Interview with See Magazine

by Lee | Filed under News, Reviews

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  by Michael 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 »

Read more | Comments (0) | December 4th, 2008

FFWD: The Man Game

by Lee | Filed under News, Reviews

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  by Bryn 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 »

Read more | Comments (0) | November 7th, 2008

Philip Marchand’s National Post Column on The Man Game

by Lee | Filed under Reviews

Thanks to Philip Marchand for taking the time to look at The Man Game in his new regular column for the National Post.

National Post

Saturday, October 04, 2008

Only the land is real in ‘phantom fiction’

Verbal excess adds life to tale of Vancouver

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 »

Read more | Comments (0) | October 4th, 2008

The Georgia Straight on The Man Game

by Lee | Filed under News, Reviews

Thanks to Kevin Chong for the article in The Georgia Straight.

The Man Game puts past in play for Lee Henderson

By Kevin Chong
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 »

Read more | Comments (0) | September 18th, 2008

Toronto Star Reviews The Man Game

by Lee | Filed under Reviews

Michel Basilières wrote this review in the Toronto Star.

Raw and rough and just right

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 »

Read more | Comments (0) | September 6th, 2008

Winnipeg Free Press Reviews The Man Game

by Lee | Filed under Reviews

Thanks to Debbie Patterson for the review in the Winnipeg Free Press

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.

ImageThe 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read more | Comments (0) | September 6th, 2008

CBC on The Man Game

by Lee | Filed under News, Reviews

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 Luckybuzz for the great comment.

Read more | Comments (0) | September 6th, 2008

Globe & Mail Reviews The Man Game

by Lee | Filed under Reviews

Thanks to Pasha Malla for the amazing book review in the Globe this weekend!

Sprawling, innovative, exhilarating

PASHA MALLA

August 30, 2008

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.