Creature of Bad Habits

The eerie feeling one gets while reading We Are All of Us Left Behind is a consequence of Bradley Somer’s gift for putting cruelty and violence on the page. Unquestionably, Somer is making a statement about identity, desire, and the emptiness of lies, but it’s his penchant for gore that makes his latest story so memorable. Days after I’d finished this lacerating novel, I was still twitching with revulsion.

The unnamed narrator bears the brunt of the onslaught. Unschooled, uncouth, and from a broken home on the Alberta prairie, the teenager is living a life of crime at the beginning of the book: locked in a cycle of hitting rock bottom and conniving his way to moments of stability, only to be beaten, usually physically, back to destitution. Travel presents him with new vistas and new people, but each opportunity ends badly, and he is reduced again to despair. The episodes grow increasingly weird, stretching credulity. Penniless and sleeping rough in Rome, he hatches a plan to rip off tourists who ask him to take their picture. It works, but are we to believe that anyone would hand their thousand-dollar camera to this stinking, grubby kid with trembling fingers?

Like the narrator himself, the novel is snappy and frenetic, interesting in its evocation of desperation and squalor but disordered and thoroughly draining. As the story progresses, the young man turns from piteous to utterly exasperating. There’s a sense that we’re meant to see him as thoughtful, perhaps a quiet genius. He longs to be a writer, and while Somer puts a notebook and pencil in his hand, he gives him a completely empty head. As he stumbles from one makeshift family to another, his attempts to find friendship lead him to misread every social situation, to make bizarre snap decisions, and to indulge in moments of generosity that are indistinguishable from brain-dead martyrdom.

There is some age-related veracity to this — teens are a good mix of the profound and the profoundly stupid — but the real difficulty is that Somer doesn’t find his character interesting enough to work through his thoughts. We get plenty of dead-end observational commentary: “I see the things now that I couldn’t when we came in last night” or “She finds a plastic bucket in the bush because she knows where to look for it” or “I take the dishes to the sink. There’s still enough hot water in the kettle to wash them, so I do.” We have precious little, however, to rationalize any of the narrator’s decisions — and not just the wild choices that, while page-turning, are completely baffling. Who, for no reason and when they have a perfectly good motel room, walks out into the brush to sleep in the dirt? Who books a train ticket from Amsterdam to Belgrade via Rome? Who, after being stabbed with a paring knife, wants to head to the airport?

This is a creature of pure but flawed instinct, scrounging and sniffing at the margins of society for bread crumbs and boltholes. Somer excellently captures the disintegrating mind of someone hungry and frantic. There’s the punitive obsession with excess and waste and the hurt caused by consumerism’s oblivious mockery. (At one point, the narrator stares slack-jawed through a store window at “pants that could feed me for months and shirts that could put a safe roof over me for a good long while.”) There’s also the incessant fatigue and panic of the isolated individual, with his desire to “exist outside this place.” Evidently, part of living in that instinctual, animal realm is to be inundated in violence, which here is elevated to a “universal language.”

At the core of the novel is a sense of aspiration, for this world of conflict, fragmentation, and pain to be overcome and brought to a serene resolution. The title of the book, uttered by a guru-like character whose brief appearance at the margins of the narrative feels crowbarred in to introduce some urbanity, beckons toward a sweeping commonality — we are all alone — that contravenes this hope. And the vision that Somer presents is so grim that his rather abrupt, chirpy ending comes across as insincere. Still, even if the plot is unpersuasive overall, Somer has a keen instinct for detail, and the tactility of his prose lends an undeniable ring of truth.

Throughout We Are All of Us Left Behind, I was reminded of another beleaguered and disillusioned traveller. Like Odysseus, our nameless Albertan finds comfort in a Circe, who takes him to her refuge in the Serbian woods, heals his wounds, and feeds him bread, sausage, honey, and wine. She bathes in a river and summons him to bed. There is something dangerously alluring in her belief that “history should be left to the historians, that it should be their burden to remember it for everyone else, not to remind everyone of what’s best forgotten.” However, forgetting one’s grim past is not the same as carving a new, better future; it’s intellectual myopia. The two halves of ourselves — everything before this moment and everything after — hinge on actions guided primarily by our learned experiences. If to leave the past well alone is Somer’s illumination, it would fly in the face of Homer’s lesson: that memory is a powerful force that ultimately leads you out of the wilderness and back home.