Rust And Bone (Paperback)

Masculinity is a dark, largely unexplored territory. While feminist writers, academics and artists have invested more than four decades into uncovering the assumptions and contradictions that comprise “femininity”, scarcely any work has gone into studying how men act out their identities. This is partly because men, at least in North America, are often socialised to be more active and aggressive than introspective and sensitive. Recently, there have been a number of noteworthy explorations of masculinity: Chuck Palahniuk’s wildly successful Fight Club, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, and the more academic ventures of Sally Johnson and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof’s Language and Masculinity and Canadian professor Brian Pronger’s studies of the hidden homoerotic content of professional sports and “working out”. Even US feminist bell hooks has weighed in with The Will To Change. However, these are stray flashes of light into a murky domain full of hormones, media images, the XY chromosomes and their testosterone-fuelled output like Ultimate Fighting (a no-holds-barred, mixed martial arts competition that is “today’s fastest growing sport”), Monster Truck events, and road rage.
Of course, such rich, complex material is fertile ground for fiction, and a couple of new writers are picking up where Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver left off. In Rust and Bone, Calgarian Craig Davidson delivers a solid collection of stories etched in wonderful prose. Even with subjects as marginal (and for some readers, disgusting) as dog fighting and porn acting, Davidson’s phrases and sentences draws you in. Personally, I’ve never seen the appeal of boxing as a sport, but Davidson’s title story entranced me right from the start: “Twenty-seven bones make up the human hand. Lunate and capitate and navicular, scaphoid and triquetrum, the tiny horn-shaped pisiforms of the outer wrist. Though differing in shape and density each is smoothly aligned and flush-fitted, lashed by a meshwork of ligatures running under the skin . . . ” This leads to a discussion of how broken hands affect a boxer’s career, which proceeds to examine closely a character not unlike Bruce Willis’s laconic, somewhat-talented pugilist in Pulp Fiction.
All but one of Davidson’s protagonists in this collection are male, and they’re usually involved in painful or marginal pursuits. One of them is a repo driver who works nights, recovering everything from cars to boats, RVs, even a prosthetic arm. When you run across this odd bit, you realize it’s a link to another story, “Rocket Ride”, in which a performer at a Marineland-like show loses his leg to the killer whale that is part of the act. During his extended convalescence, he meets another character at an amputees’ support group who complains about having his prosthetic arm taken one night. There’s a mordantly funny riff in this story which begins with this confession: “I’ve taken to screwing with people in online support chatrooms. . . Online, you’re no more than a screen moniker, a disease, an addiction, a sickening frailty, a set of reduced values.” This comic routine produces a series of perfect one-line putdowns for the members of support groups dealing with everything from breast-feeding to Gulf War syndrome. Here’s an example: “Compulsive Gambling (CARDSHARK: Bet I can beat my addiction faster than any a you chumps. I’ll book you 5-to-1 odds . . . ”) The passage goes on a couple of sentences longer than necessary, but it is nevertheless sardonically amusing.
Another thread running through these tales is addiction. “Rifleman” introduces an alcoholic father for whom the only pure things in life are perfectly-executed three-point shots in basketball, and his son’s ability to make them. When the son announces that he’s considering a career other than the NBA, his father is at a loss: the only thing left that has any value for him is the next bottle. The boy’s unease with his father’s attempts to stay in his life are finely drawn, a good example of the child being forced to play parent. The longest story here is almost complex enough to be a novella. In “The Apprentice’s Guide to Modern Magic”, the theme of the lost or incomplete father is revisited, but this story has something most of Davidson’s other stories lack: a believable female character.
Davidson is definitely a writer of great promise. I’ll overcome my distaste for boxing once again to read his forthcoming novel.
John Oughton (Books in Canada)
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'These big, riveting stories about tough guys in trouble are the best I've read in a long time from a young writer.'