like a curse or insult, both of which it is, in a way), is the kind of kid who takes upon himself the job of keeping the adults of his family in house and home. jared, the son of a trickster (the formulation is meant to sounds a bit like son of a bitch, i.e. not all of it is immediately understandable to the non-local, non-teenage reader, but, like all good writers, robinson lets you figure it out on your own. needless to say, none of this makes him the most popular boy in town, but, miraculously, jared possesses that old-soul self-containedness some kids have (that, too, is something you wish you had had when you were a teen!) that allows them genuinely not to care.Ī lot of the language is (teen?) jargon and shorthand and this, more than other things (this book is not big on descriptions and explanations) do the work of giving the reader a sense of the place, the time and the human climate. it even keeps together jared, the adorable teenage protagonist, who speaks carefully, corrects those who speak imprecisely, and uses language in that fast, über-clever teen snark you wish you had had when you were a teen. the language, it seems to me, is the one rigorous thing that holds everything together supple tendons superglue. and, on a more technical level, seemingly (but in fact not) messy timelines and storylines. this precision in the language is juxtaposed to a whole lot of mess - messy lives, messy hygiene, messy love, messy gastroenterology (lots of bad eating, not eating, and bad drinking, and TONS of throwing up). from the first page what struck me about it is how perfect it is, how precise, how carefully built, sentence by little sentence, with that effortlessness that is always the product of painstaking labor. it took Eden Robinson eight years to write Son of a Trickster and it shows. and sure, there are Carol Shields and Michael Ondaatje, but here is the catch: i bet that a good number of those who have heard of them do not know that they are canadian. Miriam Toews - i haven't dug into numbers, but this is what it seems to me - is more popular in italy than she is south of the border. even nobel prize winner Alice Munro is not a household name among american readers. the only titan strong enough to have made a breach (but, see, it's her breach, no one but she can cross over, just like in kafka’s parable!) is Margaret Atwood. There is a chinese wall between american readers and canadian literature.
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