Reviewed by Andrew Woodrow-Butcher
This first short-fiction collection from Toronto writer Kevin Hardcastle is concerned with people, places, and ideas that have fallen by the wayside. Debris is a tense and complex book, the prose fluent but unassuming, the narratives often surprising in their construction. A succession of rural locales, of harsh weather conditions, and of characters in unfortunate circumstances characterize these eleven tales.
The book opens with its most memorable story, and one that is perhaps emblematic of the collection as a whole. “Old Man Marchuk,” like all of these pieces, is set somewhere poor, remote, and troubled. RCMP Constable Tom Hoye has newly arrived out west with his pregnant spouse, to a collection of distant townships as new to him as they are to the reader. When two guys break into the titular old man’s barn in an attempt to steal some ATVs, and Marchuk chases them for miles and almost kills them with his shotgun, we side with Hoye, who, shocked by this grim and disproportionate violence, arrests Marchuk. A vocal and perhaps dangerous contingent of locals sides with the old man, though, and undertakes a campaign of harassment against Hoye and his expecting wife. The story has quite a grip, but plot points are but a small part of Hardcastle’s masterful technique. The violent potential of the situation, the evident yet unintelligible desperation of the cast of characters, the disadvantages of not knowing the lay of the land: without resorting to tired narrative cadences, “Old Man Marchuk” offers all the pleasures of suspense fiction, in which every detail might equally be ominous or benign.
All of the stories offer this same suspense, these same networks of desperation, these same violent potentials, in more or less metaphorized ways. In “Hunted by Coyotes,” for example, when Hardcastle blends the symbolic and the concrete, the human and the animal, the real and the fantastical with delightful unease, he is still working through these same concerns. Was sketchy door-to-door salesperson Squeak really being tailed by coyotes when he skipped off work early that night? How likely is it that our equally sketchy narrator was chased by coyotes to the top of a gazebo several towns later? When you see a rifle propped in the corner of a potential client’s living room, is that a threat? How will you eat and stay warm if you don’t keep scamming door to door? Though physical conflicts abound here, Debris also tackles the less tangible but equally vivid problems that haunt and hunt us: work, institutions, histories have their own subtle violence.
These themes are rich, and Hardcastle mines them well. But the repetitive set-dressing of these stories – the eminently harsh summer or eminently harsh winter, the old small-town house, the unwell senior, the grudge, the drunks, the cop someone went to high school with – unfortunately blurs them together. I suspect the stories of Debris might display more distinctiveness and verve standing alone than they do read as a collection. While a debut is an opportunity to show range or diversity of tone or content, this book has forgone these in favour of an exclusive focus on the desperation – in particular the male desperation – borne of rural and small-town decline. Again and again Hardcastle returns to the figure of the angry or desperate, white, straight, working-class man. While Debris does not exactly glamourize or valourize this masculine type – on the contrary, these many depictions have plenty of nuance and insight – it nevertheless centers these experiences to the exclusion of others. In particular, the women of this book are often merely incidental or instrumental. They are sought after, cared for, protected, resented, invoked, but they are never what the book is about. Rather, Debris delineates a crisis of masculinity, set within a crisis of disappearing opportunities for community and livelihood. This is the singular, sepia world in which Hardcastle’s characters are trapped.
The final two stories of the collection do feature female protagonists, and the first of these, “Debris,” is perhaps the best in the book. Here, rifle-toting, animal-loving, mystery-solving Emily Moore is a refreshing personality amidst all the male angst. Lots of debris has been caught in her swimming pool over the years. The story begins as she finds a dead squirrel and then a dead girl floating there during a spate of ominous weather. Hardcastle once more gives us grudges, vengeance, and a small community with a past, and again he weaves a network of tensions that terrify and delight. Emily Moore is a strong and engaging character in her own right, but as with Hoye’s wife and unborn child in “Old Man Marchuk,” the threat of male violence is the organizing force of the narrative, and as more dead girls turn up Emily begins to feel like she, despite her age, might be next. And so “Debris” crystallizes the themes of the collection perhaps even more than “Old Man Marchuk.” These are places, people, identities that have washed up, been left behind. No yellow brick road leads to an emerald-spangled exit: there’s no place but home. And rifles are as easy to come by here – perhaps easier than reconciliations.
Biblioasis | 228 pages | $19.95| paper | ISBN# 978-1771960403
‘Debris’ by Kevin Hardcastle
Book Reviews
This first short-fiction collection from Toronto writer Kevin Hardcastle is concerned with people, places, and ideas that have fallen by the wayside. Debris is a tense and complex book, the prose fluent but unassuming, the narratives often surprising in their construction. A succession of rural locales, of harsh weather conditions, and of characters in unfortunate circumstances characterize these eleven tales.
The book opens with its most memorable story, and one that is perhaps emblematic of the collection as a whole. “Old Man Marchuk,” like all of these pieces, is set somewhere poor, remote, and troubled. RCMP Constable Tom Hoye has newly arrived out west with his pregnant spouse, to a collection of distant townships as new to him as they are to the reader. When two guys break into the titular old man’s barn in an attempt to steal some ATVs, and Marchuk chases them for miles and almost kills them with his shotgun, we side with Hoye, who, shocked by this grim and disproportionate violence, arrests Marchuk. A vocal and perhaps dangerous contingent of locals sides with the old man, though, and undertakes a campaign of harassment against Hoye and his expecting wife. The story has quite a grip, but plot points are but a small part of Hardcastle’s masterful technique. The violent potential of the situation, the evident yet unintelligible desperation of the cast of characters, the disadvantages of not knowing the lay of the land: without resorting to tired narrative cadences, “Old Man Marchuk” offers all the pleasures of suspense fiction, in which every detail might equally be ominous or benign.
All of the stories offer this same suspense, these same networks of desperation, these same violent potentials, in more or less metaphorized ways. In “Hunted by Coyotes,” for example, when Hardcastle blends the symbolic and the concrete, the human and the animal, the real and the fantastical with delightful unease, he is still working through these same concerns. Was sketchy door-to-door salesperson Squeak really being tailed by coyotes when he skipped off work early that night? How likely is it that our equally sketchy narrator was chased by coyotes to the top of a gazebo several towns later? When you see a rifle propped in the corner of a potential client’s living room, is that a threat? How will you eat and stay warm if you don’t keep scamming door to door? Though physical conflicts abound here, Debris also tackles the less tangible but equally vivid problems that haunt and hunt us: work, institutions, histories have their own subtle violence.
These themes are rich, and Hardcastle mines them well. But the repetitive set-dressing of these stories – the eminently harsh summer or eminently harsh winter, the old small-town house, the unwell senior, the grudge, the drunks, the cop someone went to high school with – unfortunately blurs them together. I suspect the stories of Debris might display more distinctiveness and verve standing alone than they do read as a collection. While a debut is an opportunity to show range or diversity of tone or content, this book has forgone these in favour of an exclusive focus on the desperation – in particular the male desperation – borne of rural and small-town decline. Again and again Hardcastle returns to the figure of the angry or desperate, white, straight, working-class man. While Debris does not exactly glamourize or valourize this masculine type – on the contrary, these many depictions have plenty of nuance and insight – it nevertheless centers these experiences to the exclusion of others. In particular, the women of this book are often merely incidental or instrumental. They are sought after, cared for, protected, resented, invoked, but they are never what the book is about. Rather, Debris delineates a crisis of masculinity, set within a crisis of disappearing opportunities for community and livelihood. This is the singular, sepia world in which Hardcastle’s characters are trapped.
The final two stories of the collection do feature female protagonists, and the first of these, “Debris,” is perhaps the best in the book. Here, rifle-toting, animal-loving, mystery-solving Emily Moore is a refreshing personality amidst all the male angst. Lots of debris has been caught in her swimming pool over the years. The story begins as she finds a dead squirrel and then a dead girl floating there during a spate of ominous weather. Hardcastle once more gives us grudges, vengeance, and a small community with a past, and again he weaves a network of tensions that terrify and delight. Emily Moore is a strong and engaging character in her own right, but as with Hoye’s wife and unborn child in “Old Man Marchuk,” the threat of male violence is the organizing force of the narrative, and as more dead girls turn up Emily begins to feel like she, despite her age, might be next. And so “Debris” crystallizes the themes of the collection perhaps even more than “Old Man Marchuk.” These are places, people, identities that have washed up, been left behind. No yellow brick road leads to an emerald-spangled exit: there’s no place but home. And rifles are as easy to come by here – perhaps easier than reconciliations.
Biblioasis | 228 pages | $19.95| paper | ISBN# 978-1771960403