‘Dating: a novel’ by Dave Williamson

Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn

First things first. Dave Williamson certainly understands the importance of the colon.Had that stack of two dots been left out of the title, his book would be called ‘Dating a novel’ which is a lousy way to spend a Saturday night.

There is actually a mildly serious point to that rather silly joke. Being alone with nothing to do except read while all the rest of the world is frolicking and falling in love is a dreaded fear. In very simplified terms, Freud had sex as the motivation for everything, while Jung said it was fear of embarrassment. Seeking a middle ground, I suspect our core issue is embarrassment over a lack of sex. It certainly would explain the majority of inappropriate marriages and all forehead-smacking bad one night stands. A sexless and isolated existence is all well and good for a one-monk monastery on a mountaintop, but personally I’m not looking for a change of career.

The situation is all the worse when one has had a long and happy and sexually satisfying marriage and that is exactly where Williamson’s hero Jenkins finds himself. Jenkins full name is Robert or Bob Jenkins, however since childhood he has just been known as Jenkins. I have to admit I found it curious when Jenkins’ elder brother referred to his sibling as Jenkins. Wouldn’t he have felt like he was talking to himself?

Anyway, Jenkins is long since retired from his career in teaching and has been alone in his Winnipeg house since his beloved wife Barb passed away a few years before. He is now the odd number at New Year’s get-togethers, which used to be thriving gatherings of couples. As he proceeds through his 70s, the numbers are dwindling.

Yet, the old boy remembers the boy before the old and that is the core of Dating: A Novel. While dipping a toe into the ponds of dating (and believe you me, he wants to dip more than a toe) he remembers and describes in sharp and perfect comic detail those eager days growing up in the 1950s when the touch of a breast was to then what … well the touch of a breast is now.

There is the correct progression – from the sweet girl who one first invites to the movies, to the inappropriate girl who might have been willing but the parents were frowning, to the girl whose spirits were loosened after a night of brown-bagged rye poured into dance hall Cokes, to – well you know the narrative line all too well for you probably lived it. Unless of course you led the life of Jenkins’ friend Claude, who if you believe him scored more often than a Bally pinball machine with a broken tilt switch.

One wonders if this sort of book will still be written fifty years from now. What with news reports of today’s school bus drivers trying to stop oral intercourse going on in the back seats, won’t the notion of the slow climb up from the base camp to the top of sexual Everest seem somewhat, well, quaint, akin to embroidering needle-point tea towels or dialing a phone?

Jenkins notices the lessening of mores and changing of habits too and some of the most delicious writing Williamson does is in these passages. For example:

It’s important to remind you that this was 1955, a time when perfume was used as much to hide body odour as anything. I myself had prepared for the date by having a bath and a shave just before leaving my house. Bath soaps like Lifebuoy were meant to combat body odour, not underarm smells specifically. There was no such thing as a spray deodorant then, and the best any young man like me did was wash well under the arms – and all over, if you had time for a bath. I knew that my mother owned a mysterious jar of a cream called Odorono, but she kept it out of sight, leading me to believe it had something to do with female hygiene.

Those italics on the words ‘female hygiene’ are just incredibly perfect and say much, much more than a thousand words ever could. There was a mystery then about the opposite sex – it cut both ways although we don’t get anything of the female perspective on the question of, What are boys like down there?

Beyond all these remembrances of things smelt, Williamson’s book has a great and truly touching charm in taking us through the courtship of Barb. I loved every page of the process of meeting the parents, going on family vacations with them to Victoria Beach, Barb sneaking into Jenkins’ room at the cabin, the inevitable violent confrontation between bride and mother-of-the-bride (some traditions will never be lost and Dr. Phil can’t do a damn thing about it), each and all are charming.

Yes, charming. That is not a word used much any more in describing things, except the aforementioned needle-point and restaurants with checkered tablecloths and mis-matching chairs. Yet charm has its, well it has its charms. Charm smooths and soothes, it allows the mind to relax and float into a story. At one point, during The Wars of the Wedding Preparation, Barb convinces Jenkins of the worth of the option to just say the hell with it, let’s elope. So off they head deep into the night to a distant motel somewhere between Winnipeg and Kenora to spend their first night of not-quite-matrimonial bliss:

I turned to see that she was lying in the bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. She had her pillow folded double to prop up her head so that she could sip her drink. I saw her clothes, not in a heap but folded. Her bra was lying on top, so white, so virginal, so empty.

            There was a knock on the door.

Well there just would be, damn it. That sort of obeisance to convention is not clichéd writing, rather it is servicing the reader’s needs and expectations. Williamson knows where the reader wants the story to go and he gratefully guides us there.

This meeting of expectations can create a difficulty. Because Jenkins and his author are honour-bound to have a later-life encore performance as it were (if that comes as a shocking plot twist to you, you really need to get out more) our hero has to be kept fit for action. Now while I’m glad that we were spared scenes of Jenkins chomping down on pharmaceutical products designed to turn spaghetti noodles into graphite drivers, well, if his is a picture of what septuagenerian men’s health is like I can hardly wait to get there. Outside of a foot cramp and a need for a nocturnal widdle now and then, if you can tell that Jenkins is not in his forties or fifties, you have a much better eye than I do. (Perhaps I need glasses. Oh wait, I’m wearing glasses. Maybe I’m not looking forward to my seventies as much as I was two sentences ago.)

This is a very sweet (see: charming) book which supplies a decent share of belly laughs along with a mist of chuckles on almost every page. For the older reader, nostalgia; for the younger, admiration that the elders can still take care of business.

Turnstone | 339 pages |  $19.00 | paper | ISBN #978-0888013903