Quill & Quire
Occasionally the title of a book contains such an obscure word that the reviewer is forced to begin his or her review with a dictionary definition. In the case of Nicholas Ruddock’s The Parabolist, though, even the Canadian Oxford Dictionary is of no help because it contains no entry for the word.
Ruddock comes to the reviewer’s rescue, however, by supplying three definitions himself, the first two of which are: “one who speaks in parables,” and “a member of a splinter group of disaffected young poets in Mexico City, circa 1975.”
The novel does contain a fictional representative of that Mexico City sect: Roberto Moreno, an enigmatic poet who follows his uncle and aunt – his de facto parents – to the sleepy post-hippie Toronto of 1975. A series of chance happenings lands Roberto a job teaching an English course to med students at the University of Toronto, a course attended by Jasper and John, the two sons of Roberto’s neighbours. Roberto beds one of his students, Valerie Anderson, who is lusted after by Jasper, her lab partner in anatomy class. All of these characters are attracted to Roberto’s passion for poetry and his radical politics.
Another character who appears in Roberto’s life is a rapist, never named, whom Roberto and Jasper stumble upon early one morning as he is finishing up with his latest victim. Jasper confronts the rapist, who pulls a knife; Roberto, who packs his own blade, kills him, setting off a prolonged police investigation that circles ever closer to the poet and his student.
These events lead us to the third and final definition of a parabolist: “A practitioner of the art of concentrating energy into a single focus, illuminating or, if left unchecked, destroying everything in its path.” Roberto, we learn, is a parabolist on the page; one who, as he says, “arranges words and ideas in such a way that the energy input burns … [and] explodes in the gut and chest, where feelings are the deepest.”
Having established Roberto in this role and surrounded him with vibrant, sophisticated characters, Ruddock seems to lose sight of the third definition’s key verb – “concentrating” – and the follow-up – “focus.” Yes, Roberto concentrates the energy of his poetry- and love-starved students, precipitating love affairs, car accidents, bouts of temporary insanity, and even a murder, but the novel’s narrative voice never really gears up or down from its slightly sardonic, playful tone to match the events being described.
Characters brush up against death and love and dislocation as if those transformative experiences were simply more poems on Roberto’s reading list, artifacts to reflect upon and parse for meaning in coffee shops and bars. Relatively trivial incidents, on the other hand, are often elevated to the status of major plot points, as when Jasper’s father, Professor Bill Glass, is roused from his emotional stupor by witnessing Roberto and Valerie engage in oral sex. Here the effect feels forced, a mini set-piece rigged to illustrate the sexual mores of repressed Toronto in the mid-1970s. Compare this to the emotional trajectory of the rape victim, who merely returns to her waitressing job after the brutal assault and later falls in love with Jasper.
This sense of disconnection is heightened by minor subplots that add little to the novel’s themes, such as Roberto’s aunt Sylvana’s battles with her grope-happy boss and the ongoing travails of Professor Glass as he attempts to finish his treatise on French idioms. Meanwhile, the murder investigation is hardly mentioned for long stretches, then fizzles out after barely affecting the lives of anyone but the investigating officer. Ruddock also introduces a second suspense-novel subplot, involving an unhinged psychiatric intern who develops a violent, erotic obsession with Valerie.
When Ruddock confines the novel’s focus to his poetry-drunk medical students and their Latin American teacher, the narrative is infused with the kind of intellectual energy and playfulness that is woefully lacking in so much Canadian fiction. Ruddock forgoes the all too common strategy of fleshing out characters with long passages of internal monologue and expository backstory, choosing instead the tougher and more rewarding task of bringing his creations to life through their ideas, speech patterns, and interactions with other characters. He also draws an affectionate and detailed picture of bohemian and academic Toronto in the 1970s.
Why the author felt the need to introduce murderers and rapists into his novel is unclear. He was already doing a fine job of concentrating energy into a single and engaging focus.
Review
— Edmonton Journal
"A playful, literary mystery."
— Winnipeg Free Press
"Wildly inventive."
— The Sun Times (Owen Sound)
"An inventive, poetic, and thoroughly wonderful book."
— Vincent Lam
"Dazzling . . . an exciting, compelling, and expertly layered mystery."
— Anthony De Sa
"[A] big-brained, warm-hearted debut."
— Kyo Maclear
Praise for Nicholas Ruddock:
"Ruddock has a refined ear for dialogue and a mischievous sense of humour. He also knows how to bring a story to a memorable conclusion."
— David Bezmozgis
"Nobody can mistake the ingenuity of Nicholas Ruddock…. Ruddock has talent to burn; he writes with verve and style."
— Madeleine Thien
"Accomplished, original, witty and wise…. A wonderful piece of writing."
— Helen Humphreys (on "The Housepainters")
Book Description
Part comedy, part mystery, The Parabolist is a novel about murder, sex, the medical establishment, poetry and vigilante justice on the streets of Toronto in 1975.
Told through interlacing narratives, the story funnels towards the eye of an unsolved crime: on a rainy summer night, a woman is raped and very nearly murdered, but for the intervention of two drunken vigilantes who kill her attacker before fleeing the scene. The only clue the police have about their identities is a slab of Crisco shortening found on the victim.
The unforgettable cast of characters includes a charismatic Mexican poet, a libido-driven first-year medical student, a runaway teen turned prostitute, a raven-haired beauty, a sinister psychiatrist, and a donated corpse that is dissected - from skin to muscle to bone - as layer by layer, the inscrutable mysteries of anatomy, love, literature and life are poignantly revealed.
This is a funny, satirical, searing, dangerous and tender story of earnest youth and their ardent desire for love, acceptance and fulfillment.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Oh Jasper, she kept saying.
Then there was a crunching sound in the gravel outside in the driveway, a car, and she got up and looked through the curtain.
Jasper, she said, oh my God, you’ve got to get out of here. Right now.
She panicked. She ran in circles around the bedroom, and then she ran into the adjoining bathroom and closed the door.
He stood for a second by the rumpled bed and then he took off. He reached down and grabbed his clothes. He clutched them to his chest and ran naked out of the bedroom and down the stairs. Near the bottom, he vaulted over the mahogany banister. He slipped, he recovered, he put one elbow to the kitchen door and it flew open. It was dark in there but a dim light came up from the cellar. He stood there to breathe, to get his bearings. The kitchen door stopped its oscillation just in time.
He heard the turning of the key.
Honey, I’m home.
Those were the very words, it was hard to believe. His heart was pounding for the eleventh time that night. Quickly he ducked down onto the cellar steps and closed the door behind him.
The dog barked, a deep woof.
Hey there Brewster, the voice said.
He must have ruffled the dog’s head in the hallway because Jasper heard the clinking of the collar, the tags. Then the kitchen light came on, a sliver across his knees. He heard water running upstairs in the pipes. Marnie was in the shower now. The refrigerator opened and closed and then Brewster came over to the cellar door and put his nose under it and snuffled.
Brewster, get out of there. Brewster drop that sock, come on boy, let’s go upstairs.
The kitchen light turned off.
She shouted downstairs, Hey! You’re home? I just got out of the shower, couldn’t sleep, the humidity. Come to bed.
Flight cancelled, he said, fog.
Then, before her husband went up to the bedroom, damn it if he didn’t activate the security system. Jasper heard his fingers tapping in the code in the front hallway. It was one of those very first alarms, primitive but effective, complete with flashing lights. Then he went upstairs with Brewster. His steps receded clump-clump, jingle-jingle the dog, and there Jasper was, all alone, halfway down to the basement. There was the side door, his best chance for escape. But now a red light flashed off and on, ominously, right by the lock.
He was trapped.
He sat on the steps and got dressed, minus the missing sock, and then he went all the way down to the basement and looked around. There was enough dim light from the windows but they too were all wired up. He picked up a flashlight on a bench. Nothing useful to be seen with that, just cobwebs. He went back up into the kitchen. The clock on the stove said 5:00. Then he heard the headboard groaning upstairs but it was hard to be jealous. The place was a bloody fortress in reverse and he had anatomy class in three hours so he was desperate.
Then he noticed it, the milkbox partway down the cellar stairs. A tight rectangle, maybe eighteen inches square. Even though it was small, it looked not impossible. Everybody used to slide in and out of those things when they were kids, and there was no wiring around this one, none at all.
Aha, the Achilles heel.
He opened the inside door of the milkbox and pushed on the outer door. It flew open with a bang that no one heard. Cool air rushed in. He was covered in sweat. He eased his head and shoulders in and braced his feet against the opposite wall and pushed. It was a very tight fit though, years of growth. Inch by inch he advanced and he swore he was almost there but it was no go. He went back to the kitchen. He looked around and there it was on the counter, a large can of Crisco, never opened. He took off all his clothes for the second time that night; the anticipation now was almost equal. Cleverly, he left Brewster’s sock on the floor where it was. After all, it had been noticed. He was thinking more rationally now, like a seasoned criminal. He bundled up his pants, his shirt, his shoes and pushed them out through the milkbox into the free world. Bridges burned, he scooped handful after handful of Crisco and slathered himself neck to knee with it. He used it all. He put the empty can back in the basement, on the floor. Then he put his head and shoulders through the milkbox and again he pushed with his feet on the far wall and then bang-pop there he was, slithered and fallen on the driveway like a newborn. He almost shouted with pleasure but he didn’t. He stood up and shivered. He put on all his clothes. He hopped from one foot to the other.
Maybe should have kept that sock.
Birds began to sing, cardinals. He set out in a lope like a wolf, but there was no way he’d get all the way home and back to school on time so he headed south, down into the ravine. He lay there, hidden from the roadside by a tree, and he fell asleep.
Then his inner clock kicked in. Maybe the traffic picked up or sunlight filtered through the trees. He made it to anatomy class just as Valerie Anderson, his lab partner, made the incision into the left wrist joint, and even though he had not slept more than an hour all night, being near Valerie Anderson was enough to keep him wide awake.
You smell good, Jasper, she said, almost like baking.
The cadaver lay there as always.
I’ll be the assistant, he said. You cut, you be the surgeon.
Okay, she said.
They always took turns. First one of them assumed the role of the surgeon, the one who did the actual cutting, the peeling, the teasing of tissue. The other one held the retractors, kept things out of the way and held open the manual. The next day they switched. It was important to do it right, both jobs, to be careful. So he took the little hooked skin retractors and put them on each side of the incision Valerie had already made through the anterior aspect of the wrist. There was no bleeding, it was just formaldehyde that oozed out. He pulled apart the incision so she could see where she was going.
She was right, he smelled like Crisco. It wafted up from inside his shirt, heated to 98.6 degrees, body temperature.
Wait, he said.
He let go of the skin hooks and buttoned up the top of his lab coat.
That’s better, Jasper, she said, now I can breathe.
Then she extended the incision so it ran all the way from the base of the thumb across the front of the wrist to the other side.
There, she said.
The flexor tendons, the radial and the ulnar arteries ran side by side, exposed.
You know what that is? she asked.
Like it says in the book, he said, the arteries, the veins, the tendons that flex the fingers. All laid bare.
She just looked at him.
I’ll let that pass, she said.
Laid bare, he repeated.
It’s the number-three method for committing suicide, this, the slashed wrist, she said.
First pills, then carbon monoxide, said Jasper, if I remember right.
Yes, but this way’s not so easy, is it? I had to press hard to do that, to open the skin deep enough with this blade. And ever so sharp, Jasper, is this blade.
She made small circles in the air with the scalpel.
Ever so sharp and that’s why teenage girls, they only have little scratches when they try it the first time. They use razor blades, that’s all they have, a series of little scratches and maybe three or four drops of blood.
Poor things, he said, they get saved by ignorance.
By hesitation and by fear, she said.
By lack of physical strength, he said.
Lack of resolve more than anything, and thank God for that, Jasper, because they almost all get better in the long run.
Gestures. That’s all. They’re playing at it, those girls, said Jasper.
Men make gestures too, said Valerie Anderson.
Oh?
In the form of risky behaviour. Hold that back a bit more.
She bent towards Jasper Glass. She began to undercut the skin on the palmar surface of the hand. With the hooks, he pulled up and kept the tension constant and they proceeded that way until the whole hand was degloved. Three hours passed. Now and then his mind wandered from lack of sleep. It was a nice dissection they’d done.
Coffee? he asked.
Sure.
They washed off the stench of the formaldehyde and then they went down to the cafeteria. He bought two coffees and they sat together for lunch. She had hers from home, a brown bag.
I forgot mine, he said, or didn’t have time to get it together. One of those things.
Jasper, she said.
She gave him half a sandwich, tuna fish.
Valerie Anderson had dark hair. During anatomy class she tied it back in a ponytail but now she let it down around her shoulders, and as usual everybody in the lunch room looked at her, and looked away, and looked back at her again.
——
The professor thought at first that Roberto Moreno should never have come to Canada. The young man was a fish out of water. For one thing, he looked different, with his thick, wavy hair combed back straight from his forehead. It had a slightly dampened look to it, slick, an effect he might have achieved with a hair product, though that would have been paradoxical because the rest of his presentation was essentially careless. Not in a slovenly way—he wa...
