Reviewed by Keith Cadieux
It was a pretty good year for Dave Margoshes. 2014 saw the release of both a new novel and a collection of short stories, both of which received positive critical attention. An accomplished writer of novels, short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, Margoshes has always been a prolific and welcome presence in the Canadian literary scene, and though he is well past seventy, these two books show that he’s not slowing down.
Let’s start with the novel.
The premise behind Wiseman’s Wager seems fairly standard at first glance; the novel focuses on the life of Zan Wiseman, a self-described failed novelist now in his late eighties recounting his life story to a psychiatrist. Through the course of the novel, Zan recounts tales of his four marriages, his time in jail, his involvement with the Communist party, and his attempts to overcome the “Gibraltar of writer’s block” after the completion of his first novel. Though Zan doesn’t consider himself a very good novelist, he is an accomplished bullshitter, and here’s where the main intrigue of the novel comes in.
Zan is a born story teller, prone to severe embellishment. His old age has also brought on serious memory loss and at times he is unable to recall the names of his four wives or the order in which his siblings were born. As he tells his psychiatrist Zelda about the various episodes of his life, the reader must constantly wonder at how the narrative is being manipulated. As the back cover copy asks, “Is he misremembering things? Deliberately misrepresenting them? Merely crafting a better story? Or all of the above?”
An obvious comparison is Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version, another novel where an old Jewish man recounts the stories of his various failed marriages in a way that somehow manages to portray his terrible behaviour in a favourable light. Margoshes’s novel is in no way diminished by this comparison to Richler’s, though Barney’s Version is more playful and has higher stakes; Wiseman’s Wager is a quieter, more contemplative exploration of an unreliable narrator.
Though there is always the possibility that Zan is bending the truth on purpose, most of his unreliability as a narrator seems due to his faulty memory. Because he is not willfully misleading the audience, a lot of the potential humour is defused and Zan becomes a more tragic figure.
As is the case with any novel or story using an unreliable narrator, the author needs to sneak in some way for the reader to realize that the narrator’s version of events may be suspect and Margoshes has done this by including some shifts in the narrative perspective. Most of the novel is told from Zan’s point of view as he talks with Zelda, but occasionally there are chapters which are only dialogue or arguments between Zan and his brother Abe, some chapters are monologues of Abe talking to his comatose wife, and some chapters use a completely removed third person narrator who is able to give the facts-of-the-matter for some of Zan’s more prominent memories. By doing this, Margoshes makes sure that it’s always pretty easy for the reader to assess whether or not Zan is recounting things as they actually happened and where he’s veering away from reality. This works well most of the time but occasionally it does feel like a bit of a narrative short cut. I can’t help but think it would have been more gratifying for Margoshes to have found a way to signal the zigs and zags within Zan’s own retellings instead of relying on an outside perspective to point out the real truth.
There are a few other flaws that, while they don’t necessarily bring the novel down, do stand out against the more carefully crafted elements. The arguments between Zan and Abe are meant to be punchy but most of the time they come across as predictable and occasionally dip a little too close to stereotypical. For example:
“And all of a sudden, anyway, you’re an expert in Jewish terminology? How many times you even been in a temple – synagogue, whatever you want to call it – since your bar mitzvah?”
“Bar mitzvah? You must be thinking of a different baby brother, Abela.”
“Ha, that’s a good one. Aren’t you Alexander Wiseman?”
“Guilty as charged, Your Honour.”
“Then you were bar mitzvah.”
“I was?”
“I was there.”
“Really?”
“Oy, what a head you got.”
In terms of pacing, the recounting of Zan’s life feels uneven. The novel is just shy of 400 pages but most of the narrative focuses on the earlier episodes of Zan’s life, particularly his first (out of four) marriages. The last 100 hundred pages blaze through the rest of the wives, Zan’s involvement with the Communist Party, the Winnipeg General Strike, his mentoring of a young writer and a few other important events. The earlier portions tend to run long and be more repetitive than necessary. However, this could also be symptomatic of Zan’s unreliability.
These are minor quibbles, though, when everything is taken as a whole. Despite its length and the relatively simple plot (for the most part, the action consists of Zan sitting in a psychiatrist’s office) the novel is eminently readable and engaging. This is a testament to Margoshes’ skill as a writer and once all of the nuances and various threads are brought together, Zan’s life is one worth looking back over.
***
In a recent interview, Margoshes confessed that though he does enjoy writing novels and poetry, his favoured literary form is short fiction and the stories collected in God Telling a Joke do have a degree of polish and swagger that isn’t present in Wiseman’s Wager. Where the narration of Zan’s recollections can seem rambling and repetitive, this type of issue is not seen anywhere in these stories, which are all crisp, sharp, and engaging.
The best stories here are playful, experimenting with narrative form and difficult ideas with a disarming hint of fun. “Desert Isle or the Compunction of Narrative” is a surprisingly complex metafiction that centers on Sarah, a successful author who is using her recollections of her writing mentor, named Margoshes, to work him into a story where he is trapped on a desert island writing a story about Sara, a very promising writing student of his. Margoshes’s exceptional skill is on full display here as, despite the complexity, the story is never confusing and is both engaging and insightful.
Another story, “The King of the Jews or The Curious Case of L’Achiem Mordecai Macleod,” is about the rise to considerable fame of Palliser Macleod after he claims that First Nations people are descended from old world Jewish migrants who crossed the frozen Bering strait into North America. Though this premise seems poised to offend, Margoshes instead manages a profound discussion of identity, religious belief, and genocide and once again the playful tone defuses the potential for offence and allows some of the profundity to sink in.
The other stories are more traditional Canadian literary fiction, but masterfully crafted examples of such. “Geeks” begins as a kind of railroad adventure centring on two teen boys working in the freak show of a traveling circus biting the heads off chickens but ends up as a fairly sad recounting of the young boys’ friendship. “Breasts: a Meditation” is told from the perspective of an adult man whose mother, once a Playboy model, has just undergone a mastectomy. I’ve seem old timey circuses and horrific cancer surgeries turn up in lots of recent Canadian literary fiction, but very few examples are as well written as those which appear in Margoshes’ collection.
As can be reasonably expected with two books that were likely written so close together (though in the acknowledgements Margoshes notes that he had been plunking away at Wiseman’s Wager for quite a long time) there are some recurring themes and material between the two books. Much like Zan Wiseman, the protagonist of the title story in God Telling a Joke is an old man who identifies himself as Jewish but finds little actual engagement with the religion of Judaism. Many of Margoshes’ characters are divorced, and usually more than once. He uses a multiplicity of settings, both Canadian and American, but he always signals the Canadian-set stories by having characters listening to Peter Gzowski or watching Peter Mansbridge. Both books repeatedly mention F. Scott Fitgerald and The Great Gatsby. This isn’t a criticism, negative or otherwise, and I never felt as though Margoshes was repeating material, but it’s still interesting to track these recurring elements across one novel and more than a dozen stories.
Despite having published so many books (I found seventeen, but it can be difficult to turn up an exact number since some have gone out of print and Margoshes has had such a long career) this is an author still going strong. He clearly doesn’t suffer from the writer’s block which cripples Zan Wiseman and the stories in this most recent collection show an exceptional talent and well-honed skill in full form.
Wiseman’s Wager | Coteau | 392 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1550506013
God Telling a Joke and Other Stories | Oolichan | 272 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-0889822993
‘Wiseman’s Wager’ and ‘God Telling a Joke and Other Stories’ by Dave Margoshes
Book Reviews
It was a pretty good year for Dave Margoshes. 2014 saw the release of both a new novel and a collection of short stories, both of which received positive critical attention. An accomplished writer of novels, short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, Margoshes has always been a prolific and welcome presence in the Canadian literary scene, and though he is well past seventy, these two books show that he’s not slowing down.
Let’s start with the novel.
The premise behind Wiseman’s Wager seems fairly standard at first glance; the novel focuses on the life of Zan Wiseman, a self-described failed novelist now in his late eighties recounting his life story to a psychiatrist. Through the course of the novel, Zan recounts tales of his four marriages, his time in jail, his involvement with the Communist party, and his attempts to overcome the “Gibraltar of writer’s block” after the completion of his first novel. Though Zan doesn’t consider himself a very good novelist, he is an accomplished bullshitter, and here’s where the main intrigue of the novel comes in.
Zan is a born story teller, prone to severe embellishment. His old age has also brought on serious memory loss and at times he is unable to recall the names of his four wives or the order in which his siblings were born. As he tells his psychiatrist Zelda about the various episodes of his life, the reader must constantly wonder at how the narrative is being manipulated. As the back cover copy asks, “Is he misremembering things? Deliberately misrepresenting them? Merely crafting a better story? Or all of the above?”
An obvious comparison is Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version, another novel where an old Jewish man recounts the stories of his various failed marriages in a way that somehow manages to portray his terrible behaviour in a favourable light. Margoshes’s novel is in no way diminished by this comparison to Richler’s, though Barney’s Version is more playful and has higher stakes; Wiseman’s Wager is a quieter, more contemplative exploration of an unreliable narrator.
Though there is always the possibility that Zan is bending the truth on purpose, most of his unreliability as a narrator seems due to his faulty memory. Because he is not willfully misleading the audience, a lot of the potential humour is defused and Zan becomes a more tragic figure.
As is the case with any novel or story using an unreliable narrator, the author needs to sneak in some way for the reader to realize that the narrator’s version of events may be suspect and Margoshes has done this by including some shifts in the narrative perspective. Most of the novel is told from Zan’s point of view as he talks with Zelda, but occasionally there are chapters which are only dialogue or arguments between Zan and his brother Abe, some chapters are monologues of Abe talking to his comatose wife, and some chapters use a completely removed third person narrator who is able to give the facts-of-the-matter for some of Zan’s more prominent memories. By doing this, Margoshes makes sure that it’s always pretty easy for the reader to assess whether or not Zan is recounting things as they actually happened and where he’s veering away from reality. This works well most of the time but occasionally it does feel like a bit of a narrative short cut. I can’t help but think it would have been more gratifying for Margoshes to have found a way to signal the zigs and zags within Zan’s own retellings instead of relying on an outside perspective to point out the real truth.
There are a few other flaws that, while they don’t necessarily bring the novel down, do stand out against the more carefully crafted elements. The arguments between Zan and Abe are meant to be punchy but most of the time they come across as predictable and occasionally dip a little too close to stereotypical. For example:
“And all of a sudden, anyway, you’re an expert in Jewish terminology? How many times you even been in a temple – synagogue, whatever you want to call it – since your bar mitzvah?”
“Bar mitzvah? You must be thinking of a different baby brother, Abela.”
“Ha, that’s a good one. Aren’t you Alexander Wiseman?”
“Guilty as charged, Your Honour.”
“Then you were bar mitzvah.”
“I was?”
“I was there.”
“Really?”
“Oy, what a head you got.”
In terms of pacing, the recounting of Zan’s life feels uneven. The novel is just shy of 400 pages but most of the narrative focuses on the earlier episodes of Zan’s life, particularly his first (out of four) marriages. The last 100 hundred pages blaze through the rest of the wives, Zan’s involvement with the Communist Party, the Winnipeg General Strike, his mentoring of a young writer and a few other important events. The earlier portions tend to run long and be more repetitive than necessary. However, this could also be symptomatic of Zan’s unreliability.
These are minor quibbles, though, when everything is taken as a whole. Despite its length and the relatively simple plot (for the most part, the action consists of Zan sitting in a psychiatrist’s office) the novel is eminently readable and engaging. This is a testament to Margoshes’ skill as a writer and once all of the nuances and various threads are brought together, Zan’s life is one worth looking back over.
***
The best stories here are playful, experimenting with narrative form and difficult ideas with a disarming hint of fun. “Desert Isle or the Compunction of Narrative” is a surprisingly complex metafiction that centers on Sarah, a successful author who is using her recollections of her writing mentor, named Margoshes, to work him into a story where he is trapped on a desert island writing a story about Sara, a very promising writing student of his. Margoshes’s exceptional skill is on full display here as, despite the complexity, the story is never confusing and is both engaging and insightful.
Another story, “The King of the Jews or The Curious Case of L’Achiem Mordecai Macleod,” is about the rise to considerable fame of Palliser Macleod after he claims that First Nations people are descended from old world Jewish migrants who crossed the frozen Bering strait into North America. Though this premise seems poised to offend, Margoshes instead manages a profound discussion of identity, religious belief, and genocide and once again the playful tone defuses the potential for offence and allows some of the profundity to sink in.
The other stories are more traditional Canadian literary fiction, but masterfully crafted examples of such. “Geeks” begins as a kind of railroad adventure centring on two teen boys working in the freak show of a traveling circus biting the heads off chickens but ends up as a fairly sad recounting of the young boys’ friendship. “Breasts: a Meditation” is told from the perspective of an adult man whose mother, once a Playboy model, has just undergone a mastectomy. I’ve seem old timey circuses and horrific cancer surgeries turn up in lots of recent Canadian literary fiction, but very few examples are as well written as those which appear in Margoshes’ collection.
As can be reasonably expected with two books that were likely written so close together (though in the acknowledgements Margoshes notes that he had been plunking away at Wiseman’s Wager for quite a long time) there are some recurring themes and material between the two books. Much like Zan Wiseman, the protagonist of the title story in God Telling a Joke is an old man who identifies himself as Jewish but finds little actual engagement with the religion of Judaism. Many of Margoshes’ characters are divorced, and usually more than once. He uses a multiplicity of settings, both Canadian and American, but he always signals the Canadian-set stories by having characters listening to Peter Gzowski or watching Peter Mansbridge. Both books repeatedly mention F. Scott Fitgerald and The Great Gatsby. This isn’t a criticism, negative or otherwise, and I never felt as though Margoshes was repeating material, but it’s still interesting to track these recurring elements across one novel and more than a dozen stories.
Despite having published so many books (I found seventeen, but it can be difficult to turn up an exact number since some have gone out of print and Margoshes has had such a long career) this is an author still going strong. He clearly doesn’t suffer from the writer’s block which cripples Zan Wiseman and the stories in this most recent collection show an exceptional talent and well-honed skill in full form.
Wiseman’s Wager | Coteau | 392 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1550506013
God Telling a Joke and Other Stories | Oolichan | 272 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-0889822993