The Novel as Rubik’s Cube

These days, one tends to approach first novels about coming out with trepidation. They mostly ended tragically in the 1950s (think James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room) and in the decades following, often took adolescent navel-gazing and self-realization a bit too far. Brett Josef Grubisic, a University of British Columbia English professor, has managed literally to deconstruct the genre (his book, The Age of Cities, exists in fragments—a prologue, two epilogues and two appendices) while deftly poking fun at academics who do such things for a living. Grubisic’s narrative device is a delight. The novel itself, a third-person account told by an anonymous author, is found by a graduate student in a hollowed-out home economics book in a second-hand bookstore. The student brings it to a Professor A.X. Palios who, in an afterword, tries to assemble the book’s pieces while ponderously contextualizing them within the CanLit canon and the homophobic 1950s. He sees the book as a found artifact, an incomplete product of its time. Its almost courageous author has told his story in the ways permitted to him but has not integrated real eroticism or decided on an ending. We as readers are given a book within a book within a book and Grubisic offers the stories of his characters with compassion, but also with a wink and a chuckle. It’s up to us to decide what really happens.

What is surprising about this novel is that we come to care deeply about a repressed, small-town school librarian who is almost a ghost on the page, possessing limited insight and a massive capacity for denial about his sexuality and even his place in the world. We can’t even picture him because we are told next to nothing about what he looks like.

Winston Wilson is a bookish, cardigan-clad man who lives with his mother, Alberta, and drinks endless cups of Prufrockian tea with her. They ponder the state of the world together—it is the height of the Cold War—while remaining safely protected in the small world of River Bend City, British Columbia. Winston develops a swollen foot and begins his own mythological journey to the city to get it checked. In Vancouver, after a decidedly non-curative visit with a podiatrist, Winston encounters Dickie, a well-dressed, queeny clothes salesman in a nondescript bar:

Dickie takes Winston to a restaurant to meet his friends, Ed and Johnny. They all camp it up, but Winston just does not seem to get it. (When asked if he is a friend of the queen, he believes the question is about whether he’s a monarchist!) He merely finds their banter and gossip amusing and heads home to mother seemingly none the wiser. He promptly files the experience into one of his many tidy mental compartments, and re-enters the world of school-marmish, tongue-clucking women who see him as a confirmed bachelor and little else. (This makes the fact that his homoerotic story of men is ultimately concealed, then lost, within a book of feminine arts both ironic and poignant.)

Grubisic’s skilled narrative is true to a 1950s idiom, offering restrained precision, particularly in Winston’s dialogue with his school colleagues and mother, while infusing lush descriptions of nature. Although the funny, post-war coded lingo of gay men jumps off the page, explicit references to sexuality are absent, probably because his unnamed narrator fears censorship or prosecution. (There is, however, a symbolically disembodied Appendix 2 entitled “Obscenity” in which Winston’s new friends describe with gusto their first sexual experiences.) Grubisic knows what he is doing. Such literary conceits are true to form and mirror the tension between repression and sexual awakening, growth and stagnation. Throughout the book (with quotes from Virgil, no less), we are also reminded of the chaos of urban life versus the certainty of home in the green, abundant countryside. But, as we are told, even quiet little River Bend City has its conflicted origins. The town was founded in “a complicated entanglement of mercantile schemes and religious devotion.” Home may not be what it seems and bends always imply choices.

Life goes on until Winston receives an invitation from Dickie to attend his Halloween party, an event that will bitchily celebrate Erroll Flynn in his final career descent. By this time, we are rooting for Winston. We hope that a masquerade party will somehow free him up and allow him to discover his “true nature,” even though it still cannot be named. Winston cheerily dons tights and tunic and joins the fray. In scenes reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, he somehow fails to realize that his hostess is in drag, that two men have probably had sex in the bedroom, that there are few real women at the party and that references to Bette Davis are not merely cinematic. Even when he is taken by his new chums to the local cruising park after the party and is fellated by a stranger, it all seems impossible and dream-like. The last line of the intact (pre-epilogue) novel reads: “His senses reached out as he stared with dread into the fathomless dark of the night.” Hardly a celebration of sexual awakening or the dropping of a mask.

But then Grubisic and his anonymous storyteller (about whom we also grow increasingly curious) cheekily offer us two possible endings. Is this Po-Mo posturing by Grubisic or the ambivalence of a closeted narrator?

The first is the classic 1950s conclusion of stifling self-denial, a suppressed status quo. Winston has apparently learned from “Pandora and Eve’s fatal choices … that giving into that peculiar temptation would catapult disastrous changes into his peaceful world.” When we read this summation, we are not yet aware that the novel will once again bend and we are crestfallen for poor Winston. Then we discover Epilogue 2. In it, Winston plans a trip to Las Vegas with his mother:

At last, he seems to be reconciling his two cities, his two worlds. Ever the wounded hero, Winston may never heal, but he may just walk himself into a new life. If we allow ourselves that choice as readers.