, it’s substantially better than others in its category. The intricately woven plot, economic and careful, is the work of an experienced writer. Gillespie also turns phrases that just catch in the ear: a magazine profile tainted with personal interest is “another in the long line of slabs of propaganda that passed for journalism across every political orientation.”

Moreover, for a novel of such astute psychological realism, Crown Shyness motors along with surprising suspense. While Paul is trying to work on his story, the mystery behind Rick and Tammy’s relationship slowly emerges. It’s shady stuff that bends the novel into veritable noir material, a wild yet entertaining contrast to the plot line concerned with Munk’s profile of Daniel Code.

Tackling the heart of Albertan identity, how we can be urban socialists who get along grandly with rural rednecks until gods, guns or homos enter the conversation, how we can have our feet planted in so many different social locations, Crown Shyness is a book that Albertans should read in order to feel the bliss of being finally understood, and that others should read in order to understand us. V

?Out Tue, Sep 18
Crown Shyness
By Curtis Gillespie
Brindle & Glass, 230 pages, $22.95
Book launch Mon, Sep 17; Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts (9704 - 111 Ave)

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