‘Niagara Motel’ by Ashley Little

Reviewed by Andrew Woodrow-Butcher

Rollicking and absurd, this latest novel from Kelowna, BC writer Ashley Little offers some great characters and a bizarre tour of 1990s criminal celebrity.

Niagara Motel’s eleven-year-old Tucker Malone provides the book with much of its charm. Tucker is neither particularly streetwise nor especially naïve – Little has managed to create a pragmatic, introspective and curious protagonist who is a believable child character not in spite of but because of how much adults will relate to him. When his mom, itinerant stripper and severe narcoleptic Gina Malone, reads him his horoscope the day they move to Niagara Falls, Little takes the opportunity to set out how tenuous the distinction is between grown-ups and kids: “Even if you don’t have the faintest idea what is going on around you at the moment, act as if you have seen it all before… It’s remarkable how easily most people are fooled.” Niagara Motel is not a coming-of-age story; rather it is a story that, through Tucker, shows us the extent to which we have been faking our way through adulthood all along.

Precisely because Tucker is so competent and grounded, his willful delusions about the identity of the father he never knew resonate broadly. Tucker believes – knows, even – that his father is Sam Malone of the TV sitcom Cheers. And we see in Tucker’s complicated rationale for this belief a mirror of the types of stories we all use to protect ourselves from hurt. When Gina is laid up in the hospital for several weeks, landing Tucker in a group home for much older teens, his desperation exceeds the comforts of this paternal fiction, and he recruits 16-year-old Meredith, herself pregnant and at loose ends, for a father-finding road trip across America.

Tucker’s futile quest to find his dad is a rich and fascinating point of departure, and Little handles his gradual abandonment of his delusions deftly. She also takes the opportunity to delight us with colorful characters: an Elvis impersonator, a flamboyant drag queen. But overall this road trip, which forms the core of Niagara Motel, is bizarre in a way that is difficult to parse. As Meredith and Tucker hitchhike across America, they accept rides with a cast of characters that includes some of the greatest monsters of the 1990s, including Timothy McVeigh, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka and the Columbine shooters. With some occasional musings about how good or bad a judge of character Tucker is, the pair emerge from these encounters generally unscathed, if not a little creeped out. It is not until their last ride delivers them to LA during the Rodney King riots that they ever seem to be in any immediate danger.

And until the scene of the riots, Little is quite playful with her depictions of these figures, whom she lets the reader identify based on widely known details. There is almost the sense that she is winking at us for catching that the two maladjusted Colorado children playing Gameboys who are named Eric and Dylan will go on to kill more than a dozen people. Or that, in a blast set by this damaged ex-military fellow in Oklahoma, 168 people will die – but not our protagonists! The fact that Tucker and Meredith are unaware of the danger they are in does interact with their own relationships to truth and knowledge, just as the horoscope presaged. But the recurrence of these encounters pushes what might have been an evocative trope towards shtick.

Even if the road-trip encounters with celebrity criminals offer a clever bit of black humour, what exactly this book has to say about these figures remains unclear. And any gesture toward humour is ruptured by the first-person scenes of sheer violent horror in the LA riots, followed by intense revelations of sexual assault when Tucker finally makes it back to Niagara. For a book that concludes by earnestly invoking contexts of sexual and racial violence, Niagara Motel’s blasé depictions of these other brushes with danger are not so much cheeky as puzzlingly incongruous.

Niagara Motel is a strange, absorbing tale and – despite its flaws – an enjoyable read. While some of Little’s choices muddle the overall impact of the work, her pacing and fluent voice, affable characters and the questions she poses about the relative values of knowledge and ignorance in our lives should not be overlooked.

Arsenal Pulp | 258 pages | $17.95 | paper | ISBN 978-1551526607