Alligator

Stringing words together has never been a problem for Lisa Moore, as demonstrated by her superlative short story collections, the debut Degrees of Nakedness and Open (a previous Giller Prize finalist). The first nine pages of her first novel Alligator, another Giller finalist, remind the reader of her talent-the text undulates in rhythmic accompaniment to descriptions of a surreal safety film.

Throughout the novel lurk traces of Moore’s short story skills-many chapters conclude with one of her exquisite moments of curious insight. But the accumulation of incidents and images develops into something larger here. With Alligator, Moore has built a framework that stretches her short-form strengths across the larger canvas of a novel.

Each chapter begins with the name of a character: Colleen, Frank, Beverly, Valentin and Madeleine. Some are painterly portraits, others serve as drunken snapshots; combined they generate a family tree of relative strangers and strange relatives. Degrees of separation eventually dissolve until the environmental activist (Colleen), the Russian flimflam man (Valentin), the hotdog salesman (Frank) and the movie director (Madeleine) are interlocking branches of a large central molecule. It is difficult to imagine how else the story could have been told.

Moore provides entry into a world where runny egg yolks are “hazard-tape yellow” and frozen streams cover rock “like candle wax on the sides of a wine bottle.” It is a rare place, and worth visiting. It is not always a pleasant trip, however. Moore visits hot pain upon her creations.

Unlike the existential grotesque of Chuck Palahniuk, Moore’s violence has direction and purpose, driven by a hazy but omnipresent moral compass, and her novel suggests that we are living in a curious kind of Gothic era-a historical moment distinguished by our reluctance to recognize it as such. (Ryan Bigge)

by Lisa Moore, $29.95, 306 pgs, Anansi, 110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801, Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4, anansi.com