His Stumbling, Almost Dream-like Existence: On Cody James's The Dead Beat

The Dead Beat is a coming of age story for the slacker generation — surely, this being what some might label as Slacker Fiction—those who find themselves between great swathes of adulthood (school and careers, namely), unstuck in time with nothing but (little) money to burn and carnal instincts to explore. It sheds light on a particular foursome of dysfunctional twenty-somethings, childhood friends—not just meth addicts, but addicts of alcohol, of themselves . . . addicts to wasting away — and The High, not only from drugs, but from various facets of life, the relationships they take for granted (as we all do) and reform (again, as we all do) and others we cultivate from chance meetings. From living on the fringe, from not being a sellout and doing your own thing.

There aren’t many likable characters here, which isn’t necessarily a novel approach towards an empathetic audience (see, for instance, every character in Ellis’ Rules of Attraction, various Updike novels featuring Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, Leopold Bloom from Joyce’s Ulysses), but somehow you find yourself smiling at the antics of it all. Even though these people may be a far cry from you, there are parts of them you recognize in yourself and in your generation. These friends — lead by the affable-yet-burned-out one-time writer Adam, our guide into this world of debauchery and apathy — are addicts, users, and the story follows them, through their ramblings, through their few ups and many downs, seeing their friends suffer but doing nothing, standing idly by as the world, the lives they had once planned out, pass them by.

There are moments of clarity in the book where Adam “wakes up” from his stumbling, almost dream-like existence, and as much as we want him to kick his habits and grow up, he doesn’t. You realize this is real life, not any sort of make-believe, and there are people out there, in every city, in every town, just like this. It’s not easy to kick habits so engrained in you—and it’s the lifestyle in general, not the specificities of the lifestyle. Their daily regimens, what they have grown to expect out of life, has molded onto them like some second skin and can’t so easily be picked off. Only in the last few paragraphs do we see a change in a few of them after a heinous event transpires, one that, potentially, could rocket them all on the path to righteousness once and for all.

But then the book ends.  It’s gone. And we don’t know what actually does happen at this pivotal turning point: Do they see the error of their ways, the irreparable damage they’ve caused their bodies and their minds and move on, or do they go right back to their old ways, those familiar ways?  We don’t ever find out, and that’s the point, really, that it’s not up to us, that people in this position, they have to help themselves, so the book ends, taking it out of our hands entirely, letting these characters’ lives live on in obscurity.

James’ writing is concise, not flashy, and rarely deviates from its set course — it lays out for us, almost diorama-like, the sets and characters, and doesn’t need this glitz and glamour that many young writers feel is necessary but, more often than not, isn’t. In fact, her terse style — which readily avoids fluttering up in the clouds with long, drawn out idioms and unnecessary dialog — strengthens the story: It’s these maddening, heart-wrenching characters, the snippets of human we see in them from time to time and their interactions, and the experiences they fall backwards into, that define the book, and with such color already present, anything more would take away and lessen the impact.

The Dead Beat truly offers a worm’s-eye-view of the world, through one deadbeat after another, and while there are plenty out there who have written or will continue to write about the dredge of society — those oft-overlooked “slackers” that represent, on a much larger scale, all of us in general (but, who are too afraid to let go, some might argue, as the dredge find so easy to do) — but James does it with such wit and style, with such a tight narrative that opens up just enough to let us in and poke around without overdoing it and creating pointless caricatures, one wonders how any could ever top her.

Human-Animal Nature Through a Generational Family Saga: On Gary Anderson's Animal Magnet

Some of my favourite reads of all time have been the books I’ve found out of the blue. I found Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay and The Death Guard by Philip George Chadwick at a garage sale. They went on to influence everything I’ve ever loved about science-fiction/fantasy novels. I found “It” by Raymond Hawkey while studying in a dusty corner of the North York Library. I then went on to read Hawkey’s Wild Card, and Side Effect voraciously. His murder-mysteries prophesied advances in bio-engineering and the popularity of the internet as a social medium. I was enthralled. I read these quite a while back and since then I’ve continued to search for great texts from authors who are off the beaten path.

This past December, I went down to Hart House for The Toronto Small Press Book Fair. I’m an independent zine fan (even made one myself– as many did in college).  There I met Vincent Ponka at a table for Emmerson Street Press. Somewhere in our conversation I mentioned that my favourite novel of all time was James Joyce’s Ulysses. Actually, I might have yelled it out, as I’m prone to do.

He then went on to recommend Gary Anderson’s “Animal Magnet,” adding that it was both a thought provoking and a meaty read. I bought it, put it in my pocket, picked up a few chapbooks, and left impressed with the selection at the fair. I cracked my new read open and dived in on the subway home.

My father and I transitioned in two opposite directions: He from the civilized to the savage and I from the savage to the civilized. He from the bed to the hammock and I from the hammock to the bed. Father had no intention of taking me back to civilization — ever; he desired only that I stay with him in the wilds of the Amazonian rainforest. For what he had come to realize, with an immiscible clarity unattainable in unaltered states, is that civilization is an artificial system superimposed upon the natural world. Nothing more than a semblance of order forced upon nebular chaos.

There are books that stick with you because of their language or style. There are others that make you identify or fall in love with its characters. Animal Magnet touches upon all of these things. It is a fascinating exploration of human-animal nature through a generational family saga. At two hundred and seventeen pages, this book isn’t as huge as Ulysses, but it is epic. Each chapter is set up to tell the tale of the successor’s through varied perspectives and sometimes through different protagonists. The chapters stand alone as full short stories, but one story cannot exist without the other one before it. Anderson weaves these stories through the language of the characters’ time and place, thus enlisting mixed prose and even transposing chapters to cleverly pull the reader in and out of the novel.

I couldn’t put this book down. In its pages I found an old Western news magazine, (The Curious Case of the Man who Loved the Bearded Lady and the Dog-Faced Boy Who Mourned Him), a science fiction (Big MOFO Specting You), and even a play on magical realism (Heart of Larkness). Anderson utilizes basic animal instinct descriptors and humor to move the story forward even when its characters decide to stay still.  Sometimes when a character or generation decides to move on, we are made to question their intentions: Does evolving beyond animal instinct give us meaning, or are we running away from meaning with knowledge? The characters answer in either constructive or destructive epiphanies. Some of them find purpose while others go insane, but even in their insanity they end up finding reason.

For Georges, the pregnancy is a revelation. It seems as if all his life he has been trying to read a book in a language that is foreign to him. Page after page, he has searched for a shred of meaning, a word that makes sense, a word, a phrase that rings true. Now suddenly, he understands perfectly, every word, every sentence, every nuance. Something has changed, not in the book itself, but in him.

In an interview with Open Book Ontario, Anderson says, “. . . Animal Magnet, which has some scenes that probably deserve a nod from the Literary Review and its Bad Sex in Fiction Award. However, in keeping with the novel’s theme of humanness and the human/animal dichotomy, I felt that the sex had to be there — up front and over-the-top.”

He goes on to say, “For me, the sex in Animal Magnet can’t be read straight — these scenes are satirical in nature, if not actual satire. I don’t think I could have written them any other way.”

I found the sex scenes to be both over the top and quite accurate; it’s expected in a book about animal instinct and humanity.  Sex can be seen as a driving force to capture a cathartic moment in time in order to prolong it (There is the whole animalistic need to procreate, but can’t that also be seen as a way of stopping time or to continue our own mark on the world?). Anderson writes these scenes satirically so that the reader gets caught becoming a delighted voyeur or an unwilling participant in those moments. It’s an interesting effect.

Is it our basic animal instinct to move forward, or is it to stagnate while reveling in our passions? As humans do we feel isolated by our ability to express thought through language?  Do we search and philosophize ourselves away from happiness? Animal Magnet poses these questions to our individual thirst for the things beyond our basic survival.

There’s a tragic certainty to the book’s conclusion and one that I’m still thinking about since I’ve finished it. I’ll let you figure that out when you pick up a copy, which I urge you to do so. I’m dying to talk with others who have read this book. I would like to read an in-depth “spoiler-alert” review or analysis. Animal Magnet not only engages you, it makes you think about your own motivations and your own threads through time.  It’s the individual as icon: moving forward like an accidental hero passing through the now, motivated by its animalistic urges and the call of its human heart.