Thanks to Michael Hingston at See Magazine in Edmonton for doing this phone interview with me. He called and woke me up while I was staying drinking at the Banff Centre, so I had to do this interview Lennon-Ono style!
The Writer Gets Captured By The Game
First Novels don’t get more dense, ambitious, or engrossing than Lee Henderson’s The Man Game Published December 4, 2008 byMichael Hingston in Books • Comments (0)
THE MAN GAME
By Lee Henderson. Viking Canada. 518 pp. $32.
*****
Hollywood legend has it that Alien was sold on the strength of a one-line pitch: “Jaws in space.” It’s easy to imagine The Man Game, the huge and wondrous debut novel from Lee Henderson, being sold in similar style: “Deadwood in Vancouver.”
Like the now-cancelled HBO show, Henderson’s book is chock full of wily prostitutes, take-no-shit bartenders, waves of Chinese immigrants sent up from San Francisco, and generally fuzzy notions of law and history. Both are also beautifully written, with unlikely amounts of poetry scattered amidst waves and waves of cursing. Instead of drunk, violent cowboys, however,The Man Game has drunk, violent lumberjacks. Instead of spurs, they wear flannel.
Written over nine years, Henderson’s book recounts the imagined history of the “man game” — a sport that’s part Greco-Roman wrestling, part ballroom dancing, part bar brawl — which takes the young Canadian city by storm in 1886. The cast balloons into the dozens, but at the centre are Molly Erwagen and her paralyzed husband Sammy, who arrive in Vancouver just as a massive forest fire threatens to swallow the city whole.
An ex-vaudeville performer and current housewife, Molly senses a business opportunity in the working-class loggers, who have no entertainment available to them aside from the usual opium, whiskey, and prostitutes. Behind her husband’s back, she recruits and trains two disgraced lumberjacks as the game’s first players, and together they set out to bring some culture to the barbaric west.
SEE recently woke Henderson up while on a retreat as part of the Calgary Writers’ Festival. He spoke to us over the telephone. He didn’t get out of bed.
SEE Magazine: The Man Game is set in late 19th-century Vancouver, amidst anti-Chinese riots and the great fire of 1886, which nearly destroyed the city the same year it was incorporated. How much of this history did you know before starting the book? Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
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.
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 »
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.
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.
Know anyone in Brno? On Canada Day, I’ll be the first Canadian reading at the Month of Authors, an amazing literary festival in Brno, Czech Republic (birthplace of Kundera). This year the theme is Canadian writing. They’ve invited thirty Canadians to read alongside thirty Czech writers.
Also featured: Sheila Heti, Madeleine Thien, Ken Babstock, George Elliot Clarke, Lynn Coady, Eden Robinson, Michael Crummey, Nicole Brossard…I am having a hard time deciding how to pick highlights –all the authors they’ve invited are amazing. I wish I could stay the whole month. What a beautiful opportunity! I’ll read chapter 6 from The Man Game. The festival has translated all our work from Canadian into Czech, and apparently a big screen will be showing a Czech transcription of what I am reading. I am looking forward to how they translated “poltroon” and “bohunk” into Czech.
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.
