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In
Please, his debut novel, Peter Darbyshire exposes the amoral lives of urban twentysomethings, soulless casualties of the consumer age who are disconnected from the conventions of the outside world. The book's chapters read more like linked short stories as the unnamed young narrator wanders through a series of misadventures. From stumbling into a religious sex cult meeting to helping a homeless man to please a pretty girl, he approaches each episode with an aimless innocence. He perpetually seeks employment or, better yet, easy money, and at one point he finds work as an extra in educational films. When a staged accident goes horribly wrong, the narrator offers to drive an apparent heart attack victim, Eden, to the hospital for $100. Attempting later to collect the money on another movie set, he finds Eden has just accidentally set an actor on fire. Unmoved, the narrator insists on accompanying Eden to a cash machine on his way to driving the injured man to the hospital.
Credit Derbyshire for refusing to give his hero the moral high ground. The hero himself is a dysfunctional member of his bleak community, motivated by morbid curiosity and frayed survival instincts. He's also haunted by the memory of his ex-wife, Rachel, an equally lost wanderer who enters and exits his life with the unsettling randomness that drives all of the events in this book. Though it occasionally strays into the fantastic, Please is a stunning achievement for a first-time writer. Readers can only hope that Darbyshire's talent has just begun to surface. --Moe Berg
Books in Canada
A novel this is not. It is a collection of stories titles intact, passed off as a novel because novels theoretically sell better than story collections, about a group of disparate people linked only by the narrator, a slightly dimwitted slacker, who delivers the sometimes very humorous vignettes sotto voce, reminding me of a 1960s comedian named Jackie Vernon whose catch phrase was "I used to be a dull guy." The nameless narrator (it is virtually impossible to empathize with someone with no name) grieves the wife who has left him, while he leaps backward and forward in time recalling their meeting, their bizarre wedding, his contacts with an insane religious cult, a criminal who sends him on risky errands, his adventures as a pretend patient for interns to practice on, and a bizarre scenario where he and a gun-toting girlfriend track down a thief who stole their tickets to a concert. The stories are generally congenial if very low key, and Darbyshire shows a good deal of potential. He might someday write a real novel.
What first appears to be a beautifully designed jacket and cover turns out to have problems: when the jacket is discarded, as most jackets are, we are left with a book with a blank spine and no author's name.
W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada)
