Reviewed by Carl Watts
Brett Josef Grubisic’s From Up River and for One Night Only is, according to the back cover blurb, the story of Dee, Gordyn, Em and Jay, members of “the greatest New Wave band to ever spring from River Bend City.” It takes until page 173, however, for the drummer to switch from “index fingers and a right foot” to “actual wooden sticks and the bass drum pedal,” and beyond page 200 for multiple band members and instruments to appear in the same room; up until this point, the novel details its characters’ quotidian misadventures and their role in a small-town social ecosystem. Grubisic, whose academic work has addressed queer and class identities, genre fiction, sexuality, textuality and postmodernism generally, here uses a local take on 1980s pop music culture to invoke the seemingly endless hours and days that make up adolescence. Composed of the scraps of awkward documentation this phase often leaves behind, the at least somewhat autobiographical novel also addresses several of its author’s areas of scholarly interest.
And the story is indeed local, with River Bend City a thinly veiled Mission, B.C.; neighbouring Abbotsford doesn’t even get a pseudonym. The main characters—two sets of siblings—contribute diary entries, sketches, classroom notes and swaths of more conventional narrative that are arranged into categories such as “Venture” and “Déviation.” The end result documents dull or disastrous “parental units,” fraught paths to sexual experience and exhausting deliberations over the band’s style, sound and projected “meteoric arc” from “a mess of ideas and plans” to “bitter, marriage-crumbling accusations and spiking resentment.” In actuality, the group’s arc concludes with a semi-triumphant Battle-of-the-Bands debut; it also includes lots of the embarrassingly childish or downright boorish language we’d all hate to stumble upon in our old journals. Take, for example, a description of classmate Melanie, “aka Melon-y, aka Cantaloupes,” whose “twin brother Nardo, who was Leonardo to his mother and Lardo behind his back at school, made fun of Greek facial hair (wisps of moustache and sideburns, hers, an open secret) and called his own sister Cans, true if not that witty.”
Poring through this densely packed scrapbook is at first somewhat disorienting; further in, digression becomes the most noticeable characteristic. Obsessively imagined stage shows give way to tales of a succession of stepmothers or ruminations on “bath towels and grandmother-embroidered pillow cases.” What gradually takes shape is a coming-out story as well as a coming-of-age story, with updates that chart the “changing percentages” of sexual orientation—“from 90% into girls to 80%”—alternating with descriptions of one’s first time handling a “lump [that] felt soft and hard, similar to packaged uncooked chicken breast with the bone still in.” Amid this accumulation of documented experience, the story of the band is pushed ever further to the margins.
The period and band narrative are more than an arbitrarily selected backdrop, however. Grubisic’s first novel, The Age of Cities, was presented as a rediscovered manuscript, a move that betrayed its author’s familiarity with textual scholarship; yet even with its sly commentary on the search for fashionably transgressive literary histories, The Age of Cities perhaps felt too of a piece with its author’s academic work. In From Up River, however, this kind of crossover is subsumed under the larger conceit of the novel’s period. Grubisic’s assemblage includes some compelling observations of a punk rebellion that was already thoroughly commodified even in small-town record stores, one of which showcases:
Multiples of the woman, with hair dyed in violent pink, orange, and red chunks, glared out from a display column of jackets whose clear plastic sleeves labelled each disk an Import Single, which apparently also meant Really Expensive. Nina Hagen’s raised arm revealed the affront of pit hair in fully grown dirt brown. Her one open eye stared out with unknown but malevolent intentions, moated by thick eyeliner that stretched back as far as her temple, in parallel with paved on rouge.
Other period-specific references crop up in less conventional sections of the novel, such as sketches with band names (Chicken Treblinka, the Consorts) that allude equally to pop metal and crust punk. Drafts of set lists capture the bizarre way the everyday sounds and visual collages of the late 1970s and early 1980s can appear in retrospect to have been spectacular and impossible instances of mainstream tackiness colliding with hipster credibility:
Finalists
Throbbing Gristle (“Hot On The Heels Of Love” – too hard)
Visage (“Frequency 7” instrumental for intro)
★★Moev (“Obituary Column”)
★Siouxsie and the Banshees (“Hong Kong Prawn Garden”)
★★Blondie (“Eat to the Beat”)
B-52’s (“52 Girls”)
Far from merely hearkening back to his own youth or creating a frame with which to explore his academic interests, Grubisic uses the predictably fashionable yet always surprisingly fruitful world of new wave to shed light on the haphazard narratives that result from our urge to dig through crates, boxes, or archives.
Accordingly, the self-reflexive concluding sections are actually the most affecting part of the novel. Here, the narrative jumps into the present day to provide an impossibly brief description of the clichéd pathways out of youth, the routines of adulthood and, ultimately, the arbitrariness of death and the aggregation of its recorded traces into Google-able statistics. This conclusion provides an intense contrast with the endless descriptions and digressions of the novel’s first 325 pages. And the appendices, which include a newspaper clipping about the band’s debut and some transcribed song lyrics, function less as a self-consciously postmodernist gesture and more like especially illuminating bonuses on a DVD—fitting given that the novel’s pop-culture expo animates its author’s academic interests in a way his previous novels haven’t always been able to do. Despite its at times tortuous meandering, From Up River is ultimately an odd and compelling mixture of the intellectual and the emotive.
Now or Never | 347 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN# 9781988098074
‘From Up River and For One Night Only’ by Brett Josef Grubisic
Book Reviews
Brett Josef Grubisic’s From Up River and for One Night Only is, according to the back cover blurb, the story of Dee, Gordyn, Em and Jay, members of “the greatest New Wave band to ever spring from River Bend City.” It takes until page 173, however, for the drummer to switch from “index fingers and a right foot” to “actual wooden sticks and the bass drum pedal,” and beyond page 200 for multiple band members and instruments to appear in the same room; up until this point, the novel details its characters’ quotidian misadventures and their role in a small-town social ecosystem. Grubisic, whose academic work has addressed queer and class identities, genre fiction, sexuality, textuality and postmodernism generally, here uses a local take on 1980s pop music culture to invoke the seemingly endless hours and days that make up adolescence. Composed of the scraps of awkward documentation this phase often leaves behind, the at least somewhat autobiographical novel also addresses several of its author’s areas of scholarly interest.
And the story is indeed local, with River Bend City a thinly veiled Mission, B.C.; neighbouring Abbotsford doesn’t even get a pseudonym. The main characters—two sets of siblings—contribute diary entries, sketches, classroom notes and swaths of more conventional narrative that are arranged into categories such as “Venture” and “Déviation.” The end result documents dull or disastrous “parental units,” fraught paths to sexual experience and exhausting deliberations over the band’s style, sound and projected “meteoric arc” from “a mess of ideas and plans” to “bitter, marriage-crumbling accusations and spiking resentment.” In actuality, the group’s arc concludes with a semi-triumphant Battle-of-the-Bands debut; it also includes lots of the embarrassingly childish or downright boorish language we’d all hate to stumble upon in our old journals. Take, for example, a description of classmate Melanie, “aka Melon-y, aka Cantaloupes,” whose “twin brother Nardo, who was Leonardo to his mother and Lardo behind his back at school, made fun of Greek facial hair (wisps of moustache and sideburns, hers, an open secret) and called his own sister Cans, true if not that witty.”
Poring through this densely packed scrapbook is at first somewhat disorienting; further in, digression becomes the most noticeable characteristic. Obsessively imagined stage shows give way to tales of a succession of stepmothers or ruminations on “bath towels and grandmother-embroidered pillow cases.” What gradually takes shape is a coming-out story as well as a coming-of-age story, with updates that chart the “changing percentages” of sexual orientation—“from 90% into girls to 80%”—alternating with descriptions of one’s first time handling a “lump [that] felt soft and hard, similar to packaged uncooked chicken breast with the bone still in.” Amid this accumulation of documented experience, the story of the band is pushed ever further to the margins.
The period and band narrative are more than an arbitrarily selected backdrop, however. Grubisic’s first novel, The Age of Cities, was presented as a rediscovered manuscript, a move that betrayed its author’s familiarity with textual scholarship; yet even with its sly commentary on the search for fashionably transgressive literary histories, The Age of Cities perhaps felt too of a piece with its author’s academic work. In From Up River, however, this kind of crossover is subsumed under the larger conceit of the novel’s period. Grubisic’s assemblage includes some compelling observations of a punk rebellion that was already thoroughly commodified even in small-town record stores, one of which showcases:
Multiples of the woman, with hair dyed in violent pink, orange, and red chunks, glared out from a display column of jackets whose clear plastic sleeves labelled each disk an Import Single, which apparently also meant Really Expensive. Nina Hagen’s raised arm revealed the affront of pit hair in fully grown dirt brown. Her one open eye stared out with unknown but malevolent intentions, moated by thick eyeliner that stretched back as far as her temple, in parallel with paved on rouge.
Other period-specific references crop up in less conventional sections of the novel, such as sketches with band names (Chicken Treblinka, the Consorts) that allude equally to pop metal and crust punk. Drafts of set lists capture the bizarre way the everyday sounds and visual collages of the late 1970s and early 1980s can appear in retrospect to have been spectacular and impossible instances of mainstream tackiness colliding with hipster credibility:
Finalists
Throbbing Gristle(“Hot On The Heels Of Love” – too hard)Visage (“Frequency 7” instrumental for intro)
★★Moev (“Obituary Column”)
★Siouxsie and the Banshees (“
Hong KongPrawn Garden”)★★Blondie (“Eat to the Beat”)
B-52’s (“52 Girls”)
Far from merely hearkening back to his own youth or creating a frame with which to explore his academic interests, Grubisic uses the predictably fashionable yet always surprisingly fruitful world of new wave to shed light on the haphazard narratives that result from our urge to dig through crates, boxes, or archives.
Accordingly, the self-reflexive concluding sections are actually the most affecting part of the novel. Here, the narrative jumps into the present day to provide an impossibly brief description of the clichéd pathways out of youth, the routines of adulthood and, ultimately, the arbitrariness of death and the aggregation of its recorded traces into Google-able statistics. This conclusion provides an intense contrast with the endless descriptions and digressions of the novel’s first 325 pages. And the appendices, which include a newspaper clipping about the band’s debut and some transcribed song lyrics, function less as a self-consciously postmodernist gesture and more like especially illuminating bonuses on a DVD—fitting given that the novel’s pop-culture expo animates its author’s academic interests in a way his previous novels haven’t always been able to do. Despite its at times tortuous meandering, From Up River is ultimately an odd and compelling mixture of the intellectual and the emotive.
Now or Never | 347 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN# 9781988098074