‘Walt’ by Russell Wangersky

Reviewed by Richard Cumyn from uncorrected proof

For geeks like me who are fascinated by the writing process—influences, early drafts, recurrences of a character or motif—discovering such evidence in print is always rewarding. David Adams Richards takes ne’er-do-well John Delano in The Coming of Winter, for example, and recasts him as an RCMP constable in Hope in the Desperate Hour and his next two Miramichi novels. Protagonists from The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake are brought together in the third of Margaret Atwood’s Maddadam Trilogy. Joyce Cary shares the narrative perspective between Sara Monday, Tom Wilcher and Gulley Jimson in his first trilogy. William Faulkner keeps calling on the rapacious Snopes family of Yoknapatawpha County. Knowing this I can see possibilities for my own work and, as in the comparative example below, better understand an author’s thematic intent:

Exhibit A:

I can lie with the best of them about whether or not you need whatever I’m selling this time, but I’m not so good about lying to the cops. Or to my mother. Or to anyone else who’s willing to stare hard at my eyes and wonder why I don’t look straight back at them and hold their gaze.

Exhibit B:

I was thinking, the thing to do is to stay as close to the truth as you can, but don’t give them stuff that will make them head off in new directions. Don’t give them any of the stuff you have trouble explaining to yourself, the stuff they can railroad you with.

Exhibit A is spoken by Paul Lambert, narrator of Russell Wangersky’s story, “No Harm, No Foul,” from his excellent collection, Whirl Away (Thomas Allen, 2012). Lambert is a travelling salesman who picks up an inebriated, disoriented teenager named Lisa Rhodes:

She was almost in the middle of the road when I saw her first, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans, and it was pounding down rain, halfway down the Salmonier Line about as far east as you can go on the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland.

As suggested by its title, the story is about what might have happened but didn’t. A lonely middle-aged man driving one of his regular routes takes in a dishevelled but still alluring waif who falls asleep in his car. After driving her to the nearest town and letting her off in a schoolyard he begins to worry. “What if she didn’t turn up somewhere afterwards? I mean, what if I dropped her off and something happened to her after that?” He is equally distressed at having been in a compromising position with an under-age girl. Admitting (if only to himself and to us) that he fantasized about having sex with her, he tries to assuage the very real guilt he feels. “You can’t be prosecuted for the things that go through your head,” he says, justifying his lust. “It’s only the things you do that are supposed to count.”

Paul Lambert is a prototype of Walt Carter, the central character of the novel under review and the speaker of the second quotation (Exhibit B). Walt, in his 50s, a former salesman, is a grocery-store janitor in St. John’s, NL. He collects to-buy lists that he finds when he empties the waste bins at the check-out aisles, and has become adept at identifying the women who wrote them. He finds out where they live, stalks them via social media, and spies on them through their bedroom windows at night. Creepy. A right perv, as they say down on Water Street. Oh, and Walt’s wife, Mary? Missing for a year. As close to a cold case as they come. Two Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) investigators have been paired to jump-start the investigation into Mary’s disappearance and that of at least two other missing women, including a young hitchhiker named Lisa Tapper.

In turning “No Harm, No Foul” into Chapter 21 of Walt, Wangersky has changed little except for the male character’s emotional response to the situation. Where Paul is shaken by his felonious near-miss, an experience that may even compel him to change his life for the better, Walt’s is a clamped-down response. Both men recall the same image:

“I was picturing her just like that, exactly in that position, leaning back against the seat—but I was picturing her after I’d taken her pants off, naked from the waist down and her legs spread and her feet hanging out through the door, the balls touching the ground. […] Somehow, all at once—even imagining it, even fantasizing—it wasn’t the way I thought it would be. It was like a crime scene photo. In my head, it was like someone had switched a light on for a moment, and just as quickly switched it off again.” (Walt, p. 129; Whirl Away, p. 118)

The difference, evidence of the author’s intention regarding the transformation of the character, is in Paul and Walt’s reaction, respectively, to having had such a disturbing fantasy. For Paul in Whirl Away, after the imagined light illuminating the scene is turned off, “all the possibilities become impossible. Worse—they became ridiculous. I became ridiculous.”

Like Paul, his pre-incarnation, Walt doesn’t want to think about the possibilities, specifically the potential in him to be violent. What does not enter his mind, however—and this forms the crux of the difference between the two—is the possibility that he might be a ridiculous figure, an old goat lusting after a vulnerable young woman. Walt is amazed by the emotions churned up in him by his memory of the brief encounter with lost Lisa, “how fast you rush from embarrassed to furious. Like water rushing in and back out again,” (Walt, p. 129) but guilty is the last thing he feels.

It’s as if Wangersky thought, What if I took Paul Lambert, removed his qualms, and made him into someone with sociopathic or even psychopathic traits? That Wangersky changed so little adapting the story into the novel’s chapter reveals how normal a social deviant can appear. Walt is an intelligent, acutely observant man, a better detective, in fact, than either Dean Hill or Jim Scoville, the policemen assigned to the missing persons case. It speaks to Wangersky’s skill as a novelist that we really don’t know until the very last page of Walt whether our man is a killer or merely a lonely introvert who doesn’t respect the privacy of others.

Contributing to the mystery is the fact that Walt seems at first glance to be a basically good if misanthropic person. He narrates the bulk of the book, his chapters tending to be the longest. Each begins with a new list he’s found and what it tells him about the person who wrote it. His is a reasonable, informed, at times learned voice. He shares what he knows about human nature. He sees things others miss. Self-aware, able to be self-critical, he might be someone we’d engage in conversation. One word that does not come immediately to mind in describing Walt is “criminal.”

Wangersky’s work as news editor of the St. John’s Telegram has afforded him intimate knowledge of police work, the cases they strive doggedly to solve and the politics that often impede them. Those chapters told from the third-person perspective of Hill and Scoville tend to begin with an RNC bulletin announcing either a development or a plea for assistance in the cases involving the missing women, one of whom, Alisha, narrates short chapters akin to diary or blog entries. As her chapters progress they express her growing unease, the sense that someone is watching her.

The line dividing normal from abnormal and voyeur from murderer, Wangersky suggests in Walt, can be a thin one. The virtually invisible man who cleans up spills in the condiments aisle has a rich inner life. He remembers objects and events in precise detail. He knows much about the natural world. He’s an expert fly-fisherman with an out-of-the-way spot on the river, one only he knows about. He is someone, we learn, who elicited passionate outbursts, at first amorous then increasingly angry, from his now absent wife. He has a jealous streak, one that gets him into a precarious situation, one of the book’s most suspenseful scenes. All in all, based on his own words, Walt might be as normal as the next guy: he’s lonely, definitely; an introvert; emotionally cold; analytical; at times judgmental, but basically harmless.

What he’s not is the glib, superficial, grandiose “player” described by psychologist Robert Hare in his 1993 book about psychopathy, Without Conscience. Nor is Walt impulsive, undisciplined or a thrill seeker, further identifiers of the psychopath, according to Hare. On the contrary, Walt is if anything a pursuer of orderliness. Nothing gets him more peeved off than customers “who think they own the place”:

It’s stupid, I know, because it shouldn’t mean anything to me. Not my problem, not my profits. […] You wouldn’t believe what people do. I’ve found fresh chicken breast quarters left high and dry on a tideline of popcorn packages in the snack aisle….

Walt knows that people have feelings and that emotion is important. What he seems to lack, we realize as the novel progresses and becomes increasingly ominous, are the feelings themselves. Or he has suppressed them for so long that he no longer has access to his emotions. Most glaringly absent in him is empathy, although he does admit the possibility that he could be responsible for the suffering of others. Describing the tumult of his 18-year marriage, he refers to himself as a cork in heavy seas, “tossed around in all directions by different winds and currents that were impossible to resist but had nothing at all to do with me. I never felt it was completely my fault, but I imagine some of it probably was.” (p. 16)

Loneliness is central to the novel, each character in some way isolated. Inspector Dean Hill, a foil for Walt, lives alone, his wife having recently left him. Like Walt he appreciates patterns and order. Even his new partner Scoville is a solitary type made uncomfortable by the close quarters of the office they share. “Scoville didn’t like talking—in fact, he didn’t seem to like anyone or anything outside the job.” (p. 30) Alisha, the third narrative voice, lives alone in a rented house, her two roommates having moved on. She is poised for change, in a love relationship that is coming to an end and a living arrangement she probably can’t afford. Of the three perspectives in the book, only Walt’s expresses contentment with his status quo.

For someone who admits that he doesn’t “have much time for the effort of being neighbourly” (40) and can muster only “the bare edge of politeness,” (43) Walt sure knows a lot about human nature. Observing gender differences in the way people shop, he sees that women move in “close-held, personal little bee-dance patterns…like loose schools of fish,” (36) whereas a man tends to engage in solitary, “combat shopping. Everything checked off in his head as he went, not a single glance side to side. Alone and in deep, behind enemy lines.” (88)

Inspector Hill would likely be a combat shopper. He suffers those acutely male impediments—inability to express feelings in words, lack of emotional connection to the world beyond his own skin—that have brought him painful consequence, in a failed marriage and the loss of a job he enjoyed. That he shares personality traits with his prime suspect should put him at an advantage in the investigation. He should be able to get inside Walt’s head and figure out, if Walt did what Dean thinks he did, how to secure evidence leading to his arrest.

At times Walt seems to contradict the assumption that he lacks empathy. Reading a short found-list, for example (“2 hair dye—Golden Blond / soap / bus pass / diapers”) (60), he intuits an entire, heartbreaking life:

Because—this is stupid, but it’s true—that’s the kind of note that makes you want to be behind her with your arms out, ready to catch, makes you say, “I’ve got you,” right up close to her ear….

Does he feel the note writer’s tacit cry for help or does he only intellectualize it? It’s hard to believe that anyone could so incisively detect a woman’s emotional state and not be moved by it. It’s a testament to Wangersky’s control of the narrative, his continual return to a neutral position regarding the question of Walt’s guilt or innocence, that he keeps us guessing to the very end.

Like all good mystery writers, Wangersky sprinkles possible clues throughout his book, lightly enough that on first reading they could well be overlooked. The perfect place to dispose of a body, for example. Walt’s history of jealousy. An episode in which he is cruel to a neighbour. Walt’s physical strength, the muscle memory of a previous job toting heavy cartons. He admits that if pushed far enough he could resort to “popping a guy in the mouth.” But every good detective knows that no arrest can be made without hard evidence. If Walt is guilty of abduction and murder, as Hill and Scoville believe him to be, they lack the decisive nail with which to close the case.

By mid-story we are so used to Walt’s reasonable, confident though not cocky tone, his insights that resemble wisdom, his admission that honesty is the smartest tack in any situation, that we still can’t be sure he’s done anything worse than break into a woman’s house and paw through her underwear drawer. We almost forgive him that transgression—almost—when he tells us that his compulsion has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with his desire for connection. He needs to know intimate details about these women, the way someone else might need physical contact and sexual release. Perverse? Certainly. Do we throw him in jail or find him a therapist?

People like Walt live among us. Most function normally, doing little or no harm. They don’t feel in the same way others do and their experience tends to be an intellectual rather than an emotional one. That disconnectedness makes them potentially hurtful to others, especially if they fail to acknowledge responsibility for their actions. The strength of Walt, this compulsive “Did-he-do-it?” is the novel’s ambivalence regarding a character who could just as easily be standing on one side as on the other of the line separating criminality from civility. It’s chilling to contemplate and important for all to know about.

(With thanks to Brian Bartlett for his assistance regarding references to David Adams Richards and Joyce Cary.)

Anansi | 304 pages |  $22.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1770894679