‘Milosz’ by Cordelia Strube

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic from an advance reading copy

Cordelia Strube’s glass-is-half-empty worldview grew decidedly bleaker (the glass is practically empty?) with 2010’s demoralizing coming of age story, Lemon. While Milosz also reflects the author’s thorough awareness of chilling news headlines, the lengthy dark corridors of history, and the confounding and ongoing ability of our species to produce greater harm than good, its comic foundation provides a manic levity in the form of farcical set pieces and a tentative optimism signalled by—gasp!—a heartfelt wedding in the final chapters. Rest assured, though, celebrants talking about human trafficking, sexual assault, and death at that wedding provide ample testimony that Strube’s ninth novel is scarcely ready material for a laugh track-punctuated prime time sitcom.

Milo Krupi, a thirty-seven-year old underemployed actor with limited range and prospects, slouches, lurches, and missteps at the novel’s centre. Like teenage Lemon, Milo is seeking a comfortable nest in a hostile and frequently absurd world that appears to offer little in the way of opportunity, consolation, or security. Instead of honing his craft and winning applause onstage in Toronto, and despite “experiencing a renaissance as an everyman,” Milo is (wild goose) chasing TV commercial gigs—where he’s repeatedly called Mr. Crappy by caffeinated execs—and supplementing a meagre income by working for his abrasive buddy Wallace at the wildly misnamed Friendly Junk Removal (“There’s no end of work, no end of junk,” Strube’s narration explains, “particularly with recession house foreclosures”).

Milo lives in his father’s ramshackle house (his awful father, Gustaw, a survivor of a Polish labour camp in WWII, is missing and presumed unreachable) and pines for the debt-hobbled married woman next door, whose autistic son Robertson’s increasing aggression and mania is grinding her once-happy marriage into the ground.

Conscious of the seeming chaos, indifference, and simmering violence everywhere and knowing his own lacklustre history of being a “paunchy everyman who can do nothing but blunder,” Milo is motivated by earnest ethics and a nurse-like utopianism. Within a few chapters, however, his efforts have resulted in the death of a bully at Robertson’s school and a severe traffic accident that lands Robertson’s father in a hospital bed for the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, Milo’s house grows more crowded with angry and sexually dysfunctional Wallace, Wallace’s visiting mother (Vera, who speaks in a constant stream of ludicrous Britishisms), an escaped rodent stolen from Robertson’s school, and Pedro, a studly (and often shirtless) Cuban-born junk remover whose girlfriend has just put their romance on hold thanks to an irreconcilable devout/atheist difference. Add to that Geon Van der Wyst, a supposedly avant garde director, Zosia (Milo’s ex-girlfriend, a Latvian immigrant whose fourth English word was “whatever”), background characters with names like Hunter, Sarah Moon Dancer, and Fennel, humiliating commercial auditions, a locally-shot TV program (Reality Check, a “reality show about people who think they’re on reality shows”) in which his institutionalized father—who, due to an accident, can now only speak Polish—is a contestant, a deer attack, painkillers, and a runaway youth, and Strube makes it abundantly clear that Milo is experiencing the all-time-low of rough patches.

Strube’s distinctive verbal dexterity and impressive talent for showcasing the half-empty keeps Milosz moving along at breakneck speed. The novel’s busy screwball plot lines drift and meander to a degree; Strube’s episodic approach and scattershot interests do not result in a novel of mathematical symmetries or precisely controlled farce. And her reflexive pessimism— “Nothing about humans is eternal,” Milos says, “Except, of course, their stupidity. Einstein called it infinite”—butts uncomfortably against the generic conventions of comedy: if the expected happy endings of reconciliation and marital accord aren’t unbelievable exactly, they do seem somewhat improbable.

Milo, though, commands full attention. Since in his view “problems cling like barnacles” and “experience burns you, covers you in scars so thick you can hardly move,” when Strube grants him a small aperture for contentment, it’s difficult not to cheer.

Coach House | 280 pages |  $19.95 | paper | ISBN #978-1552452653