INSIDE
By Kenneth J. Harvey
"Naturalism" is one of the few -isms in literature with a concrete
sense of what it's all about. Realistic in technique, the naturalistic novel
tends to focus on a certain social element - the working poor or unemployed -
while weaving sensational plots - usually involving some kind of crime - that
illustrate a "scientific" thesis about the controlling power of
environment and heredity on its doomed protagonists. It's a fictional formula,
but one that doesn't have to be formulaic or limiting, as this terrific new
novel by Newfoundland author Kenneth J. Harvey demonstrates.
The story begins with Myrden being released from the prison where he has
been, apparently wrongfully, committed for the past 14 years. When he returns
home - which is a run-down neighbourhood in St. John's - he finds that nothing
has changed. He can even lose the press hounds on his heels by cutting through
backyards and alleys that are, remarkably, still the same. But then one of the
central assumptions of naturalism is that things don't change. We are trapped -
by our genetic code as much as cycles of violence and poverty. Myrden's father
killed his mother, and his own sons are frequently in-and-out of jail. Heredity
is fate. In one of the very few false notes in the book's dialogue, a reporter
asks Myrden on his release if he is concerned that his children will follow in
his footsteps. It's a false note because one can't imagine a reporter asking
such a stupid question, but it is thematically correct. Family is like that. The
villains in the novel are all members of another family of barely-employed
degenerates, while the good woman, Ruth, isn't part of the neighbourhood at all
but "from money." Which tells you everything you need to know.
Being "inside" is shorthand for prison, but since the naturalist
views all of life as a kind of prison it has other meanings as well. In the
first place it means inside a particular environment, and if nothing else this
book reminds us that nobody does poverty and squalor like Canada's own East
Coast writers. The bottles of beer for breakfast, the cheaply-built row houses,
the domestic violence, the dirty, foul-mouthed children, the lines at the
welfare office, the smiles empty of teeth, the animal-like lives reduced to
angry or submissive desperation. Myrden's people have "faces that had been
through everything." They are "heart-mangled. Not just for the moment
or the week or the month. It was their family legacy. To exist in these
places." Forever inside.
"Inside" is also inside Myrden's head. This is a prison too, since
Myrden isn't much of a guy for talking and typically expresses himself through
muscular action. The only time he communicates any feeling other than rage and
frustration is when he plays the piano, and he only does that once,
unconsciously. The writing is the perfect vehicle for his plodding, inarticulate
thoughts. Sentences break down into stuttering fragments. Moving forward. Just a
bit. At a time. It is language confined to baby-steps, which is all that Myrden
is comfortable with.
When he is first released from prison the wide open spaces almost make him
sick. "There was wind out here. No walls for it to run up against. . . .
The landscape beyond the crowd stretched away. Further and further. Such endless
height and distance. Dizziness in his head and stomach." He is
uncomfortable with this "space shooting off in all directions" because
it represents freedom, which is a concept he can't recognize. In much the same
way the big government payout he receives is only something he wants to give
away or otherwise get rid of. Money is freedom, and freedom is another world.
This final point is driven home when he uses part of the money to buy a vacation
to Spain with Ruth. False dreams of escape! He doesn't belong in Spain, and
doesn't belong with Ruth. He belongs inside.
That the novel's finale is so predictable isn't necessarily a weakness. A
book so concerned with inevitability and fate could hardly end any other way and
still be true to itself. Its beginning is its end, and more than most novels it
demands to be taken as a whole. By any measure it places Harvey's name among the
top rank of this country's writers.
Notes:
Review first published online July 19, 2006.
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