The Man Game: Lee Henderson Interview
by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Lee Henderson’s debut novel, The Man Game, is a romp and a face-off in olde Vancouver. There is racism, there is opium, there are pretty entrepreneurs, a paraplegic (train stunt), saloons, brothels, and, yes, lumberjacks. There are fist-fights, bravado and dance routines; there is (discretion is advised here) a great deal of nudity. There is, in short, nothing like The Man Game. Your Fall book season will truly be incomplete without having read it.
Award winning author Lee Henderson and Bookninja’s Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer wrestled into the book and around it in this interview. Please enjoy.
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Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer: I read The Man Game manically, over a few days. And these were my gut responses as I read: What the? Wha-? Is Lee Henderson mad? Where did this all come from?
So, I guess: What the? Wha-? Are you mad? Where did this book come from?
Lee Henderson: The culture of woodsmen, day labourers, stevedores, fisherman, and miners in the 1800s was rough. To write convincingly about that pioneering scene, I wanted to use language that was good for readers today. So I dialed my ear to those voices in contemporary Vancouver — listening to the guys argue and fight on the scaffolding as they reclad the leaky condo I was renting, transcribing bar fights as they escalated, talking with the longshoremen and misfits who aspired to be professional wrestlers, hanging out with anarchist punks and noise musicians…I was listening for the sounds of early Vancouver in today’s city. I discovered it was all around me.
Anger is a part of this book because it is human. Hate is a part of this book, too. These are awfully difficult emotions to write about, but I had to be responsible to the dark history of Vancouver, and so I had to write about anger in detail, anger and hate and fear caused our race riots. Read the rest of this entry »
Thanks to Bryn Evans at FFWD magazine in Calgary for the cool write-up on the book. Linked there, and copy-pasted here for the archives.
Real men wear pink tights and makeup
Henderson tackles the games men played in gritty old-time Vancouver Published October 9, 2008 byBryn Evans in Books • Comments (0)
Lee Henderson’s debut novel, The Man Game, opens in Vancouver in 1886, a dirty, bawdy city full of smoke and filth. Enter Molly Erwagen, a performer who has spent most of her life in the circus, recently transposed from out East with her paralyzed husband Samuel. Having nothing else to do but look after him, she finds her attention drifting to two lumberjacks, Litz and Pisk. They’re immersed in the underground “man game,” a brutal, poetic form of wrestling, where men strip naked and pulverize each other. She finds in them the same sense of desperation she feels and is drawn into their world of performative violence. Read the rest of this entry »
The Globe and Mail posted an audio clip of a reading I did at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. You have to kind of scroll down the Globe’s page of readings to find it, and there’s plenty more amazing authors’ readings to distract a person from the short 7min thing I did. I read on Wednesday, October 29 with the other amazing nominees for the Writers Trust Award.
Thanks to the inimitable Ben “big heart” Hart for the thoughtful piece on the book forTyee. I’ll copy-paste it here, but be sure to check out the Tyee’s site, it’s full of awesome.
November 5, 2008“We were in search of a history we were sure to mistreat. As if a city would ever store its proudest moments in this dipping cellar. As if we could floss a story from all this mealy worthless scrap.” So says Kat, the narrator of Lee Henderson’s first novel The Man Game, as he digs through old newspapers and photographs, testimony from another time.
The Man Game exists in two places at once — past and present-day Vancouver. In the present, Kat and Minna, the woman he desperately loves, follow the hush-hush of rumour to a neighbourhood on the east side of the city, a place utterly foreign to them. “A long-nosed boy sat in a corner of the yard beside a tree,” Kat says, describing the place, “one hand inside a black silk top hat, no pants on. That kind of neighbourhood. Poor magic.” Kat and Minna trail a crowd to the backyard of a sinking house. There, they witness two men engaged in a kind of burlesque — a wrestling match, a man game that marries brutal force and artful choreography. After the game, Kat and Minna befriend the players. They are ushered into the house and then shown to the basement. It is here they discover a story as big and as confounding as the city and all its incarnations. Read the rest of this entry »
This week, Lee Henderson’s first novel, The Man Game, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust fiction prize, and deservedly so. It is a sprawling, brilliant, playful, heartbreaking, and eminently wise book that considers its world with unusual bravery and purpose. It’s easily one of the very best books I’ve read this year. I caught up with Lee Henderson last month, while he was in Toronto for the launch.
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This is your first novel, but unlike many first books it’s not obviously autobiographical. How did your ideas come together?
I think it still is autobiographical, but more symbolic autobiography. I’ve always been doing drawings, and I always thought it was somehow irreverent to draw naked men, and I’d be in writing classes and you’re supposed to write critiques on people’s stories or poems, and I’d just be drawing little naked men for them. It seemed counterintuitive at the time, so I’m always looking for how to draw stories out of very small obsessions like that. I knew that if it was going to take nine years, at least I’d be entertained while I worked on it. And I just tried to take this idea of the man game and basically use it to craft a book that could talk about the historical novel as a genre within literature, as well as something much more contemporary, integrating and absorbing the information and narrative structures of video games, for instance. I was thinking of this idea of combat or competition as a structural cog to keep the book going. And I was also frustrated by some of the CanLit books—the historical novels—which I felt were too committed to a fidelity of the time, trying to match the era word for word. It’s kind of a parlour trick. Not that I don’t love a lot of the straight historical fiction that’s done, but that’s why I wanted to write a historical novel: it’s a Canadian form in a lot of ways.
Philip Marchand, Weekend Post Published: Saturday, October 04, 2008
Great swatches of Canadian literature are occupied by a collective phenomenon I call phantom characters.
These are fictional human beings who don’t really emerge from the narrative, or assume rounded dimensions. They’re like individual blanks accompanied by a set of instructions from the author to the reader, on what to make of them. These semi-human personalities often have a mysteriously soulful presence and display extreme, but somehow poetically appropriate, behaviour.
Jane Urquhart and Michael Ondaatje love this sort of character, and now Vancouverbased author Lee Henderson, in his debut novel, The Man Game (Viking Canada, $32), joins their company. Numberone phantom character in the novel, set mostly in 1886 Vancouver, but intertwined with a narrative of the present-day city, is 17-year-old Molly Erwagen, married to Sammy Erwagen, quadriplegic bookkeeper to a Vancouver sawmill manager. Her green eyes, “flecked by a saffron cascade of fallen flames,” and her “moonlit” beauty have a preternatural effect on men, who view her as a “goddess.” One besotted male claims, “She’s how we know God exists.” Another man, in her presence, feels like “a peer to God.”
Why exactly they feel this way we don’t know. It must have something to do with that saffron cascade. This arbitrariness becomes a problem in the works of Urquhart and Ondaatje because sooner or later their phantom characters find themselves in a conventional narrative, but at least The Man Game, from start to finish, is an assay into the “unknown weird,” as one character puts it. Anything goes. Case in point is the “man game” of the novel’s title, an invention of Molly’s. The game is a rarefied form of pro-wrestling between two naked men — the nudity keeps the game “honest” — a combination of martial arts, dancing and acrobatics. Read the rest of this entry »
At Stanley Park, the Hollow Tree is braced by two beams and could be mistaken for a giant, primordial tripod. In Lee Henderson’s mind, the long-standing but ailing park attraction appears too small.
Henderson, whose first novel, The Man Game (Penguin, $32), is set in an earlier period of Vancouver’s history, when the park was occupied by squatters, a Native settlement, and a herd of free-range cattle, describes archival photos he’s seen in which people pose with cars and elephants inside the tree. In his novel, he’s set a pivotal scene, in which one character spurns another’s advances, at the local landmark.
“It must have been pretty huge at one time,” says Henderson about the tree, which, he tells me, has shrunken as it’s dried out over the decades. “It’s still pretty towering.”
The Man Game isn’t your typical historical novel, one that tries to conjure a place in the past as accurately and believably as possible. Although thoroughly researched, the book is full of deliberate anachronisms, including its eponymous conceit: a Greco-Roman–style wrestling competition between naked lumberjacks that transfixes the city in its early days. Read the rest of this entry »
Lee Henderson’s debut novel grips our roots - a setting of mud, racism and opium - as if history really matters
TIMOTHY TAYLOR
September 15, 2008
Lee Henderson’s first novel, The Man Game, has been released to great reviews. (Full disclosure: I blurbed the book. So I clearly admire it.) Concerning itself with a fictitious type of naked wrestling between loggers, the book may seem at first pass utterly fanciful.
But one of the things that may intrigue Vancouver readers about the book is its enthusiastically gritty engagement with this city’s early history. The fictitious sport is our sport. And it plays out in a carefully detailed historical setting, one of mud, racism, opium and the rampant cutting of first growth.
Last week, I asked Mr. Henderson to walk me through the streets where the novel is set, and we talked about that history and our remaining connection to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Lee Henderson’s inspired imagining of frontier Vancouver is a loose, baggy monster of a novel that already has him in the running for the big book prizes
Aug 31, 2008 04:30 AM
Michel Basilières
The Man Gameby Lee Henderson
Penguin Canada,
513 pages, $32
Hooray for The Man Game, and hooray for Lee Henderson.
Henderson is the author of one previous book, The Broken Record Technique, a fine collection of short stories that won the Danuta Gleed literary award in 2003. He’s also got a great-looking website. The Man Game is his first novel, and it’s a terrific debut. Read the rest of this entry »
Remarkable first novel full of compelling surprises It’s surprising that a book called The Man Game should have a woman as the central character, bit it’s only the first of many compelling surprises in Vancouver writer Lee Henderson’s remarkable first novel.
The Man Game itself turns out to be an imaginary activity in present-day Vancouver that seems to owe something to Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.
It’s an extreme sport that combines brutal violence and slapstick comedy with elements of ballroom dancing and vaudeville.
Competitors are awarded points for successfully executing moves with names like the “Medical Breakthrough,” “Flipping the Bird” and “The Boxing Chinee.” Spectators crowded into the squalid backyard drink beer, cheer and boo, and bet heavily on the outcome.
Thanks to Greg Buium for an in-depth write-up on The Man Game for the CBC, that includes mention of Superconductor, George Bowering, and Father Zosima Presents…as well as asking me to include 10.5 interesting things I learned while researching the book. And to Luckybuzzfor the great comment.
THE MAN GAME By Lee Henderson Viking Canada, 513 pages, $32 It begins with a handshake, a moment of solemnity and ritual before all hell breaks loose: A bizarre, cartoonish competition that combines ballroom dancing, ultimate fighting, wire-work kung fu and bare-knuckle boxing in a gracefully brutal show of, essentially, two men beating the hell out of each other.
Dan Rowe reviews the book for the Vancouver Sun… I cut out the last part where he disses me because the rest of the review makes some decent observations worth archiving here…
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Reimagining the past Lee Henderson conjures up Vancouver in the 1880s Dan Rowe Special to the Sun Saturday, August 30, 2008 THE MAN GAME BY LEE HENDERSON Viking Canada, 513 pages ($32) - -
Lee Henderson’s first novel, set in Vancouver, features frequent drug use, a thriving sex trade, violent rivalry between groups battling for territory and business, an uneasy relationship between ethnic groups, a tragic wheelchair-bound figure named Sammy and even a disembodied foot that turns up on the shore. However, The Man Game, which also features the daughter of two vaudevillians as a main character, a cameo by the Knights of Labour and the construction of the CPR station on False Creek, is primarily set in 1886 and 1887. But this is not your mom’s historical novel. Henderson has set his story in the past but doesn’t rely on research or notable historical events to guide the narrative. In fact, the recent novel The Man Game most reminds me of is Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown, which reimagined the well-known story of the settlement of the Virginia town (with John Smith, Pocahontas and friends) but set it in a post-apocalyptic future. Read the rest of this entry »
Thanks to Caroline Skelton at the North Shore News for the nice profile piece! It runs under the slow-news-day headline: Rules of The Man Game hard to pin down. I’ll copy-paste the piece and put it under the perforated fold line because I have no idea how long things stay on the weird canada.com website system… Read the rest of this entry »
After a gruelling week working on the docks, the longshoremen would gather to fight. Convening in a ring in the middle of a rented legion hall in New Westminster, just outside Vancouver, they’d engage in a pastime some may think of as deranged but one they found cathartic: hardcore wrestling. Read the rest of this entry »
On a recent Vancouver Sunday afternoon, a young man stumbles upon a secret sport invented more than a century before, at the birth of his city. Thus begins The Man Game, an epic tale of loved requited and not, that crosses the contemporary and historical in an extravagant, anarchistic retelling of the early days of a pioneer town on the edge of the known world.
In 1886, out of the smouldering ashes of the great fire that destroyed much of the city,Molly Erwagen—former vaudeville performer—arrives from Toronto with her beloved husband, Samuel, to start a new life. Meanwhile, Litz and Pisk, two lumberjacks exiled after the fire, and blamed for having started it, are trying to clear their names. Before long, they’ve teamed up with Molly to invent a new sport that will change the course of that fledgling city’s history.
e that was good for readers today. So I dialed my ear to those voices in contemporary Vancouver — listening to the guys argue and fight on the scaffolding as they reclad the leaky condo I was renting, transcribing bar fights as they escalated, talking with the longshoremen and misfits who aspired to be professional wrestlers, hanging out with anarchist punks and noise musicians…I was listening for the sounds of early Vancouver in today’s city. I discovered it was all around me.
The 
The Man Game itself turns out to be an imaginary activity in present-day Vancouver that seems to owe something to Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.
