About book Man Descending: Selected Stories (1992)
I was going to give this four stars, but fuck it. I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I was going to. In high school, I read Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy. I hated that book with a fucking passion - pedestrian writing, pedestrian plotting, pedestrian everything. (Even now, many years and many brain cells removed from that experience, I don't think I'll ever be able to read that book, again.)So this was an incredible surprise.These stories, although they are rather simple, are written with deeply felt emotion. These stories reminded me quite a bit of Alice Munro's, in that there is a sadness in them that really becomes clear as you reach the final lines. They sucker punch you, in a way.And when I say that these stories are simple, I don't mean it disparagingly. I just mean that the goal here isn't to weave complex intellectual thematic content. They are emotional and experiential, almost traditional. Folksy, too.The only issue is that, story to story, the situations are a bit too familiar. The first half of the book deals exclusively with young men, just after WWII, living in troubled familial situations, in rural Saskatchewan, with aggressive fathers and weak mothers, etc. But that is easily forgiven, since each of them was interesting.I have to say, though, that "The Expatriates' Party" and "Dancing Bear" did almost nothing for me. Unlike the other stories in the collection, I put them aside in the middle of them to watch an episode or two of Louie.Overall, though, I would say that this collection was damned successful. It really speaks to issues of masculinity (the penis issue in "Going to Russia" was hilarious), morality, family, love, innocence, insanity, and (heartbreakingly in "A Taste for Perfection") mortality.5 Insane Old Men out of 5
(8/10) When it comes to writers like Guy Vanderhaeghe, "craftsmanship" is the word that first comes to mind. None of these stories are flashy or innovative like the academic postmodern writers I'm used to reading, but they have a kind of power all their own. The stories in this collection are about the deep scars that relationships between people leave, and how the most poisonous of these relationships can also be our most valuable. What I remember two months on is not the details of any one particular narrative, but the general mood: a foggy, haunting sort of moment, where the familiar becomes just a bit horrific.Of course, it's a short story collection, so some of the stories are going to be better than others, and it doesn't really congeal into a satisfying whole. But there are fantastic bits of writing in here -- "Going to Russia" comes to mind -- that more than make up for the duller Canadian-realist bits. Guy Vanderhaeghe is a writer's writer, and that is probably not the best method for becoming a best-selling author, but I think it's pretty high praise nonetheless.
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There's no better way to put the major 'problem' with Vanderhaeghe than to say that he is sort of, in theory, um... lame. He writes about rural life, about really fucking white members of Canada's previously existent 'liberal class,' about Canadian suburbia before it really had any sort of tension to it, and uses a lot of what I call 'oh shucks'-isms. Dude writes like what he is, like a university educated white guy from small town Saskatchewan.The great thing about Vanderhaeghe is that I've seen his fiction eagerly consumed by your young urban dwelling types who hang out at city bars and smoke Meharis outside said bars. The guy writes this sort of good old-fashioned fiction that's totally great and has that timeless (or whatever you want to call it) quality that people I hate claim all good fiction has.Vanderhaeghe, I'm trying to say, is the one dude who epitomizes everything I find boring and shitty about establishment CanLit and a lot of establishment lit in general, but manages to totally rock my world with something like "Going to Russia" or "What I Learned from Caesar," the latter, about a Belgian immigrant, seems to me one of the most important Canadian stories ever written, but nobody fucking teaches it. Nooo; let's have another Wiebe...
—Adam
