‘The Reverse Cowgirl’ by David Whitton

Reviewed by Jessica Michalofsky

If you relate in any way to the plight of the antihero (as most of us can), you’ll enjoy David Whitton’s short story collection, The Reverse Cowgirl. Crammed full of dystopian sex, exotic drugs, knocks of fate, deus-ex-machina plot devices, and slime-induced time travel, Whitton’s ten unconnected stories playfully explore the potential of the antihero to deconstruct modern values.  Those reverse qualities of the hero—moral weakness, confusion, lack of courage and honesty—become the very qualities the antihero needs to question the value of dreams that may not be worth attaining.

“Twilight of the Gods,” previously published in editor Zsuzsi Gartner’s futuristic fiction collection, Darwin’s Bastards, illustrates Whitton’s tendency to use vice and venality as modus operandi for his characters.  The story is set in a near future that recalls the Anglo-Saxon plundering and colonizing of the past. Torn between his admiration for his pragmatic, tough-talking female co-worker and his lust for his messed-up, un-dead, and over-sexed girlfriend, and disillusioned with ransack and warfare, antihero Hans Rasmussen finds himself at an impasse in his life.  In darkly saccharine prose, Rasmussen muses on his dilemma:

I used to love these trademarking sorties: the non-stop action, the adrenaline high, the constant threat of obliteration.  Used to love hovering over the peninsulas, our engines blowing across the lagoons so that the water rippled and swelled and the locals scurried for their lives into the forests and the bunkers and crumpling strip plazas.  On a really dark night you could see flares from the methane farms, little fairy lights that made you feel like your chest would burst from the joy of it. But something had changed.  For the past few months, I ‘d gone to my happy spot, or I’d go down to the processing floor and scrape algae from the hopper, or whatever—I’d do all the things that used to rock me out—and feel nothing.  Not happy. Not sad. Just nothing.

Rasmussen ultimately does the classic antihero move—doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (or was it the wrong thing for the right reasons?)—though it comes to him as a stroke of doubly-ironic self-revelation that he says “seemed perverse, and then it made sense, and then it went right back to being perverse.”

“The Reverse Cowgirl,” an enjoyably complex time-travel story that messes around with the concept of predetermination, puts the antihero in a similar predicament. While in Paris, antihero Keith confronts his fears of conformity by dumping and re-dumping Holly, a “devastatingly normal” girl from Calgary, whom he has met for casual sex. Laments Keith:

When we’d gone out in public, the streets of Paris, fashion capital of Europe, what had she worn? A fleece sweatshirt and cowboy boots. And not cool cowboy boots, either.  We’re not talking Alison Mosshart here. We’re not talking Chrissie Hynde. These were hand-tooled, going–to-the-rodeo boots, ugly in all their particulars.

While Keith admits his physical attraction to Holly (“I wanted to fuck this mommy, and this confused me, and the confusion made me want to fuck her even more”), he’s conflicted about avoiding a life he simultaneously desires but is repulsed by. When a seemingly random act threatens to bind Keith and Holly together for life, Whitton uses the authorial hand-of-God to give Keith repeated opportunities to observe, and perhaps potentially change, his own behaviour.

Whitton is most successful in his characterization of antiheros as males, and stories like “Roppongi Story” and “Gargoyles” provide more opportunities to roll around with the theme of debauchery, moral weakness and weird strokes of fate as instruments of redemption. However, Whitton is less successful in his characterization of women as antiheros.

In “Who do You Think You Are,” Barb, a female administrator at a beauty school tries to seduce a student—except the student is the complete opposite of all things aesthetic. Meet John Maltman—thick orange beard, dirty taupe overalls, pouch of Export “A” green in his pocket—a male construction worker who has enrolled at the beauty school to do something different with his life. Like Whitton’s other male characters, he realizes something needs to change, so he does something non-conformist.  He explains:

It was fucking freezing in there, 20 below, it was January, and I had to jackhammer the ceiling.  And there was all this grit and dust flying into my face, and cement chips pinging off my goggles, and I thought: I need to change my life.  You know?  Just: There’s got to be more to the whole shitstorm.”

Yet, the major development in this story centres on the female administrator, her inability to seduce the burly and unlikely student of aesthetics, and her ultimate breakdown, which involves, for unapparent reasons, stripping off her clothes. Though Barb lusts and manipulates, her motives are less the selfishly inspired actions of an antihero and more the pitiful exploitations of a victim.

In “Raspberries,” Whitton, I feel, makes the same moves. But this time, he puts the qualities of the antihero into the body of a confused seventy-eight-year-old woman.  Though she steals and lies to get what she wants (doing the wrong things for the right reasons), her character is unconvincing. When she speaks or thinks, she sounds like a thirty-something slacker in a septuagenarian’s body.

The best reads in The Reverse Cowgirl are the stories that roll around in the male psyche—they’re the dirtiest, the most perverted, the most far-out weird—yet they’re precisely the stories that probe (ahem) most at ambivalent moral issues like responsibility, fidelity, and faith. And while they seek to titillate (go ahead, say it like it’s a good thing), they are neither apologetic nor dishonest. If they provoke, it’s to arouse the straight-laced reader into examining his or her character for the bits that are lascivious, selfish, confused, and unconvinced by aspects of the modern life.

If the measure of a tragic hero’s life is how nobly he or she accepts the inevitability of failure and suffering, then it might be possible that the measure of an antihero’s life is how much fun he can have vociferously balking at a life that is hollow, dehumanizing, and meaningless.

Freehand | 220 pages |  $21.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1554810628