‘Famous Last Meals’ by Richard Cumyn

Reviewed by Lynne C. Martin

Online daters know that matches can look great in profiles and yet be non-starters in person. Such is my experience with Richard Cumyn’s collection of three novellas, titled for his second story, Famous Last Meals. Each story, considered on its own in content, characters, and style, has what should be a fascinating premise, and Cumyn’s writing is at times funny, wry, and acutely perceptive— yet it didn’t hold my attention for more than a few minutes at a time because I didn’t care about the characters.

Adam Lerner, the naïve protagonist of “Candidates,” is a case in point. This first story, a clever satire about a young man’s first job after university, describes Adam’s internship in the Prime Minister’s Office during which he becomes increasingly confused trying to obey conflicting authorities, until he finally starts to think for himself. Though I didn’t feel particularly connected to Adam, many moments had me laughing out loud at his expense.

For example, at the beginning, after an unsuccessful interview for a “spy job,” Adam notices a car filling up with exhaust in the employee parking lot as its occupant tries to commit suicide. Rather than intervening directly, Adam approaches the guardhouse attendant, with the ensuing exchange an hilarious indictment of the bureaucratic authority to which Canadians too willingly kowtow:

“Yes sir, back again,” said the uniformed man on duty.

 “Yes. It’s—okay, three things, actually.”

 “Three.”

“Right. In no particular order: one, I think someone’s trying to commit suicide in the parking lot; B, I’ve locked myself out of my car; and lastly, I’ve left my overcoat in the building. Come to think of it, that’s descending order of importance, isn’t it?”

In his list for the guard, Adam can’t even settle on an organizing principle; instead, he uses “one,” “B,” and “lastly” to introduce his three items. But the guard is no better; the conversation meanders along for another whole page before Adam is let back into the building to fetch his overcoat. Meanwhile, the reader is left squirming about the fate of the man in the car.

When the guard asks for his name again, Adam points to his signature on the ledger, but the guard reads it as “Adam Leaner,” thus labelling the boy perfectly. After Adam politely corrects him— “And it’s Lerner”— the guard’s response, “As in lifelong,” establishes the trajectory for the rest of Adam’s experience.

Cumyn’s tone sometimes suggests the hard-boiled detective novel, playing on Adam’s spy aspirations as well as his need to decipher what is going on in his PMO job. However, at times the writing is too full of extraneous detail and characters while skipping over important information. Perhaps this style is meant to imitate the choppy, boring bureaucratic haze Cumyn is skewering. Intentional or not, I couldn’t stay with it.

The second novella, “Famous Last Meals,” uses a much more fluent style to describe the complicated relationships among two couples—Colin & Beth, Max & Chandra— who meet regularly to research and re-enact the last meals of famous people. Interspersed throughout are Colin’s recollections of his early love affair with a dancer named Jane, who is bent on effecting Colin’s transformation from fearful and unimaginative to life-loving and expansive. However, Jane herself carries many secrets, including suicidal urges driven by family events gradually revealed. Though Jane’s story eventually moved me a little, the novella’s overarching preoccupation with death as drama is off-putting, and we never really see those famous meals.

Even so, I hope Cumyn develops this story into a full novel. More background into the motivations of each of the four spouses would help readers understand their choices, even if we find them distasteful. For example, Max brags about his addiction to Asian prostitutes, claiming it proves his manhood. As a woman I find this both incomprehensible and contemptible, so my first impulse is to write him off. What pain drives him? What makes any of these characters do what they do? And what transforms them, Jane notwithstanding? Cumyn frustratingly doesn’t tell.

Yet the one truly poignant section in the whole book was the closing of this novella, originally published as a short story called “Perennial,” in which Colin and Beth help Max and Chandra, all much older, move out of their family home because of Chandra’s terminal illness. Here the friends’ muted sadness and loss transcend the selfish, petty deceptions practiced among the four of them throughout their lifelong “friendship.”

The love expressed by Max for his wife is deep and real, completely at odds with his earlier behaviour; in fact, because the mood is so different, with years having passed between scenes, I wondered whether this was the same story. Up to this point I didn’t like any of these characters enough to want to spend time reading about them. If Cumyn could take the compassion of this ending back into the earlier parts of the story, he could make these characters more appealingly human. A novel would also allow for more narrative gaps to be filled.

The narrator of the third novella “The Woman in the Vineyard” is even less sympathetic. A whiny, pompous academic, he spends 49 pages envying his protégé Troyer’s successful novelization of a few weeks spent at a retreat with a famous actress and her playwright ex-husband. The narrator has agreed to turn Troyer’s novel into a stage adaptation, but he can’t make it work, so besides complaining about what he sees as Troyer’s mistakes, he continually makes excuses for his own failures as a writer.

Though the character’s first-person voice is an accurate portrayal of a certain kind of narcissist, it becomes hard to listen to after a few pages. Instead of being interesting, he quickly becomes merely annoying, with his only complexity being his self-deception— but again some hint of how he got that way may help the reader commit to hearing him out.

Cumyn, an accomplished writer and editor, has a wonderful ability to control the surface of his stories, especially in matching the style to the content. His writing is polished and his observations astute, but because there’s so little warmth in these characters (and I suspect Cumyn himself has little respect for them), they quickly fade from memory like a meh first date.

Enfield & Wizenty | 280 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN #  978-1927855171