‘Confidence’ by Russell Smith

Reviewed by Richard Cumyn

Russell Smith wears you down. Like the seductive theater-promoter, Jackie Farbstein, in the title story of this smart, disquieting new collection, Smith works his wiles, complimenting you on your refined taste, sharing a bite of derisive gossip, enticing you into what feels like a voyeur’s private box seat. Smith’s facility with narrative erodes the resistance a reader might bring to Confidence, it being difficult for some to read his fiction without hearing the voice of the culture critic published regularly in The Globe and Mail. It is an instructive voice, one that purports to know every meme, every risible faux pas, every “don’t,” a word the couple in one story uses as a noun to dismiss fashion disasters they see in public. If you are familiar with that Russell Smith and his continuing treatise on Canadian (read “Torontonian”) urban sophistication, you will recognize him in Lionel, the protagonist of “Fun Girls.” When Jennifer, the adamantine beauty Lionel goes home with after a giddy night of bar-hopping, teases him cruelly for his pedantry, he replies, “You’re absolutely right, that is exactly what I want, to know everything and explain everything, and for you to listen….”

Self-referential or not, Smith’s satire can be as scathingly entertaining as that of Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark or Evelyn Waugh, and like the male novelists of that list he works a delimited acreage. As in his previous fiction—How Insensitive, Noise, Muriella Pent, Girl Crazy—Smith is an acute observer of a rarefied slice of the city that continues to hold the national imagination in a death-grip. His Toronto is a metropolis replete with money and pretension. Despite still-healing wounds suffered during the Rob Ford administration, and despite being a city alarmingly divided by race and income, the Toronto of Confidence is best personified as a stunningly beautiful woman introduced cleavage-first. She is posed, like the women working in a bar in “Crazy,” “as if instructed to do so by a director with smutty intent.” In fact so many of Smith’s female characters are hyper-sexualized props that it makes you wonder what he’s playing at. Is he using the printed page as a Freudian couch? Is he giving the finger to past critics who have upbraided him for his reductionist portraits of women? It’s hard to believe he could be unconsciously sexist to such a degree as this.

The answer, I think, has much to do with what Russell Smith wants to reveal about men. Or, more accurately, one man. Compositely his male characters build a profile of someone trying desperately to keep his dirty secrets hidden. A man going home after spending the day with his girlfriend in the psych ward of the hospital—she is a suicide risk—takes a detour into a brothel. Another, a landlord who posts nude photos of his wife on an amateur-porn site, fantasizes about one member of the bellicose lesbian-couple renting his squalid basement apartment. In another story, his former girlfriend threatens to tell a man’s wife about them if he doesn’t hand over incriminating sex tapes he and the ex made together. A drug-addled grad student hauls heavy reading from place to place, knowing full well he’ll never return to his thesis. Hard-drug use is so prevalent in these stories you almost forget it’s illicit. Emma, the young woman who threatened to jump naked off her balcony in the opening story, has no idea her successful boyfriend is a full-blown opiate addict: “You’re so good. You’re so perfect,” she tells him, adding that he doesn’t deserve the pain she has subjected him to.

The stories of Confidence expose the cupidity, duplicitousness and unrestrained appetites of a certain class of people—well read, ambitious, narcissist—and the fiction’s cumulative effect would be dispiriting were it not for the artful manner in which Russell Smith presents them. “Research” opens, for example, with a character identified only as “she” reading haltingly from Winnie-the-Pooh. She could be a child just learning to read. She could be 40 and illiterate. When we discover, late in the story, that she and her lover are PhD students in their mid-twenties coming down queasily from a prolonged drug high, we’re startled but not incredulous, so convincingly real is their depiction.

The dialogue in “Fun Girls” reveals Smith’s uncanny ear for current vernacular. You can almost hear it ping erratically like an unrestrained body in the back seat of a careening cab. Their speech patterns illustrative of aimless hedonistic privilege, these young socialites relish the echoes of their raised voices and all that entertains them, including inventiveness in language. Not wishing to go to any restaurant or nightclub that is too “fabulous,” meaning anywhere populated by women who look like fashion models, one character declares herself to be “a pathological fabuphobic.” Similarly they declare off-limits anywhere “too democratic,” i.e., “no beer bars or country music.” Occasionally, they accept with mock sagacity, one must compromise.

Narrative structure, dialogue and character meet deftly at a peak in the title story. “Confidence” begins simply enough with a clutch of young professionals winding down after work in a bar, which we later learn is an exclusive club. As in a tightly orchestrated play during which everyone remains visible on stage (the story could be easily adapted to the theatre), the spotlight moves between a few similar small groupings. The characters all know each other, personally or by reputation. At a table a smooth impresario solicits a well-known novelist’s help securing positive media-coverage for his new production. At one end of the bar, three male lawyers or bankers drink to excess, argue about sports cars and make all-inclusive declarations about which of the women in their circle of friends they would date. At the other end, two women watch them and bemoan the limited choice of mates available to them. They would prefer to go out with rich boy Charles Easton, who dresses like Thurston Howell III and hangs out with people named Olivier. What they don’t know is that Charles, Olivier and their ilk are as shallow as everyone else there.

Confidence is hardly family entertainment. In eight stories we’re aware of only two children. One is an unseen wailing infant in “Gentrification,” the other a three-year-old cutie named Bernard (nicknamed “Bean”) who steals the show in “Raccoons.” Bean asks his father, Ivor, such awkward zingers as, “Daddy, what is called crack cocaine?” (The news is filled with allegations of the mayor’s drug use.) Because Kara, Ivor’s wife (a.k.a. blogger “40YearOldMom”) has a “mindfulness” date out of the house all afternoon, and Ivor a time-sensitive task to complete to secure the continuation of his marriage, he brings the Bean along on the mission. Fraught, hilarious in its expectation of disaster, the story is reminiscent of the Damon Runyon story, “Butch Minds the Baby.” In 1930, child-care brought complication to the successful cracking of safes; in 2015, child-care complicates everything else.

Confidence follows a discernible tonal trajectory, from the hopelessness of “Crazy” and “Research,” through the glittering flash of its middle stories, to something approaching comfortable, domestic optimism in the last two. At the end of “Raccoons,” for example, husband and wife join hands in the dark, immediate crisis averted, united now against a more daunting threat, that is, invasion by the city’s host of fearless ring-tailed scavengers. The collection’s final story, “Sleeping With an Elf,” ends on a note that can only be called heart-warming, which doesn’t fit the book’s abiding mood. One can imagine a call having come from above: “Russell, it’s Stan from Re-write. Listen, it’s all too bleak. You have to throw the folks in Guelph a crumb. You know, something sweet, something to get up for.”

Whether he continues to write fiction in a confessional style marked by erudite, inward-gazing pessimism, or begins to vary his lens to include a wider range of experience, Russell Smith will always be an author to “get up for,” if only to learn what of the zeitgeist we might have missed seeing since last reading him.

Biblioasis | 170 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN #  978-1771960151