‘The Guy Who Pumps Your Gas Hates You,’ by Sean Trinder
Posted: July 15, 2015
Book Reviews
Reviewed by Jason Marcus-Freeman
Though every novel requires some verisimilitude to draw the reader into its world, realism is a weird and slippery objective for a novel to attempt. Narratives are shaped for a reason, and a dedication to utter realism risks tedium. Sean Trinder’s debut novel The Guy Who Pumps Your Gas Hates You has an almost avant-garde commitment to portraying the banality of everyday existence, detailing the daily slog of an abrasive twenty-something gas jockey living in the tiny Winnipeg suburb of Oakbank. The book covers a year in the life of Brendan, Trinder’s protagonist/stand-in (the broad strokes of Trinder’s bio and the book’s overall plot are essentially identical), as he attempts to escape boredom and the “asshole customers” he’s forced to deal with by taking a creative writing class at the local community college.
The book contains many (many!) small scenes of transactional conversational bullshit—small talk, essentially. An emblematic example:
“How’s it going, Brendan?” she asks.
“I’m okay. You?”
“I’m good. My plans for tonight kinda fell through. You wanna get together for coffee or something?” she asks.
“Sure. Where?”
“Meet you at the hotel for seven?”
“Sounds good.”
Like Brendan, I’ve taken a creative writing class or two in my day. One of most useful instructions I’ve ever received was to ensure that every piece of dialogue was “nutritious,” that it reveal character, or establish mood, or drive the narrative; the majority of the dialogue in Gas is empty calories.
The book also contains many banal descriptions of action or setting, like when Brendan describes an apartment: “There’s an entertainment unit with a TV and a stereo. There’s a couch and a chair beside it. There’s a rug on the hardwood with a coffee table on it. There’s a bookshelf against a wall.”
Maybe this banality is intentional; maybe in his pursuit of realism, Trinder wants the novel to embody the tedium of daily life in small town Manitoba for an antsy twenty-something. In this aspect, he is mostly successful.
However, Gas almost completely glosses over the experience of winter; the book’s only real reference to winter is: “It gets cold and it snows, and pumping gas becomes something you do in a parka and thermal underwear.” Considering how central winter is to Winnipeg’s very identity, it’s disappointing that Tinder doesn’t even try to characterize the brutal, unforgiving majesty that is a Manitoba winter, perhaps revealing some technical shortcomings as a writer.
Gas’s problems don’t end there. Trinder’s attempts to make the book “edgy” render it borderline offensive, and I’m not talking about the book’s ridiculously plentiful f-bombs (Alternative title: The Guy Who Pumps Your Gas Fucking Hates You. It’s actually better, I think). Example: Brandon reads a story aloud to his creative writing class, including a portion where the story’s narrator casually drops the word “nigger,” which, of course, draws gasps from his fellow students, and maybe, Trinder hopes, the reader. Brendan rationalizes his use of the word to the class: “I really like the movie Taxi Driver, and Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver is racist. I thought that’s a really great flaw for a main character to have.” I’m from Winnipeg, but I don’t think I have ever heard anyone actually use the word “nigger” to refer to black people in a derogatory way. I have, though, heard endless, depressing, eyebrow-singeing, soul-crushing racist diatribes against Winnipeg’s First Nations population, a population conspicuously and utterly absent from Trinder’s novel. If Brendan or Trinder really wanted to engage with racism, he could have drawn from Winnipeg’s lengthy history of prejudice towards First Nations people, but instead, it’s just an ugly word used to score a cheap shock, for zero narrative purpose.
The book is also unapologetically misogynistic. Most female characters are at one point or another referred to as “bitch,” most pointedly Brendan’s ex-girlfriend (of course, right?). One of Brendan’s co-workers, Chantelle, also faces Brendan’s inexplicable wrath: multiple times, Brendan attributes Chantelle’s dialogue with “she says in her stupid bitch voice.” And though Brendan’s ex is marginally important to the book’s plot, such as it is, Chantelle has absolutely no narrative function whatsoever—she’s just a punching bag.
It could be argued that Tinder is attempting, like his protagonist, to create a flawed main character. But Brendan is narratively static: he has no real arc in the novel, remaining fundamentally unchanged from start to finish. You could try chalking this up to realism, but the book’s overall narrative quickly becomes predictable, even clichéd (Brendan gets a girl, arbitrarily loses that girl, etc.), complete with (spoiler alert) a sunshine and roses happy ending. So, if Gas isn’t going for radical realism, what is it going for? The answer, unfortunately, seems to be: not much.
NeWest | 220 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927063781
‘The Guy Who Pumps Your Gas Hates You,’ by Sean Trinder
Book Reviews
Though every novel requires some verisimilitude to draw the reader into its world, realism is a weird and slippery objective for a novel to attempt. Narratives are shaped for a reason, and a dedication to utter realism risks tedium. Sean Trinder’s debut novel The Guy Who Pumps Your Gas Hates You has an almost avant-garde commitment to portraying the banality of everyday existence, detailing the daily slog of an abrasive twenty-something gas jockey living in the tiny Winnipeg suburb of Oakbank. The book covers a year in the life of Brendan, Trinder’s protagonist/stand-in (the broad strokes of Trinder’s bio and the book’s overall plot are essentially identical), as he attempts to escape boredom and the “asshole customers” he’s forced to deal with by taking a creative writing class at the local community college.
The book contains many (many!) small scenes of transactional conversational bullshit—small talk, essentially. An emblematic example:
“How’s it going, Brendan?” she asks.
“I’m okay. You?”
“I’m good. My plans for tonight kinda fell through. You wanna get together for coffee or something?” she asks.
“Sure. Where?”
“Meet you at the hotel for seven?”
“Sounds good.”
Like Brendan, I’ve taken a creative writing class or two in my day. One of most useful instructions I’ve ever received was to ensure that every piece of dialogue was “nutritious,” that it reveal character, or establish mood, or drive the narrative; the majority of the dialogue in Gas is empty calories.
The book also contains many banal descriptions of action or setting, like when Brendan describes an apartment: “There’s an entertainment unit with a TV and a stereo. There’s a couch and a chair beside it. There’s a rug on the hardwood with a coffee table on it. There’s a bookshelf against a wall.”
Maybe this banality is intentional; maybe in his pursuit of realism, Trinder wants the novel to embody the tedium of daily life in small town Manitoba for an antsy twenty-something. In this aspect, he is mostly successful.
However, Gas almost completely glosses over the experience of winter; the book’s only real reference to winter is: “It gets cold and it snows, and pumping gas becomes something you do in a parka and thermal underwear.” Considering how central winter is to Winnipeg’s very identity, it’s disappointing that Tinder doesn’t even try to characterize the brutal, unforgiving majesty that is a Manitoba winter, perhaps revealing some technical shortcomings as a writer.
Gas’s problems don’t end there. Trinder’s attempts to make the book “edgy” render it borderline offensive, and I’m not talking about the book’s ridiculously plentiful f-bombs (Alternative title: The Guy Who Pumps Your Gas Fucking Hates You. It’s actually better, I think). Example: Brandon reads a story aloud to his creative writing class, including a portion where the story’s narrator casually drops the word “nigger,” which, of course, draws gasps from his fellow students, and maybe, Trinder hopes, the reader. Brendan rationalizes his use of the word to the class: “I really like the movie Taxi Driver, and Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver is racist. I thought that’s a really great flaw for a main character to have.” I’m from Winnipeg, but I don’t think I have ever heard anyone actually use the word “nigger” to refer to black people in a derogatory way. I have, though, heard endless, depressing, eyebrow-singeing, soul-crushing racist diatribes against Winnipeg’s First Nations population, a population conspicuously and utterly absent from Trinder’s novel. If Brendan or Trinder really wanted to engage with racism, he could have drawn from Winnipeg’s lengthy history of prejudice towards First Nations people, but instead, it’s just an ugly word used to score a cheap shock, for zero narrative purpose.
The book is also unapologetically misogynistic. Most female characters are at one point or another referred to as “bitch,” most pointedly Brendan’s ex-girlfriend (of course, right?). One of Brendan’s co-workers, Chantelle, also faces Brendan’s inexplicable wrath: multiple times, Brendan attributes Chantelle’s dialogue with “she says in her stupid bitch voice.” And though Brendan’s ex is marginally important to the book’s plot, such as it is, Chantelle has absolutely no narrative function whatsoever—she’s just a punching bag.
It could be argued that Tinder is attempting, like his protagonist, to create a flawed main character. But Brendan is narratively static: he has no real arc in the novel, remaining fundamentally unchanged from start to finish. You could try chalking this up to realism, but the book’s overall narrative quickly becomes predictable, even clichéd (Brendan gets a girl, arbitrarily loses that girl, etc.), complete with (spoiler alert) a sunshine and roses happy ending. So, if Gas isn’t going for radical realism, what is it going for? The answer, unfortunately, seems to be: not much.
NeWest | 220 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927063781