East Coast Fish Out of Water

Four years ago, the writer and filmmaker Alex Pugsley published Aubrey McKee, the first of five planned autobiographical novels. Aubrey narrates his life in Halifax between 1963 and 1985. The history of the “saltwater city, a place of silted genius, sudden women, figures floating in all waters” confronts him as he passes “through streetscapes where stone townhouses neighbour lofty office developments, a tattoo parlour abuts a low-rise union for longshoremen, and ironstone warehouses preside over grimy wooden piers.” As a teenager becoming a young man, he immerses himself in comic books, bears witness to second-wave feminism, and spends time as a drug dealer, punk rock guitarist, and capable tennis player. Aubrey changes with the cultural and coastal winds of his hometown and its residents. “Whatever these recollections have been,” he says near the end of the coming-of-age tale, “they have been mine, for this was Halifax as I knew it, as I lived it and felt...