Not Very Good Bad Boy

Every decade or so throws up another bad boy in Canadian writing. Some dark-eyed, bristly chinned swart whose trenchant prose matches his irascible public personality so as to create an overnight literary sensation. Or so their publicists would have us believe. In the ’70s it was the West Coast’s Britt Hagerty; in the ’80s we had Ontario’s Patrick Roscoe. The newest of the bad boys hails from Newfoundland, Kenneth Harvey, here in 1994 with his third book, The Hole That Must Be Filled.

It’s a collection of 14 stories, all about the same length, that deal mostly with down-and-out characters. The Raymond Carver crowd—only slightly more crazed. They tend to inhabit two locales, a dead-end rural patch called Cutland Junction, where intermarriage proliferates and speech is just being invented, and Slattery Street West, its violent urban counterpart, the concrete and garbage-bin home of defeated adults and gangs of roving street urchins.

What has caught readers’ imaginations about Kenneth Harvey is his sense of how awful it is to inhabit the skins of most human beings. The people in his stories—men, women and children alike—are barbaric: malicious without reason, brutal with pleasure and cruel beyond expectation. His world is a truly horrible one; a man cuts off his own gangrenous hand to atone for the death of his child; a logger stabs the woman he’s living with because she’s too beautiful for other men to look at; a crowd of drunks drives a besotted mate into the frozen tundra and leaves him there to die as a joke.

“Birthdays,” the final story in the collection, is typical. It’s about a gang of street kids who kill a suburban girl in a back alley because she happened to stop her white car there. “A funny ugly thing is a bad joke, but it’s better than no joke at all” are the thoughts of the story’s central character, a boy who enjoys giving his friends birthdays almost as much as he enjoys murdering rich kids. He’s a violent, vicious little fart whose prostitute girlfriend reports back about a rendezvous she had with a man:

“Click, click,” she says, letting me know that she cut the guy with her switchblade. “After he stuck it in me, I stuck it in him. Got his own little momma hole now.”

This same girl, it comes out later, killed both her parents when she was eight by using “a blade across their filthy fucking throats.” When he asks, “Then what?” she replies, “Nothing.” That’s how it is with the people in Kenneth Harvey’s fiction: there’s nothing for them to say because that’s what life adds up to.

In an equally bleak but less sensational story, “Buffer Zones,” a man is beaten up by his brother who then steals his girlfriend, the pair of them leaving him unconscious on the floor with his two front teeth smashed out. He spends a long time shouting “ITH ME, MOTHER” into the phone, before we learn he stole the same girl away from his brother six years earlier. Are the parallel displacements meant to suggest that the brutality is justified?

At the end of most of Harvey’s stories, things work out terribly for a lot of people but it’s difficult to care for these hopeless souls who live so far down the food chain, and I’m not sure Harvey himself cares much for them either. As sensational as the narratives can sometimes be—thrilling in the moment of reading because they are so violent or potentially violent at every turn—they ultimately leave you hollow. And not hollow out of dread at the human condition, but uninvolved, empty of any passion or compassion.

The title story of the collection, “The Hole That Must Be Filled,” is a case in point. This one is about a man who lost his young daughter when she drowned in the ocean. The event has utterly destroyed him. He spends his time trying to find his “niche in the ruins of a more comfortable desolation,” and has selected for his dark night of the soul the locale of Slattery Street West. It is a concrete and iron rubble of decaying warehouses, like the set of Brasilia, or a side street in one of William Gibson’s futureworlds. Here he thinks dark thoughts about himself and his wife: “We owe each other nothing, but everything as well, and the vacuum inspired by such extremes hugs and shoves at our distant bodies, disparity evoking our retarded slur of love.” At other times he thinks of his lost daughter: “Vee’s body has left a gaping hole into which—I realize, one day—I must step.”

The terms in which he articulates his despair are overblown and unrelieved by intelligent engagement. Paragraphs of nauseating despair follow paragraphs of futile speculation and inaction. Your eye begins to skip down the page, looking for relief, but there are only more sighs of misery:

But Providence does not realize that the geography of despair is undefinable, without longitude or latitude. Its plottings become the form that is the soul’s disgruntled outline—a theological product of man’s ever-changing morality—struggling to fit beneath my skin.

Whatever that means, it does not indicate much by way of grace or redemption in Harvey’s world. But it does point to one of the flaws in his writing, a fondness for portentous phrasing and excessive summing up:

Either way a woman is raped. It can be pretty or it can be brutal. Consent falls within the boundaries of that silliest of abstract arguments—Interpretation.
…she walked off with her head staring down at the ground like someone had disappointed the intention that directed her to this place, the understanding being misunderstood, but misunderstood with such complete clarity that it was made to be an ever-greater truth, a truth all unto itself…

Kenneth Harvey is strongest when he describes simply irrational violence and brutality. He has an acute eye for the way rage takes over our psyches; he evokes fear and terror and doesn’t hesitate to tell us that it may be all there is to experience. These stories give a new and more desperate spin to the tale of man’s inhumanity to man, piling ugliness upon ugliness. Ah, well. The middle of the decade is only a knife thrust away. Somewhere in Balgonie, Saskatchewan or Teulon, Manitoba the next bad boy of Canadian letters is probably honing his literary stiletto. ♦

Wayne Tefs writes a regular column on fiction for Border Crossings.

The Hole That Must Be Filled by Kenneth J. Harvey Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1994 Hardcover, 220 pp., $24.95