Servant of the Servants of Distraction

In 1981, after 20 years of teaching high school in Nanaimo, Jack Hodgins quit to spend more time writing. In 1984 I was on a similar path, starting my first year as an English teacher in rural Ontario. I lasted seven years. A few of my colleagues had two decades or more under their belts, an achievement of note given that the clientele never ages and pressure on the classroom teacher mounts daily from every side. I have had the privilege, therefore, of knowing stalwart teachers like Axel Thorstad, protagonist of The Master of Happy Endings, this latest fictional foray into Jack Hodgins country. Their dedication was inspiring, their endurance daunting and their students very lucky indeed.

I picture Max von Sydow playing the tall, rail thin, 77-year-old Thorstad, long retired after 40 years in the educational trenches. If the adaptation is not already in script development, well, shame on the CBC. The novel, Hodgins’s eighth, is after all a paean and a pilgrimage to Hollywood, Mecca of our eternal distraction, and a story serviceably rendered by perhaps the only Canadian author to have a character named after him on a current American TV series (Bones). The title refers to Thorstad himself who, like Chaucer’s narrator in Troilus and Criseyde, thinks of himself as “the servant of the servants of love,” despite the misgivings voiced by his late wife, Elena, about his chosen profession. A long-winded Greek chorus, Elena pops up to remind her old swimmer of his limitations whenever the waters begin to boil.

Hodgins, whose novel The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne won the 1979 Governor General’s Award, has made fast the improbable strands connecting rugged Estevan Island, British Columbia, Thorstad’s chosen Elba, to Los Angeles. We learn, for example, that Thorstad grew up believing that his father, a Hollywood stuntman and someone he never knew, died filming a movie in the 1930s. Thorstad’s former teaching colleague, Oonagh Farrell, a fair likeness of Yvonne De Carlo, went on to become a star of stage and screen. And in an attempt to rediscover relevance, be of use and find a less isolated living arrangement without capitulating to life in a “senior-seniors” home, Thorstad adopts himself out to the Montanas, realtor Audrey and dentist Carl, who need a tutor for their teenage-actor son. Saddled with a name like Travis Montana, the kid has no choice but to be in a TV series called Forgotten River.

Author of the widely used A Passion for Narrative: A Guide to Writing Fiction, Hodgins knows that no plot worth reading runs smoothly. What Thorstad thinks will be a sedate residency, living in the Montana guest house in Victoria and helping Travis cram for finals, is complicated by the news that the young actor’s character has been given an expanded role in the series. This requires immediate relocation. Thorstad is expected to accompany Travis to Los Angeles and somehow, between takes, effect in his pupil a mastery of the grade 12 curriculum. The resulting conflict, between the show’s executive producer and Thorstad standing in loco parentis as the servant of education, is handled convincingly. Clearly Hodgins had access to a working film set.

Travis exhibits all the typical traits of his age group, those uniquely current and those universal. We meet him playing basketball in the driveway of the family house. He is plugged into his tunes. Later he sends text messages while at the dinner table and asks impertinent questions. He does not want a tutor. What kid his age would, especially one so gifted and fortunate enough to be acting on TV? Travis reminds Thorstad of a particular type, “the easiest sort of pupil to work with if you responded as they wished, the quickest to turn against you if you did not.” In fashioning Travis, Hodgins has tried to capture the speech patterns of today’s adolescent, but at times the boy sounds much older. About his mother’s plan to invest in a residential cruise ship, he explains, “she figures once the idea catches on there’ll be big demand—retired people wanting to, you know, own a suite in a ship that never stops roaming the world!” He is hardly typical, though. What child actor who is also a student of entertainment history is? The sooner we recognize that Travis and his folks are denizens of dramedy the better.

Aside from Thorstad, it is Oonagh Farrell who succeeds best as a character in her own right, even if she can’t avoid tracks laid down by The Golden Girls. The Oonagh of young adulthood, the one Thorstad fell in love with and for whom he still carries a torch, makes the most memorable turn, despite such treacly descriptions as the following: “Even so, [Thorstad] was never for a moment unaware of the subtle energy in her every move and every spoken line as genteel Gillian Tripp, of the radiant beauty and unreserved femaleness that issued from her whether she was her exuberant self on the sidelines or the dainty central character on stage.”

Oonagh goes on to escape small-town life and enjoy a long, lucrative acting career. In some ways she reminds me of the heroine of Herman Wouk’s novel, Marjorie Morningstar. Wouk’s Jewish ingenue and Hodgins’s Irish beauty are products of the same era, the early 1950s. The relative chastity of Oonagh and Thorstad’s time together “camping” in an unoccupied beach house on Vancouver Island, one Easter break away from the chalkboard, evokes, at least in me, the summer-camp turmoil of Marjorie Morgenstern, hopeful actress, whose endless debates with herself about the propriety and proper timing of sex render her annoying, and whose rebellious love affair with a bohemian composer ends in the conformity of a conventional marriage.

Oonagh, still enough of a rebel in her dotage, has slain the moral dragons that cowed Marjorie. When Thorstad visits her in Venice Beach, he discovers that her house is a crash pad for starry-eyed gay waifs. Our gold-hearted dorm mother is also a menace at the wheel, great for a laugh and a thrill. She covers her ex-husband’s rent in a nursing home, the very terminus Thorstad dreads. She spirits Travis away from the set to teach him how to engage with the camera. She is a loud, undeniable force. And yet, where Wouk’s heroine still has something interesting though dated to say to us about becoming adult and abandoning fantasy, Oonagh, like the eccentric types who populate Estevan Island (imagine a cross between Beachcombers and Corner Gas) is subordinate to her function in the plot, where she is mainly a useful link to Thorstad’s past.

Like Odysseus, Thorstad returns home battered, the victim of a chilling encounter with monstrous representatives of unrestrained youth, and we can’t help wondering if his voyage of reanimation was worth the pain. His pupil appears headed for academic success without him. A young Penelope and her gaggle of six daughters, variously fathered and colourfully christened with the names of local flora (“Rosy Pussytoes,” “Hooker’s Willow”), are squatting in his cabin. He is still getting replies to his ad for self-adoption (some of the best passages in the novel). And his prompter, Hodgins, is still too often feeding him the fatuous preface, “of course,” which, as our prime minister can attest, invites unintended doubt in any audience.

Without being a spoiler I can reveal that the novel ends mysteriously. Although this unresolved point does not detract from the larger story, it feels unsatisfying, like a difficult bonus question on an exam. You know the type: reward for close reading. Didn’t you just love it when the teacher did that? Me neither.