‘Congratulations on Everything’ by Nathan Whitlock
Posted: May 9, 2016
Book Reviews
Reviewed by Julienne Isaacs
You might call Nathan Whitlock’s sense of humour the gallows kind: he readily locates the brutal and exposes its ridiculous underside. Not that he makes fun of his characters’ small, damaged lives—too much, anyway. Instead, he opens them up to reveal their working—and broken—parts.
Congratulations on Everything is Whitlock’s sophomore novel after 2008’s well-received A Week of This (ECW). A Toronto writer and editor, and instructor in Humber College’s new Professional Writing and Communications Program, Whitlock brings all the familiar flavours of the Greater Toronto Area to the pages of this novel.
He also brings the sensibility of a Greek tragedy: Congratulations on Everything bears its classic element, a focus on a single human misfortune that evokes pleasurable catharsis in its audience. Because nothing is more cathartic than reading about someone else’s failures. And the failure at the heart of this novel—while its dimensions appear grand—is more than usually pedestrian, and thus comforting.
Jeremy is a middle-aged owner of a bar-restaurant called The Ice Shack. He’s spent his entire working life in the service industry, and has built his small success on the teachings of Theo Hendra, a self-help guru, sayings like “I don’t call what I do a job, and I don’t call it work. I call it living.” Jeremy still carries the keys to every place he’s ever worked—they jangle perpetually in the belt around his softening waist.
The Ice Shack is Jeremy’s whole passion: he loves it like a new lover, woos its customers, and cherishes all its little details, from its corners to its condiment baskets. When he hires a new waitress, Charlene, he tours her through the Shack’s minutiae: “He wanted to impress upon her how important it was to understand the culture of the Shack—as important as knowing where to find extra napkins or how to get the ice machine working again if it crapped out.”
In one of just a few instances of heavy-handedness in this novel, the Ice Shack is actually, as well as metaphorically, perched on the precarious edge of a ravine. It’s located in Jeremy’s neighbourhood, where “the thin tip of the CN tower and the jumble of downtown were only visible from third-floor windows,” and where “every tree was sick with the same thing.” It’s a side of Toronto that feels more than a little stagnant, diseased: “Another widower lived across the street with three kids. Two widowers on one block—must be bad luck, Jeremy thought. Something was killing the trees, the grass, the wives.”
Whitlock’s sense of humour isn’t always this direct: he takes vicious, understated delight in making Jeremy’s inner narrative function like a ticker-tape of clichés:
If, on the other hand, you lost your focus, let your emotional life get too messy, and took the people around you for granted, or were simply not up to the task, you were almost guaranteed to find yourself scrambling around begging for help to delay the inevitable and fighting off people who tried to rob your dreams right out from under you. You’d have nothing left to do but lick your wounds and settle for second-best.
Jeremy’s success narrative also, of course, foreshadows his future, which adds another layer still to the novel’s wry outlook: just because something sounds trite doesn’t mean it can’t be true.
Congratulations on Everything could fit into a special category of Canadian literary fiction that wraps real feeling in a cloak of cynicism—it’s resonant of Angie Abdou’s Between, at least in its indictment of Canadian consumerism and the devastation that follows from treating market variables as fixed points. Jeremy takes his role as seriously as a peer of the realm, and though Whitlock is to some extent serving him up, it’s impossible to take his self-importance too lightly. It’s just too damned familiar:
Even on quiet nights, he loved staying at the Shack to the bitter end, helping the servers cash out and messing sweatily with the stereo behind the bar. He felt it was important to be around as much as possible, if only to ward off, by his mere presence, the sudden and total panic he was certain would descend the moment he left.
Whitlock leaves no character half-baked. Charlene’s private struggle with a disappointing marriage is the quiet underside to this plot. Even Charlene’s husband Kyle, an interesting composite of bland conventionality and rage, brings something unexpectedly soulful to the table.
But what most readers might find most satisfying about Congratulations on Everything is its insider’s look at the restaurant industry. The flyleaf perhaps misleadingly references “gourmands and chefs,” when the best “gourmand” the Shack can offer is the surly teenage cook/trainee Tyler. The Shack is the opposite of a hipster’s mecca, and Jeremy is endearingly out-of-touch with anything digital. Yet by the end of the novel the reader may find it’s impossible to judge him.
Everyone knows it’s difficult to succeed as a restaurateur, but fewer people understand all the moving parts that have to balance to make a business—or a life—a success. Whitlock seems to know some of the ingredients of failure, or at least he admirably pretends so.
‘Congratulations on Everything’ by Nathan Whitlock
Book Reviews
You might call Nathan Whitlock’s sense of humour the gallows kind: he readily locates the brutal and exposes its ridiculous underside. Not that he makes fun of his characters’ small, damaged lives—too much, anyway. Instead, he opens them up to reveal their working—and broken—parts.
Congratulations on Everything is Whitlock’s sophomore novel after 2008’s well-received A Week of This (ECW). A Toronto writer and editor, and instructor in Humber College’s new Professional Writing and Communications Program, Whitlock brings all the familiar flavours of the Greater Toronto Area to the pages of this novel.
He also brings the sensibility of a Greek tragedy: Congratulations on Everything bears its classic element, a focus on a single human misfortune that evokes pleasurable catharsis in its audience. Because nothing is more cathartic than reading about someone else’s failures. And the failure at the heart of this novel—while its dimensions appear grand—is more than usually pedestrian, and thus comforting.
Jeremy is a middle-aged owner of a bar-restaurant called The Ice Shack. He’s spent his entire working life in the service industry, and has built his small success on the teachings of Theo Hendra, a self-help guru, sayings like “I don’t call what I do a job, and I don’t call it work. I call it living.” Jeremy still carries the keys to every place he’s ever worked—they jangle perpetually in the belt around his softening waist.
The Ice Shack is Jeremy’s whole passion: he loves it like a new lover, woos its customers, and cherishes all its little details, from its corners to its condiment baskets. When he hires a new waitress, Charlene, he tours her through the Shack’s minutiae: “He wanted to impress upon her how important it was to understand the culture of the Shack—as important as knowing where to find extra napkins or how to get the ice machine working again if it crapped out.”
In one of just a few instances of heavy-handedness in this novel, the Ice Shack is actually, as well as metaphorically, perched on the precarious edge of a ravine. It’s located in Jeremy’s neighbourhood, where “the thin tip of the CN tower and the jumble of downtown were only visible from third-floor windows,” and where “every tree was sick with the same thing.” It’s a side of Toronto that feels more than a little stagnant, diseased: “Another widower lived across the street with three kids. Two widowers on one block—must be bad luck, Jeremy thought. Something was killing the trees, the grass, the wives.”
Whitlock’s sense of humour isn’t always this direct: he takes vicious, understated delight in making Jeremy’s inner narrative function like a ticker-tape of clichés:
If, on the other hand, you lost your focus, let your emotional life get too messy, and took the people around you for granted, or were simply not up to the task, you were almost guaranteed to find yourself scrambling around begging for help to delay the inevitable and fighting off people who tried to rob your dreams right out from under you. You’d have nothing left to do but lick your wounds and settle for second-best.
Jeremy’s success narrative also, of course, foreshadows his future, which adds another layer still to the novel’s wry outlook: just because something sounds trite doesn’t mean it can’t be true.
Congratulations on Everything could fit into a special category of Canadian literary fiction that wraps real feeling in a cloak of cynicism—it’s resonant of Angie Abdou’s Between, at least in its indictment of Canadian consumerism and the devastation that follows from treating market variables as fixed points. Jeremy takes his role as seriously as a peer of the realm, and though Whitlock is to some extent serving him up, it’s impossible to take his self-importance too lightly. It’s just too damned familiar:
Even on quiet nights, he loved staying at the Shack to the bitter end, helping the servers cash out and messing sweatily with the stereo behind the bar. He felt it was important to be around as much as possible, if only to ward off, by his mere presence, the sudden and total panic he was certain would descend the moment he left.
Whitlock leaves no character half-baked. Charlene’s private struggle with a disappointing marriage is the quiet underside to this plot. Even Charlene’s husband Kyle, an interesting composite of bland conventionality and rage, brings something unexpectedly soulful to the table.
But what most readers might find most satisfying about Congratulations on Everything is its insider’s look at the restaurant industry. The flyleaf perhaps misleadingly references “gourmands and chefs,” when the best “gourmand” the Shack can offer is the surly teenage cook/trainee Tyler. The Shack is the opposite of a hipster’s mecca, and Jeremy is endearingly out-of-touch with anything digital. Yet by the end of the novel the reader may find it’s impossible to judge him.
Everyone knows it’s difficult to succeed as a restaurateur, but fewer people understand all the moving parts that have to balance to make a business—or a life—a success. Whitlock seems to know some of the ingredients of failure, or at least he admirably pretends so.
ECW | 322 pages | $18.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-1770412903