Bang Crunch (Hardcover)

Inanimate objects don’t chat, as a rule. Good thing; imagine a severed foot or a pair of gloves suddenly saying “Hullo!” to you. Imagine how helpless you’d be to react. Me, I’d probably just stare, frozen, and think something like, “Aah! This hat wants to talk! My God! What About?”
The bad news is that the low points of this newish, lionised book, Bang Crunch, can give you that same gawking feeling. On the other hand, its youngish author has already completely mastered prose style, and is observant in a pity-free and heartbreaking way. Neil Smith, in fact, might be one of the finest “Montrealais” writers to emerge from English Quebec’s last decade.
The Verdun native also happens to be hilarious. Consider the subtle joke in the premise of “The B9ers”. This story concerns a support group for survivors of benign tumours. Wait, survivors of what? Non-lethal, non-dangerous conditions? Yet Smith makes the gag touching:

“Last night on the phone, they each listened so patiently as he explained his theory: that when you’re as benign as a dodo bird, what prevents the enemy from sailing a boat to your shore and clubbing you over the head? Were they fiercer, more ruthless, John was suggesting, maybe their tumours wouldn’t have sprouted . . . ”

Most other Bang Crunch stories seek a similar balance between the ludicrous and the emotional-this is probably Smith’s writerly territory. Some vivid passages in “Funny Weird or Funny Ha-Ha?” support the theory. For example, when the stumbling-drunk narrator misunderstands a Juste pour rire hidden-camera prank, and thereby escalates the situation into shattered lenses, bloodshed and chaos, you truly want to both cry and laugh. (Has anyone in Montreal not been taped by the Just for Laughs/ Gags programming empire?) Smith stakes an important literary claim here, on the frontier between the absurd and the melancholy. “Funny Weird” turns on this illustrative riddle: Q. What is Pollyanna’s epitaph? A. I’m glad I’m dead.
This being Smith’s first book, it may seem premature to situate him in the tenderly semi-surreal realm of, say, the American writer George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline) and his various followers. But Smith has publicly claimed Saunders as a literary sibling, and Bang Crunch is a debut sensational enough, promising enough, to warrant some early conjectures about where the author is headed. It may have long-term artistic value.
This author’s chief virtue is a crucial one-he is extremely readable most of the time. Still, his prose can be hard slogging, when he succumbs to his minor flaw, as in parts of the title story and another called “Extremities” (the one with the chatty limbs and garments). Neil Smith’s little vice is that he has a small gambling problem.
Clearly a betting man, he wagers in a couple of the nine stories here that eccentric narrative devices of his own invention won’t drain emotional power from the fiction. It’s the old form-content gamble of the literary experimentalist. The Bang Crunch generation might phrase the proposition as follows: “Betcha can’t get your reader past the fact that the mitten has a point of view, on to caring what the mitten has to say, or wondering about its accent.”
Here’s an apt sample from “Extremities”: “The calfskin gloves, appalled and frightened by the turn of events, attempted to lose themselves in memories of happier times.” Did they now? A gambling man has got to roll snake eyes sometimes, we are reminded. Another small complaint: many characters in this book seem to live above money, holding only aggressively quirky jobs, like selling dog booties to pet shops. Sure, it’s mostly set in Quebec, and the usual thing would be government work; but c’mon.
A few awkward moments don’t make Smith an inconsequential writer, though, and it’s hard to overstate how enjoyable this book is. The author is just as 21st-century sharp as comparable cohorts like Vancouver’s underrated Peter Darbyshire, and Mark Anthony Jarman (who, providentially, blurbs Bang Crunch’s back cover). But Smith avoids the cold nihilism those writers’ work is prey to.
It’s a bit difficult to say how he pulls that off. Certainly the humour helps, as when a grieving widow holds an imaginary conversation with the husband whose ashes she has sealed inside a curling stone: he’s on “constant watch,” she has him say, because “I’m your rock.”
Smith doesn’t shy away from gene splicing, artificial insemination, school shootings, and other alienating phenomena of our age. His gift lies in the ability to incorporate spooky detail into a fictional world where love, family and good intentions still count for something.
They still do in our non-fictional lives, as fine literature still reminds us, since we always need reminding. One minor Bang Crunch character avers “in all sincerity, that he personally [knows] a lot of inanimate objects with more human personalities than many humans.” But he doesn’t say this to his windbreaker or pencil case or bowl of poutine, Neil Smith quietly notices. This is an imperfect but animated book he has written, and it’s a substantial literary accomplishment, a part of the conversation we non-objects are lucky to have.
Lyle Neff (Books in Canada)

Montreal-based translator Smith debuts with nine stories, some of which hit the mark. In The B9ers, a man forms a support group for people who have had benign tumors removed, and that's where the action stops: a weak subplot involving fraud by a representative of an orphanage fails to give the story much bite. In Isolettes, a woman has a baby with the use of her friend's sperm, yet when catastrophe strikes after the birth, the general airlessness of the writing makes it hard to access her feelings. Similarly, the collection's longest story, Jaybird, profiles an ambitious actor led into an extremely revealing performance by his agent's secretary under false pretenses, but the denouement unfolds mutedly. Smith's poise finds its best home in Extremities, which follows a pair of gloves from one owner to another and finally through a murder, and in the title story, in which a woman ages forward too rapidly, and then backward just as rapidly. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.