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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?

Lee Henderson: To be quite honest, I knew very little. It was a matter of taking the small bit I did know and just running with it. I knew about the fire, and I knew the city was fairly young. I knew that it had a worthy history, because I’d read the literature that’s come out of it — books like [Sky Lee’s] Disappearing Moon Café and [Wayson Choy’s] Jade Peony. But I didn’t know the real details all that well, and I didn’t quite understand what led to the riots.

SEE: The copyright page acknowledges J.S. Matthews, the city’s first archivist, but you’re subverting history as much as retelling it. How faithful have you been to the real facts?

LH: The character John Clough — the one-armed drunk, poundkeeper, lamplighter, and prison warden — is a true figure from history. And R.H. Alexander is a real character, owner and manager of the Hastings Mill. Obviously I took great liberties at the same time. I have a hard time trying to describe when I started to subvert it and when it’s part of real history. To me, the city was the backdrop on a set of a play. It has to be real enough to convince you to watch the play, but no more than that. The purpose of this book wasn’t historical accuracy — it wasn’t to create a document that kept history under a bell jar. It was far more important for me to be interrogating history, questioning it and questioning the role of the fiction writer in history.

SEE: That reminds me of the Wikipedia quote that opens one of the chapters — from an entry on Chinook jargon, which is used throughout the book. There’s a typo in the entry, and that seems somehow emblematic of your story: it’s not note-perfect, but there’s something larger being conveyed.

LH: Exactly. I like putting a Wikipedia entry in there. I liked that it was misspelled, too. We all know how Wikipedia is created. For all you know, I wrote that entry.

SEE: I should confess that after reading that quote in the book, I went on Wikipedia to see if the typo was actually there. It was, and then I fixed it. Should I have not done that?

LH: [Laughs.] That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. Now the next interviewer is going to be like, “Why did you put that spelling mistake in there?” and I’ll have to explain myself.

SEE: The man game itself is a mix of a bunch of different things, including boxing, wrestling, dancing, as well as some moves that are physically impossible. How do you define it?

LH: Usually I describe it the way you just said, but on another level I thought of it as — and I’m a bit hesitant to say this, because it sounds kind of goofy — a graffiti over history. It’s like when you go down to Gastown in Vancouver. You see these walls that are 110 years old, the oldest walls in the city, and they’re covered in graffiti. You have this sense of a language that’s been put through acrobatics — most people who look at really accomplished graffiti can’t make heads or tails of what letters are there. It’s like a hidden cipher. I don’t want to draw too much of a parallel, but I saw each move of the game as being a letter in a piece of graffiti. Most people would be like, “That’s impossible that’s a letter. I don’t see it at all.” They don’t see the code, the conversation behind it. The language of the game had to be as dazzling, even if it didn’t make any sense.

SEE: You started working on the book in 1999, and only finished in January of this year. Can you tell me about the writing process?

LH: I knew I wanted to do the drawings [that accompany descriptions of each new move], so it started with that. I kind of knew what the story was going to be, but I’m not the kind of writer who puts too much planning ahead of the writing itself. The challenge with a historical novel is, first, how much historical stuff did I need? I didn’t know. It was trial and error. Scene to scene, I didn’t really know what was going to happen. I wrote this whole 75-page prologue about Toronto, Sammy and Molly’s First Nations live-in helper. Even when I was writing it, I knew it wouldn’t go in the book. So by the time 2003 rolled around, I had written — not including this prologue — 250 pages. The first man game had just happened, 250 pages in. I looked at it, and thought, “That’s the end of Act I. This book is huge! Drastically huge! No one’s going to want to read this.” I had a night lying in bed, just thinking I was sinking into some kind of abyss of foolishness. So I chucked it — I woke up the next day and started again.

SEE: It’s a long, dense, ambitious, historical novel — not something you expect from a first-time novelist. Were there moments where you felt you’d flown too close to the sun?

LH: Yeah, definitely. It’s personal ambition. I wouldn’t say it’s anything other than that. You could take the easy road with a debut, and draw from your own domestic life, growing up and all that — and there are lots of great first novels about that. But that’s never going to be my interest. I felt a certain responsibility to take the novel as an opportunity to discuss the world that I saw around me, and through my own attitudes, with humour thrown into it. The problem with writing is that one minute your little wax wings are melting off, and the next you’re pumping your fists in the air, thinking you’ve won the Stanley Cup. It’s almost minute to minute — grave insecurity, and then ridiculous egomania, one after the other.

 

~

MICHAEL HINGSTON IN THIS ISSUE

The François Revolution
Watch The 400 Blows & Jules and Jim, and you’ll see Truffaut revolutionize 60’s cinema
in Screen Review
More by Michael Hingston…

 

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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.

Henderson describes “the man game” as a mix of “ballroom dancing, karate, breakdancing and pro wrestling.” The novel is accompanied by a series of comedic illustrations describing the moves the fighters use (i.e., the Banger — “A cocksure move on the part a both players, who unwisely confuse the hardness a the brainpan with the durability a the flesh”). It’s a strange hook to build a novel on — operatic, homoerotic wrestling — and it all began with these little cartoons Henderson drew for fellow students while in university. “They were funny and irreverent, cartoonish, naked men,” he says. “When I was in school, all of these ideas about gender were up for grabs — how gender was created, and how identity has become so fractured. When writing The Man Game, I had this feeling that in each gender there is this negative core. In men, this tendency towards animalistic violence and a fear of the other. I wanted to strip men down to that and study it.

“It is inevitable to say it, but there is an eroticization of sportsmanship,” he adds. “In a metaphorical way, it’s replacing a certain sexual impulse with a competitive one — the desire to be on top.” In order to better capture the mechanics of wrestling, Henderson immersed himself in the world of amateur wrestling. “There are these longshoremen, dock workers, who come out at night wearing pink tights and makeup and just beat the shit out of each other in some small Legion in New Westminster.”

The Man Game is a historical novel like no other — a curious, challenging blend of tongue-twisting Pynchon and warped Canadian pastoralia. The language is a rowdy mix of anachronistic English and rap lyrics (“these folks didn’t have soaped clean mouths,” says Henderson). Its skewering of historical fiction, particularly of the usual staid Canadian kind, is so bizarre, hilarious and satirical, it reads like an assassination. “I wouldn’t say ‘assassination,’ but I appreciate that,” says Henderson. “I wanted to question the purpose of the historical novel. I really felt that there was something missing from those books. They assume history is fact, when it’s really a set of revised opinions of the archived record. The politics of arts and culture — these things warp history.”

Vancouver is central to the novel, a character of brooding, wheezing intensity. However, when Henderson first began writing, it wasn’t going to be that way. “I was going to set it in old New York,” he says. “But I realized, ‘Why am I in a Vancouver library learning about this?’ I thought I would be much better off creatively to turn my head to my own city. There are so many interesting elements there — the great fire of 1886 and issues around labour and industry. Vancouver has this anarchistic edge, it provides great freedom for artists and others. Back then, it was more pronounced. I saw a history parallel to today — the struggles with drug addiction and immigration.”

The grand, kaleidoscopic scope of the book took Henderson nearly 10 years to write. “I’ve spent the last few years paring it down, compacting the manuscript. I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t slow and sludgy; I wanted to make it feel like you were racing through it. There were times when my nerves got the best of me, but I never got bored.

“When I finished, it was like a 10-ton weight came off of me,” he adds. “It’s gratifying to talk to people about the book. For so many years it felt like an isolated, private project. Now, let it be out in the world to find friends and make enemies.”

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INTERVIEW

Lee Henderson’s Beloved, Nasty Old Vancouver

By Ben Hart

 

TheTyee.ca

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.

Vancouver is burning when Molly Erwagen and her paralyzed husband, Sammy, arrive from Toronto in 1886. The place is wild. Streams run heavy with blood. Trees are lit matches. The men are ruffians and drunks, addicts and gamblers and cheats. The women are hard, sharp and capable as a crosscut saw. This is Vancouver in its terrible infancy. There’s rabble: a labour movement gaining momentum, a race riot brewing. Snakeheads stalk the streets. The city’s elder statesmen tunnel like rats to opium dens and gambling parlours and brothels. “The city was already humming a different tune,” Henderson writes. “Behind the cedars, firs, anomalous arbutuses, away from the prying eyes of eastern civilization, Vancouver men were safe to grow their hair out, to live and die on instinct alone.”

Enter Molly: an industrious and beautiful young woman with a fine ear and a good eye for saleable entertainment. Molly grew up in Europe. Her parents were performers. She spent her youth immersed in vaudevillian spectacle. She is taken by the virility of the city, by its potential. “The men in Vancouver come to participate,” she says, “not to watch from the bleachers. The pews are empty. The pulpit is in the street.”

Molly enlists two exiled lumberjacks, Litz and Pisk, and invents the man game — a naked wrestling that calls upon participants to seduce their opponents with dance, to invoke magic, to float and punch and kick and flip. Vancouverites are engrossed by the game. They pour their energy, their faith, their meager fortunes into it. The man game becomes the core of the place, the very heart of it.

Henderson not only creates an expansive story for Vancouver, he gives it a brilliant tongue. He blends frontier Canadian and Chinook to create a dialect that belongs to this place alone. You get a sense, reading the novel, that this dialect is the only one capable of properly telling the story.

The Man Game is a declaration, not of historical fact but of the truth of a place, of its magic and its people. The novel is part love letter. Henderson writes, “The spirit of Vancouver is goddamn invincible…. Vancouver’s men were boisterous and thick-skinned. They cursed each other out of respect. Vancouver wasn’t just a city; it was a kind of fate, a destiny rock for dreams that needed ledges.” The novel is also an indictment of a place that insists upon forgetting its past, insists upon snuffing out its identity. “I wanted a set of principles like the stars that I could look up to and see, fear and interpret,” Kat says near the end of the book. “Stars were scarce in my world. I lived in a city surrounded by purple clouds.”

I meet Lee Henderson in a bar with no windows. There are a few other patrons — all of them men. There’s a record on the player. Discordant squeals interrupt a steady drum beat.

There’s something familiar about this place, about these quiet men. You can feel it — the kind of potential that Molly Erwagen recognizes and exploits in The Man Game. It’s only a matter of time. One of these guys — some bohunk, a total poltroon — will break his silence and then we’ll all be outside, our clothes in a pile at the door, our hands artfully ringing necks.

I look to Lee. He seems perfectly calm, unaffected by the impending ruckus.

So I take another glance around the room. There are only men sitting at the bar. And, yes, the place is full of gut sounds, car crash noise. But these guys aren’t out for blood. They are skinny, these men. They have beards that make them look even skinnier. They’re no lumberjacks, no man gamers. Not these guys. They’re web designers and video artists. They’re dobro players. This is Main Street, Vancouver, 2008. This is where I talk to Lee Henderson. Here’s what he has to say…

On the same old, different story

“Part of the book is acknowledging the subjectivity of history, the prejudices of history. Our assumption that it is a lesser example of who we are, that civilization has somehow not only changed but improved. It hasn’t improved. It’s just slightly different. We’re still the same beings. We still have the same brains. Nothing’s changed in the last hundred years. We’re physically the same creatures we’ve been since the beginning of recorded time. I wanted to question history. What I wanted was to be monogamous and truthful to the idea of fiction and set that in opposition to history.”

On historical fiction vs. fictional history

“Why do you want to go back to this particular time? What does it speak about now? You need to make that explicit or the story risks becoming a parlour game. My question with this book wasn’t so much: am I writing a historical novel, as am I interrogating the historical novel. It’s risky to teach people that history in something scientific and provable when it’s so often revised. I like the novelistic approach to history.”

On Terminal City

“We’re a modern city. We’ve never been able to create an area to maintain our identity. This city’s never stopped changing its entire life. It looks nothing like the place I came to in 1994. It keeps people feeling very happily rootless here. The city has never really considered itself anything other than a port. It’s beginning to, though.”

On Van Art (or: How to create civic identity)

“I like what Coupland is doing for the city. I like what Michael Turner is doing. There are certain artists and musicians that I identify the city through much better than through our governing body. It’s what I admire so much about this city: the kind of artists that are here. [In Vancouver] your only real option if you want to survive is to find ways to live here and have all your professional shit elsewhere. It requires you to have some sense of what’s happening elsewhere.”

On the ‘Cascadia mentality’

“Along this coast, there’s still this lingering sense of autonomy from our respective countries. All the way from upper B.C. to northern California. We’re really our own entity. The Cascadian mentality—I was really inspired by it. That’s why I came here, the difference there is here. Every little spot between Portland and Seattle and here is strange. Strange folks living in the woods.”

On the nature of monkey man

“I have a feeling there’s an extremely violent core to men, that there’s something chimpanzee in us. We need to express ourselves through action. Civilization keeps that in check. But, sometimes, we don’t want to be that civilized.”

On Macho Man Randy Savage vs. Hulk Hogan; George “The Animal” Steele vs. Jake the Snake (or: How professional wrestling soothes our violent impulses)

“It’s theatre playing to the lowest common denominator, to the very base interest which is blood and feuding. It’s fantastic, athletic theatre. It’s like the world needs allegory, living metaphor for war and conflict. At some point, we’re all that character in the wrestling ring and we need that theatre to help us overcome some of our prejudices.”

On musical fiction

“I listen to a lot of music when I write. When I think of how to explain what it was I was trying to achieve it was a lot of listening to it, reading it back and listening. In the last couple of months of editing I was able to listen to [the novel] like a piece of music.”

On ‘The Man Game’ (or: Writing a novel is fun)

“You don’t know how else to express these thoughts. You try to say them out loud in conversation and you feel like you don’t say them right. If only you could spend nine years trying to say them in some other weird way.”

Ben Hart is a Vancouver writer. 

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Saturday, October 4, 2008

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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.

* * * * *

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.

It’s the Canadian form. What Canadian books were important to you in this? I kept thinking of Tay John.

I was thinking of books like that for sure. They weren’t really influences, or anti-influences. But they were part of my thinking. That’s my own self-consciousness, thinking about a novel in terms not just of story but its context within literary history. And frustrated by some of the legholds that you get into, the expectations, I still really wanted to embrace that. The best books I looked at were George Bowering’s. Bowering’s Shoot! I had the idea, and then I began to look at some of that work more closely. I really loved Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man.

How did your idea of Vancouver in the book—part historical, part imaginative—come about?

It’s entirely related to the people I spend my time with in Vancouver, and the version of Vancouver that I know, the identity of the city I know. And that drew me to that city—it was always a place for people who weren’t looking to have a career, but be creative. To do things that hadn’t been done yet.

You’ve said that the novel doesn’t build to a huge moment. What surprised me was that it opened with its big moment—the great fire of Vancouver. How did that structure work for you?

I couldn’t get over this image: What if a young couple was coming to town that day, the day it burned to the ground in 1886. And what would it have been like to see the city incinerated in twenty minutes? It was so hot—people were running down the street on fire. I wanted the book to be elemental—fire, water—this raw, naked world, because it’s that elemental thing: once that’s established, the idea of guys stripping down to nothing makes more sense.

It seems plausible…

Plausible, yeah. It’s a hard thing to make plausible. When I started researching this city, it didn’t come as much of a surprise, but it was interesting to note that almost all of the problems the city has now, in terms of development, racial tension, drugs, a red-light zone—all these questions that the city is still posing to itself—how are we going to deal with immigration, labour issues—were all there at the very beginning. To me, this is the story of Vancouver, to just completely obliterate its past every so often. And the Great Fire was the first time it happened. We’ve essentially been repeating that. We incinerate our past in Vancouver all the time.

Violence is obviously a major preoccupation of the book, but it’s always tempered with beauty—the game itself being martial arts tempered with dance. There are these guys who you expect to lodge pickaxes in each other’s heads, and walking among them is Molly Erwagen. This twinning of violence and beauty—what’s their relationship in the book?

There definitely is a relationship. Radically simplified, I feel like there’s love on one side, war on another side, and in between we have these variations on sport and dance that act to distill our impulses toward those two poles, and also to represent them in a situation that’s much safer for the public. It’s so much more satisfying and safer and it releases some of that fear of the other we have when we watch the Olympics in Beijing. I was really interested in the leadup to the Olympics. “It’s going to be the biggest Olympics ever, but…what about their humanitarian record?” There was this incredible fear of Asia coming out through the media, and then the Olympics happen, we see ourselves win a medal, we see them win a medal, and all of this is released. The games become a way for us to buffer ourselves from this bad impulse toward violence. It’s not like the one excludes the other—it’s not like sports could entirely replace war—but just that we really need it. In the same way that Flamenco or Capoeira has a really sexual side to it, to do with love. Right after I came up with the idea for the man game I saw Capoeira for the first time, and then I saw professional wrestling at a local level in Vancouver and interviewed those guys and talked to them. Capoeira people aren’t really my type of people, but the pro wrestlers were really interesting. Really good guys. Imagine, this is like a longshoreman who’s working all day, slugging around weights, whatever, and these guys were getting into barroom brawls, and they realized that they could go to jail or get in the ring. And sure enough, outside the ring they’re not the gentlest, most at ease men. You’re never going to see one of them in a fight, since they get it all out in the ring.

In his review of the book in the Globe, Pasha Malla noted that violence in the book becomes an avenue of release for unrequited love. Which is a point I like, but it overlooks the fact that violence preexisted Molly’s arrival. Is it something baser, then, that’s primal, and can be sublimated, but sometimes isn’t?

Yeah, without Molly around it can’t be sublimated, turned into something more productive. They need that Other to inspire and frighten them. And I think Molly’s main inspiration comes when she sees these lumberjacks need something do to. They go to bars, they fight, and they occasionally kill each other. They need something more than a music hall, a brothel. They need something to love, something to hope for.

So there can be violence with or without love, but it’s best off…

I think that without Molly there, they don’t understand why they’re fighting each other. As soon as they’re able to understand and become conscious of what’s causing them to be so frustrated with each other, so angry with each other. As soon as they become conscious of that through her, they’re able to control it, master it, turn it into something more artful. Whereas before it was misdirected anger.

I think it was a really hard life back then. Guys really did sleep six to a bed. They’d go out to the camp, sleep six to a bed, get up in the morning, work your ass off. You know, it wasn’t an easy life. And they needed something to hope for. The promise was always, when we get this place settled, we can bring our wives in, and turn this into a civilized place.

The idea of gender as something that was so strict and divided was really in question when I was going through school and when I was growing up. This idea of gender was really up for grabs. And I think that part of the male identity got mismanaged during that time, and we got disconnected from the violent core of the male psyche.

One of my favourite parts of the book—what I took to be its core—is the Molly/Sammy relationship. She’s so mobile, always running here or there, and him—I was really drawn to his character as this kind of quiet, kind, still centre of the book. The novel’s about a time of progression, and about the ways men move and women move among them. To have this character who’s so still [Sammy’s a paraplegic], what does that do for you as a writer?

Sammy? Sammy is my soul in the book. He’s the guy. There’s a wormhole between me, Kat, and Sammy. I’m not a physical guy. I’m a brain sitting there. I kept saying to my friends who were out in the park, playing soccer: I feel like the kid practicing violin while everyone’s out having fun. The writer doomed to sit and be trapped in the chair.

Well, then, what’s the difference between writing a novel and bookkeeping [Sammy’s occupation]?

Well that’s the joke, I guess, the bookkeeping. There was a whole other element to Sammy’s character—I think it’s alluded to in the book—he was coming up with an entirely new form of accounting, and I went into a lot more detail in an earlier draft about this bridesmaid system in accounting, where you don’t have any month end, you don’t have a final tally, so you’re always cycling through, in movement. So he was working on an accounting scheme that was in constant flux, but he was totally still. He’s the guy who needs to know the most in the whole world. Furry and Daggett, they need to be less violent. Litz and Pisk need their autonomy back. Sammy needs to grow a whole lot by the end of the book, come to terms with his flaws and his lack, that he doesn’t have to worry about Molly leaving him for whatever reason.

What’s next for you? Are you writing another novel?

I’m just writing short stories right now. I’m writing a couple of stories more like… I’m back to contemporary Vancouver. I guess I’m always interested in this sort of speculative fiction thing. The world, but it’s not the world. I like realism too, but I think that boundary between what’s speculative and realism in literary fiction is totally arbitrary and unreal and everybody should just be willing to take the world as they see it. A writer’s job, it seems to me, is one consciousness talking to another consciousness, one on one essentially. You read the book by yourself, with me there. And why not give all of your consciousness to that—all the possibilities. That’s what I was looking for with this book. Something that was me. And if people like it, that’s cool.

We talked about Canadian fiction, but who are your non-Canadian favourites at the moment?

I’ve been reading Roberto Bolano. Amulet and Distant Star are really, really good. And By Night in Chile, everyone says that’s their favourite, I liked Amulet best. Savage Detectives didn’t grip me. But I felt those three skinny books were amazing. He’s doing something really good in those books, mixing the political history of the time with the literary history he was a part of and creating a really unique version of a Graham Greene spy story. Really interesting. I’ve been reading Joseph Roth this summer, The Tale of the 1002nd Night and Rebellion. In general, when I’m struggling I look to Beckett, or Thomas Bernhard, Lydia Davis, David Foster Wallace—a really good early influence for me. When I read the story “Girl with Curious Hair” when I was nineteen or twenty, I thought, “Okay, you can write this way.” He opened a door for me. His stories are so good, overwhelmingly good. I’m always interested to see what he’s doing. [This conversation occurred a few weeks before the tragic news that David Foster Wallace had hanged himself at the age of 46.]

You mentioned a bit ago the idea for The Man Game. Did this one come to you pretty fully formed?

It kind of did, but it’s sort of weird because I had to throw away 250 pages of the book. That’s the problem with not creating a road map in advance. I didn’t know scene to scene what was going to happen, but I knew in 2003 when I threw away most of the book that I’d written that I hadn’t somehow caught the novel I meant to be writing. So when I started again, it was easier, and I wrote seventy five percent of it in two years, after struggling for the previous three years, and then rewriting it for two and half years. I finished the last draft in January.

But the original idea was clear? ‘I’ll write a book about this game?’

Yeah. Game, young woman—it had to be a young woman who invented the game—I knew she was probably Jewish but keeping it to herself, and her husband would be a counterpoint to it, all brain, all intellect. I knew that RH Alexander was going to be who he is. I just didn’t really know scene-to-scene.

When you throw it away, did you map it out for your second try?

Nope. I just tried again.

You’re lucky.

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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.

Like everything else in the narrative, this man game, a literary conceit, asks not to be taken too seriously. Interspersed in the pages of the novel are doodle-like sketches of combatants engaged in man-game manoeuvres with such fanciful titles as “The Totoosh Twister.” Henderson describes one move as involving “a lunging vaudeville stomp alternating with an operatic scissorstep, boldly slashing the crapulent leg off a genteel tiptoeing, building up speed with this half-drunken, half-musical stagger for the inevitable banana flip.”

In Canadian novels with phantom characters and phantom activities, one thing stands out as real. That is the landscape, particularly landscape in its most bloody-minded aspect. In British Columbia this means forest fires. Henderson’s description of such a conflagration at the beginning of his novel is even more vivid and grotesque than the epic forest fires in Jack Hodgins’s Broken Ground and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road.

In between fires, the landscape in the novel broods like a “jungle.” The city of Vancouver itself is slimy and rotten, its muddy streets full of decayed logs, its open spaces overgrown with moss and fungus, its air tainted with the stench of dead fish. “There was no other place like Vancouver anywhere in the world,” Henderson writes. “It was slop and here a man was swine.” Life is made bearable for Vancouverites only by liberal amounts of tobacco, hashish, opium and moonshine. Civic manifestation of the “unknown weird” takes the form of a series of underground tunnels linking key points in the city, notably the local whorehouse.

With the parallel narratives of 1886 and present-day Vancouver there is no end of complexities in the novel’s structure. I haven’t even mentioned, in the 1886 narrative alone, such important features as a talismanic, life-giving form of pastry, an enigmatic character known as The Whore Without a Face and a recurrent theme of tensions between whites and Chinese. What it all adds up to is hard to say. A key symbolic character is Sammy Erwagen, whose quadriplegia echoes the Western divorce of the body from the head. His miraculous recovery of both mobility and sensuality is a kind of riposte to the Ladies Temperance League, whose members want to “beautify Vancouver’s streets” and “encourage sobriety, diplomacy, virginity until marriage and prayer.” Their activities go against the grain of the “unknown weird,” a plentiful commodity on the West Coast, where, according to one character in the novel, there are “no boundaries between natural and supernatural.”

At times the reader feels as if these narrative themes, and the author’s inventiveness, is mostly an excuse to display verbal exuberance, including the use of such phrases as “cromagnonically hairy” to describe a naked man. I myself like verbal excess, and there are certainly times when Henderson’s prose has a propulsive rhythm as well as a rococo vocabulary. Describing the forest fire, for example, he writes, “A swatch of mossy earth collapsed into a burnt-out hollow in the ground and all that fresh oxygen ignited, shooting antheridia into the sky as an array of squirming sparks.”

Bravo. But reader, be warned: There are 513 pages of this.

philip.marchand@utoronto.ca

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

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The Man Game puts past in play for Lee Henderson

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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.

In some senses, the connection seems thin. We wear our history lightly in this town, often averting our eyes in embarrassment, or even shame. The harvester ethic doesn’t fit well with environmental sensibilities and the race relations were not what we would like to be known for now (two anti-Chinese race riots in Vancouver in 1887 and 1907, for example).

But Mr. Henderson’s novel does not avert its eyes. In fact, the book grips our roots as if history really matters. As Mr. Henderson himself says, as we’re walking through Chinatown, “I’ve often wondered if cities aren’t like people in that those first five years are critical to personality.”

I tend to agree in the sense that geography, immigration and indigenous populations forge, at their point of intersection, the rough, original shape of a place. In Mr. Henderson’s rendering of early Vancouver, that original shape is rough-hewn, ad hoc and charged with the tensions of the frontier: economic, sexual, racial.

As we walk down Pender Street just west of Main, Mr. Henderson describes what that block would have looked like in the day. Brothels on one side of the road. A vibrant opium industry. A Chinatown built on stilts to hold it above the mud of the False Creek tidal flats. And, of course, streets teeming with people bent on making a fortune.

“They thought they’d barely scratch the resource supply in their lifetimes,” he says, as we turn into Main and head toward Crab Park. “They thought they’d all be millionaires.”

That attitude was connected to a popular view of nature as a thing to be kept at bay. And the idea that we remain connected to this history may seem counterintuitive to Vancouverites today, who generally don’t look at the North Shore mountains and visualize them as log booms.

But Mr. Henderson’s work traces some threads of continuity nevertheless. One of these is a tendency in Vancouver’s earliest days for constant renovation and redesign. Since the city had to shift physically in response to where the jobbers were, structures were not built to last, but to be replaced or moved.

“You had to build quickly and not necessarily consider if this was the final design,” Mr. Henderson explains.

Anybody who has watched the Vancouver skyline over the course of the past few decades will understand what it means for a city to steadily reinvent itself and turn under its architectural objects. Anyone who got wet in the leaky-condo crisis will relate to Mr. Henderson’s assessment that in Vancouver “impermanence has often been part of the design.” A bonanza attitude toward harvestable timber resources has, in this parallel, only been replaced by a bonanza attitude toward the sloshing pools of international real-estate investment capital.

But Vancouver has also had some more positive inheritances from that 19th-century resource-town swagger, to which Mr. Henderson’s novel is affectionately tuned. He was drawn here in the first place by what he describes as “an anarchistic, libertarian, off-the-grid, sometimes just weird sensibility.” This is a free-spirited, creative Vancouver. A place where, at least at the time Mr. Henderson decided to move here, “the artists and writers and musicians seemed to be better.”

With the Olympics coming, Mr. Henderson worries that Vancouver may lose this “Cascadian personality” in its efforts to ape other high-gloss international cities. “You know, we’re just not Dubai.”

And if Vancouver is going to become that kind of place, with the ever more insane rents that come with the honour, he wonders, “Why would artists choose to live here and not just move to Toronto, which is at least bigger and busier?”

On tour recently in Toronto, Mr. Henderson launched a mini-tirade from behind the podium about precisely this risk in Vancouver - that it will, through its late postmodern boom, eradicate the frontier ethic of which the city’s artists have been (strangely, some may say) the truest spiritual heirs.

Paradoxical, no doubt. But the novel is a weaving of just such material. And when I ask him about the Toronto tirade, Mr. Henderson doesn’t acknowledge it straight on. He looks to the harbour instead, and then impressively extemporizes: “Well, you see, there are certain people from Toronto that I don’t want to move here. So I tend not to be too positive about it when I’m travelling there.”

Timothy Taylor is a novelist

and journalist based in Vancouver.

His latest book is the novel

Story House.

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Michel Basilières

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.

Newlyweds Molly and Sammy Earwagen arrive in Vancouver in 1887, just as a great fire is destroying most of the emerging city.

She’s a 17-year-old ex-vaudeville performer, and he’s an accountant. On the trip out from Toronto, he’s had a serious accident and is now paralyzed from the neck down. As the city struggles to rebuild itself from the ashes, somehow Sammy manages to fulfill his duties at the lumber mill, even though he needs as much care as a newborn.

Meanwhile, Molly witnesses a bar brawl between rival loggers and conceives the idea of the Man Game. As a sport, it’s part martial art and part performance. Maggie and her acolytes Litz and Pisk are betting it’s just the diversion this brutal frontier town needs.

Litz and Pisk are exiled loggers, blamed (rightly or wrongly, we never really find out) for the massive fire, but eager to clear their names and return to their favourite bar.

It’s Pisk who invents the first elements of the game, when he’s called out to fight by his archenemy, the monstrous and elemental Dagget. With no way to prevail in the uneven fight, he clownishly strips naked, dances around his opponent and combines surprise with acrobatics to … well, to deke him out.

The witnessing crowd of lumberjacks and barflies roars with approval as these shenanigans, and Molly’s sense of theatre recognizes the germ of a new – and profitable – sport-cum-entertainment. Molly spends the rest of the novel slowly and carefully manipulating events and people to transform a disparate group of feuding and aimless factions into a cohesive and lively industry.

This is a portrait of early Vancouver as an open, Wild West frontier town. The novel has the now familiar parallel contemporary element, although it adds nothing to the story and could easily be dropped from what is already a long book. It also comes with footnotes placed right in the action scenes that are commentaries on the various competitors’ moves in the man game, complete with diagrams of the opponents’ positions. Again, these are distractions that serve only to distance the reader from an otherwise totally engrossing story.

Don’t let these minor quibbles discourage you. The Man Game is one of the most entertaining, rollicking and original Canadian novels I’ve ever read.

Its large cast of characters are all convincingly drawn, no matter their background. It’s a loose, baggy monster of a novel, and it’s raw and rough in all the right ways. It has a confident use of vernacular that destroys the convention of polite historical novels and animates its characters with a Rabelaisian earthiness. It has a chronological narrative loaded with an anachronistic vocabulary, and a sensibility that lends it both an air of realism and an otherworldly atmosphere.

It’s bright and clear, yet mysterious and dark. It has cowboys and Indians, hookers and puritans, immigrants and racists, and capital and labour. There are hidden rooms and secret passages. There is a woman so beautiful, every man falls in love with her. There is a Whore Without a Face, from whom there is no escape. Naked men cavort in the streets.

More than once during this book, I was sent scurrying for my dictionary. For someone who’s spent a lifetime reading, that’s a pretty rare event. Nevertheless, once this novel draws you in, it keeps hold of you till the end.

One of the delights is how often Henderson avoids the clichéd choice. There’s no investigation into whether Litz and Pisk actually started the fire. The cripple’s wife does not have an affair with another man. Murderers don’t get their comeuppance, the riot doesn’t end in a lynching, and so on. This is the kind of storytelling that makes the unusual and outrageous parts of the story seem real.

Readers looking for historical accuracy might be better off with a different book. Henderson’s mixing of a contemporary vocabulary and his character’s liberal drug use is probably anachronistic, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is, as novel, The Man Game comes to life and moves to its own rhythms.

Toronto’s Michel Basilières is the author of the novel Black Bird (Vintage Canada).

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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.

Just when the oppressiveness of that testosterone charged mob scene becomes overwhelming and claustrophobic, we are taken back in time to the genesis of the Man Game, where the bulk of the novel takes place.

In 1886, as the great fire is destroying Vancouver, newlyweds Molly and Sammy Erwagen arrive in town to begin a new life. Molly sashays through the smouldering carnage, puffing on a cigarette and declaring “I can hardly breath!” while her recently paralyzed husband is carried like so much baggage, bound to a donkey’s back.

They’re accompanied by their gentle and discreet guide Toronto. Henderson plunges us into a wild world of Deadwood desperadoes, predatory capitalists and hoodwinked Chinese labourers, all simmering with resentment and discontent.

Rival logging gangs hopped up on opium, moonshine, illegal gambling dens and dens of greater iniquity threaten to overwhelm the straight-shooting police in this brutal outpost.

We are borne confidently through this dangerous landscape by 17- year-old superwoman Molly, a former vaudeville performer so stunningly beautiful that her glance could “de-bone” a man’s legs.

“Her most humbly elegant fineries tousled about her louche figure; she neither floated above the earth nor ever seemed totally locked to the ground,” Henderson writes. “It seemed that at any given moment she could lift her legs and fly away, kill them all and give birth.”

But though men fall at her feet with protestations of love at every turn, Molly manages all her admirers with aplomb, neither denying nor confirming requital. Rather, with a martial artist’s skill, she bends her opposite’s energy to her own ends.

Inspired by the thuggish desperation of the men in the streets, Molly invents the Man Game and recruits two disgraced loggers to be her accomplices. With help from the women at “Woods” (the aforementioned den of greater iniquity) to spread the word, the Man Game takes the city by storm.

Henderson’s previous credits include a short-story collection, The Broken Record Technique, and contributions to a few arts magazines, including Winnipeg’s Border Crossings.

Here he brilliantly toys with his reader through the inscrutable Molly — seducing us into her twisted scheme, keeping us wondering what she’s really up to, never sure if we can trust her, waiting for her to break our hearts yet completely unable to stop loving her.

And as he plays with our faith in Molly, he daringly challenges our faith in his story.

From the gritty, earthy, hyper-realism of the mean streets of old Vancouver, Henderson ever so subtly begins dropping hints that all is not as it seems.

A slight exaggeration gives way to a touch of whimsy until we gradually begin to suspect that we’re in a work of magic realism, but we’re brought in so smoothly that, when truly magical events being to unfold, everything is earned and logical and utterly satisfying. Our faith has not been misplaced: Henderson is the real deal.

The language of The Man Game is colourful, at turns crass and refined. Full enjoyment of Henderson’s great skill as a wordsmith requires a hunger for new words, a good dictionary and a chortling delight in inventive vulgarity.

As a work of speculative historical fiction, as a study in the nature of unrequited love, as a song of praise to the power the objects of our affections wield, The Man Game becomes more than a ripping good yarn; it’s a stunning achievement.

Debbie Patterson is a Winnipeg playwright, composer and director.

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Sprawling, innovative, exhilarating

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.

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This is the titular “man game” at the heart of Lee Henderson’s phenomenally ambitious and artful new novel, a sport stumbled upon by our narrator, Kat, in a present-day Vancouver subdivision and traced to its roots among the city’s lumberjacks, labourers and vaudeville performers of the late 1800s. A previous story collection, The Broken Record Technique, proved Henderson as a master of skewed suburbia, but it is when The Man Game shifts to the past that his skills really shine. The novel’s parallel historical narrative is populated by a Melvillian, grizzled crew who spout a foul-mouthed, distinctly Canadian dialect peppered with “aboots,” “ehs,” and the regional jargon of Chinook, their plebeian lives brightened only by whoring, gambling, drinking, drugs - and violence. Introduced into the squalor of this Deadwood North are Molly and Sammy Erwagen, fresh from Ontario. She is the daughter of vaudeville performers, he an accountant paralyzed from the neck down, and together they arrive in a city ablaze - Vancouver’s Great Fire of 1886 - which reads like the hellish Old West of Cormac McCarthy: “They passed by streams that ran with currents of blood clogged by burnt and disgorged carcasses of domesticated animals that floated down the bubbling current.” Amid the fire, Molly gets her first glimpse of Litz and Pisk, two lumberjacks blamed for starting the conflagration. Facing exile from the camp, the friends