Indigenous Beasts [Paperback]

It’s a fraught situation. A publisher releases, with more fanfare than is typically accorded such events, a book of short stories by a first-time author. Accompanying publicity materials tell of the author’s graduation from Princeton University’s Creative Writing program; of his tutelage under Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Edmund White, and Chang-rae Lee; of his award for distinctive achievement in said program; and of the book’s serialization in a sexy, glossy-paged national magazine. They also mention, most gallingly, his age: twenty-two.
A copy of the book is sent to a reviewer-a cash-strapped hack working out of a basement apartment, a reviewer with no manuscript, let alone a book deal, to his credit, and whose own literary output, such as it is, remains uncelebrated and unanticipated despite being nine years the author’s senior. From this unhappy meeting, it is expected that the reviewer will produce a fair-minded and tightly argued assessment of the story collection in question. He will, if properly engaged in the spirit of the enterprise, provide a few generously laudatory comments that could adorn the book’s back cover in future printings. What might otherwise have been a few days of not unpleasant toil becomes instead the reviewer’s prodigious struggle for self-mastery; can he write an essay that is not rendered toxic by deep envy?
The promotional copy for Indigenous Beasts promises a work that is “shocking and disturbing . . . intense with despair and depravity,” and the book duly delivers up a joyless festival of drug abuse, murder, suicide, and sexual deviancy. But in an era where a two-hour action film yields a higher body count than a week of guerilla warfare in the sub-equatorial Third World, where the Internet hosts horrors virtually undreamed of a generation ago, it has become terribly difficult to shock and disturb. Of the fifteen stories collected here, the three that deserve special mention are evidence that a story needn’t be shocking at all. “Home Movies” lays bare the entire lives of two men, father and son, in a mere two pages; the curiously compacted format and the aggregate effect of one declarative sentence after the next give the story a surprising power. In “Animals” a hunter in the woods debates whether to flee from a pregnant girlfriend back home. The first-person voice is captivating: ungrammatical, brutal, and self-deceiving. “A Routine to These Things”, which traces the quick disintegration of a couple’s marriage after their attendance at a swingers’ party, is only partly successful, but Sellyn’s good at portraying the husband’s weakness and anxiety, his appetite for unknown female flesh and his near-revulsion when he finally gets it.
For the most part, though, the author’s very young age, so useful in the marketing of the book, is necessarily detrimental to its contents. Unless the writer is a Rimbaud, a Mailer, a Zadie Smith, a literary mutant harbouring not just dangerous levels of talent but also uncanny self-understanding and social awareness, he or she will not-cannot-have anything much to tell me. Once this dearth of experience has been detected, one looks hopefully to the style, searching in the best case for some emergent virtuosity, some youthful flouting of the writing rules laid down by literary forbears. To his credit, Sellyn does occasionally conjure up a striking description or observation. A man falls in love “the way you fall in love with a child, all at once and for no reason.” A fastidious stamp collector arranges his philatelic goods on a display page “as squarely as fascists on parade.” A plump stripper works the crowd in “a thong that resembles a string around your Sunday roast.” But counterbalancing these felicitous (or amusingly ribald) turns of phrase is an assortment of unconsidered ones. Characters let forth “choked” sobs, their hearts “pound”, they experience “blinding” pain, they’re “burning with anger”, they have “toothy smiles”. Phrases like these reveal an author who’s not always pushing himself hard enough to find the new in a language that allows for almost infinite novelty.
Cyril Connolly once wrote that, “the object of the critic is to revenge himself on the creator.” But I am not strictly speaking a critic, and there is no real cause for vengeance here. The envy I admitted to earlier for the author’s present circumstances does not yet extend to his writing. In the end, I’m obliged to say that the collection left me feeling ambivalent, a logical result of the work’s mixed quality. There is promise here. But in forecasting future accomplishment, I fall back on a hack’s phrase (pat, meaningless, useful for compromising scrapes like these): only time will tell.
Matt Sturrock (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

"My characters reveal that Canadians can be just as despicable as our American counterparts; I want to provide a 'warts and all' perspective, or as my grandfather said, 'plenty of drugs, sex, strippers and violence." -- Nathan Sellyn

Indigenous Beasts is a daring and energetic fiction collection from an enormously talented young writer. Sellyn's stories are populated with indifferent young men sorting out violence and despair in their lives, and clumsily questing after love--from parents, spouses and strangers. These stories are raw and elemental, yet beautiful and compelling. Through characters who are often despicable or violent, and with fresh, stark writing, Sellyn elevates the everyday into the truly extraordinary. Indigenous Beasts marks the arrival of a bold and confident new voice in Canadian fiction.