Ditch, by Toronto's Hal Niedzviecki, is such a perplexing, audacious novel that adjectives fail me: Challenging, bravely original and skillfully executed certainly all apply -- but need to be qualified with creepy, sickening and possibly even downright offensive.

Niedzviecki, 30, is a prominent standard-bearer for underground writing in Canada, and his three previous books include some frankly callow shock writing. In Ditch, he deals with subject matter that is horrendously unsettling, though arguably relevant: Namely, the most exploitive Internet pornography.

You would hardly guess that from the timid, almost fraudulently misleading dustjacket blurbs -- which pitch the book as a "coming-of-age" novel and "poignant quest for friendship and lost fathers." So be warned: This novel forces the reader to confront unthinkables. That may be a legitimate artistic imperative (or else not far removed from the impulse behind bathroom graffiti), but to me it made for odious, excruciatingly unpleasant reading.

Still, the book is too well-crafted to dismiss offhand. And while it is a "thriller," and Niedzviecki exploits his material for the purposes of suspense, in his defence, his treatment is rarely prurient. This is not for dirty-book readers.

Ditch is the protagonist, a 23-year-old delivery truck driver still living with his mother in Toronto. At first, it seems as if this will be yet another aimless-young-guy novel (a frightening enough prospect), as the bottle count piles up and the central tension concerns Ditch trying to lose his virginity. Even here, the author does a fine job of evoking Ditch's dead-end existence, through such telling details as the way his thoughts dwell on the "agin' " doughnut-shop counter girl ("She's old . . . probably thirty") who constitutes practically the only female contact in his day.

But then the plot takes a fateful turn, and such quotidian matters are eclipsed by the steadily ratcheting suspense. Debs, a young woman Ditch met briefly at a party (though she seems not to remember), rents the upstairs apartment in his house. Ditch soon winds up involved with her, his first love. She's a capricious, coquettish waif -- but she is also on the run from a dark and mysterious past.

As that past comes out, in an accumulation of surreal fragments and sinister hints, "like following crumbs through a labyrinth," its profoundly disturbing nature will be too sordid for many sensibilities. Debs has come from the United States like a fugitive, escaping on a bus to "somewhere far," crossing the border without a scrap of ID and carrying nothing except a laptop she refers to as "Daddy's."

In her room upstairs, she sends bizarre, lurid e-mails to Daddy -- warning him the police are looking for him -- and watches a Website for a sign in response. She also sets up her own site and posts photos of herself reclining nude in the bathtub.

Gradually, we are led -- or perhaps misled -- to understand that Debs's Daddy is wanted by police in connection with the murder of her mother, and perhaps also the mother's boyfriend. Did the father, an Internet pornographer, really commit these murders? Or did Debs do the killing, perhaps as a desperate act of self-defence? Or was there any murder, really?

Then Debs thinks she receives the sign she has been waiting for -- over the Web come pictures of the house she has run away from. Live webcam pictures. She convinces Ditch, who knows she is crazy but is also in her thrall, to steal his work van, withdraw all his savings, and join her on a desperate pilgrimage back to the scene of whatever horror she has been fleeing.

As a suspense novel, the book is remarkable -- truly harrowing, if that is an experience you enjoy. The hidden story here, the grotesque truth of Debs's past and what she is leading Ditch back to, is shrouded in her bizarre and evasive behaviour in a way that creates an overwhelmingly menacing atmosphere. The horrifying climax, mercifully delivered in a sort of fever-dream sequence, certainly makes good on that sense of dread. It also lets you piece together an explanation that makes what had seemed frighteningly surreal before seem even-more-frighteningly plausible.

But the book also deserves -- demands -- to be considered as more than merely a genre novel. To convincingly render such a bizarre character as Debs, and to make it psychologically credible that Ditch would be so swayed by her, represent Herculean challenges -- which Niedzviecki pulls off with countless intelligently imagined, realistic scenes.

This is one of the riskiest undertakings by a Canadian writer of Niedzviecki's generation, and it undoubtedly succeeds within the terms the author has set for himself. And yet, as a reader, there is only one thing I can confidently say about it: Shiver.

Digging Ditch
Matt Galloway
Now Magazine
September 5, 2001

There's not much uplifting social interaction or many high-water performances by humanity in Hal Niedzviecki's Ditch.The short novel is the tale of Ditch, a 23-year-old sad sack with a glorified paper route who lives with his mother, and Debs, an equally unstable woman who arrives in Toronto under dubious circumstances and promptly begins uploading porno shots of herself onto the Web and corresponding via e-mail with a fellow pornographer, her father.

Debs and her laptop move into the apartment above Ditch, the two get friendly and eventually take off toward Maryland in a stolen van. There's no real reason for their flight -- they just have nothing better to do.

That sums up much about Ditch and Debs, who'd both rather stay on the move than face reality and themselves. Communication breaks down before it gets started, and even the vaguest idea of purpose is feared like the West Nile virus.

It's a bleak tale, yet what makes it a compelling read is Niedzviecki's acute grasp of the characters' slackness. Short chapters that resemble diary entries and the casual shorthand of e-mail drive the fractured, unstable narrative, and it's a credit to Niedzviecki's writing that he's created a pair of utterly pathetic losers who become likeable and even occasionally charming.

Reviewer calls it bleak, bleak, bleak
Dana McNairn
Victoria Times Colonist
October 21, 2001

The man who, among other things, explained to us why we collect vintage lunch boxes, memorize TV theme songs and obsess about the Sex in the City gang is technically no longer a "youth" commentator on popular mass culture. He's 30 now and has written a funeral parlour of a book that's in keeping with this traditionally sombre milestone.

Hal Niedzviecki is the Toronto-based author and "culture commentator" because he's also the editor of Broken Pencil (and its sister Web site http://www.brokenpencil.com). Niedzviecki's foothold is firm on the slippery slopes of all that is "cool" --his 'zine reviews alternative culture and publishes fiction not found in the mainstream press. He's written three books: the short-story collection, Smell It; a retelling of E.B. White's Charlotte's Web entitled Lurvy: A Farmer's Almanac; and the bestselling non-fiction rant, We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture.

Alongside his magazine, We Want Some Too is the work upon which Niedzviecki's cultural guru status rests -- he's spent a lot of time thinking about what constitutes independent culture while it thrashes about in the seas of pop culture.

However, as with any forms of pigeonholing, the author has said previously that labels are dismissive and lazy journalism, likening it to our infantile need to reduce everything "to spectacle instead of content."

In Ditch, Niedzviecki's intent is an old-fashioned coming-of-age story about a socially inept 23-year-old still living with his mom. There the resemblance to traditional narrative stops. Part cyberthriller, part cybermurder, with nasty gashes of cyberporn thrown in for good postmodern measure, Ditch is also a love story between an improbable couple.

Niedzviecki calls it a "search for identity and for events that can be said to be true" because the writer is interested in how "mass culture affects us and mass culture is computer and high-tech culture." If his premise proves correct, culturally we're toast as a species. Ditch is dysfunctional, disheartening and disturbing.

Ditch, the eponymous protagonist, is graceless and aimless, too apathetic to even eat regularly. His life is beyond monotonous. You know it, and Niedzviecki knows it. "He takes out the orange juice carton and unscrews the cap. He stands by the fridge with the bright plastic cap loose in his palm. He tilts the carton, fills his mouth with juice. He forgets to swallow until he feels the cold trickle down his chin. Then he gulps the juice down, gasps for air. He puts the carton back in the refrigerator. He wipes his face with his arm. The orange cap still in his hand."

Sponging off his mom and driving a newspaper delivery truck, he has a lot of time on his hands to think. Which apparently isn't about much other than obsessing about the rotting smell of old newsprint and why his legs always feel numb. When Debs, a runaway from the States, moves into the upstairs apartment in Ditch's mom's rundown Toronto house, Ditch is smitten. Why not? His mom, Barbara, dislikes the mysterious young woman and her nocturnal skulking. That's about all the reason Ditch needs to bang Debs senseless while she takes grainy snapshots to post on her skanky Web site. Gentle reader, stay with me. It gets worse.

Naturally, Debs is completely unstable, has a big fat secret involving daddy and a possibly murdered mommy. It only makes sense then, that dingle-nuts Ditch and delusional Debs steal the van and embark on a bizarro road trip to go find Debs' childhood stomping grounds so she can say hi to her old man and well, have a chat or something. Of course, the police are involved. Debs' life, up to now, is the "drifter's terror of meeting the familiar" and Ditch's life, so far, is a series of moments waiting for glimpses of "clarity."

It's computer-age angst, however which I don't share, so I was rooting for some cyberboot to materialize out of the ether and kick the sorry behinds of these two kids. Staring at a blinking screen is part of my day, but it isn't consuming my life, rendering me incapable of regular speech and social interaction not hinged on psychosis.

Yet, Ditch is elliptic and enervated by the very mass culture the book is supposed to expose. It is, at times, mind-numbing to read.

Despite the media's insistence on calling Niedzviecki the "alternative culture guru," his fictional urban terrain remains bleak, bleak, bleak. I'm not as convinced trendy morbidity is the only adjective available to young writers to describe all things alternative or even postmodern. Isn't despair about the future a cliche, anyway?

In Ditch, no one has any redeeming qualities and nobody cares. A bar owner dying of testicular cancer comforts himself with rivers of booze and the cocktail waitress who thoughtfully masturbates him every night. A mother can barely speak to her grown son because of stupefying exhaustion from her job doing "functions." The streets are greasy and the buildings caked in grime.

These grey-faced characters shuffle and shiver like they are in some post-apocalyptic atomic winter. T.S. Eliot was right -- it will be with a whimper, not a bang. If this is the cultural landscape we're headed to in the digital millennium, I'm deleting my password.

Dana McNairn is freelance reviewer for Southam Newspapers

Book tells curious tale
Canadian Press
September 15, 2001

TORONTO - As the founding editor of the zine-culture magazine Broken Pencil, and a regular contributor to This and Shift magazines, Hal Niedzviecki has been called a guru of independent culture.

But in 1999 his first novel, Lurvy: A Farmer's Almanac, received enough praise that he could almost be called mainstream.

His new novel, Ditch, is a curious tale that takes its name from its enthusiastically apathetic protagonist. He's a slacker who finds himself by erasing his own identity on a wild ride from Ontario to Maryland with his teenage lover Debs, while she posts porn of herself online to try to find her long lost father.

Terse prose describing the familiar yet alien surroundings of Ditch's Toronto - Interlog online becomes Interlock online, Tim Hortons becomes Good Time Donuts and Deli, yet University of Toronto and the 401 keep their names - alternates with e-mail excerpts from Debs's eerie online diary.

The effect is jarring, and it takes longer to think your way through this 229-pager than you'd expect. There's something in between the lines, though. It's not necessarily fun, nor is it boring. It doesn't go anywhere but it moves. It's edgier than Douglas Coupland, and more realistic than William Gibson. Though fans of those authors would easily follow his style.

Designed to startle and mesmerize
Naomi Brun
The Hamilton Spectator
September 8, 2001

Have you ever seen a jigsaw puzzle of Edvard Munch's The Scream? In this picture, two bony hands clasp a skeletal face howling in despair. Hal Niedzviecki's latest novel, Ditch, is a postmodernist exploration of the same theme but key explanatory pieces from the puzzle are missing.

Extremely graphic language and sordid imagery tell the story of Ditch and Debs, two disturbed twentysomethings seeking their fathers in each other.

Ditch and his mother own a Toronto duplex. Between the rent from the upstairs tenant, his income from driving a delivery van and the money she earns planning parties, the two of them scrape together an existence.

When their tenant dies, Ditch rents the apartment to Debs, a young and beautiful woman running physically and emotionally from her past.

Her instability reminds Ditch of the father he has never known but has always heard his mother complain about.

Debs has "an empty space of longing inside her, a coffin" she wishes to fill, and as Ditch's quiet and quirky ways echo those of her father, she chooses Ditch to fill the void.

Debs falls into substance abuse, internet pornography and self-mutilation to escape guilt, yet the reader is never sure what is at the root of her guilt. Niedzviecki hints darkly that murder and incest are in her history but does not clarify the circumstances of either.

This uncertainty amplifies the mood of hopelessness and leaves the reader confused about basic elements of plot.

Ditch tries valiantly to rescue Debs from her harmful behaviour. He is instead pulled into depression, alcoholism, and quite possibly, crime.

There is a vague suggestion that Ditch has done something illegal, but the nature of the crime itself eludes the reader. The end of the downward spiral provides no enlightenment. The experience is purposefully hazy, and in fact, the one thing that can be taken from this story is that Ditch and Debs have not found what they were looking for.

Niedzviecki shows a high degree of innovation in his writing style but clarity is somewhat compromised. Chapters and subsections begin with a computer icon of an arrow and e-mail messages from Debs to her father are interspersed throughout the novel. The online age dictates the format of Ditch, written in a style similar to computer correspondence.

This device lends itself to brief chapters, each one a snapshot of action or emotion whose causes are only whispered about. The reader may then find it difficult to make necessary connections. The resulting bewilderment mirrors the emotions of Debs and Ditch.

Niedzviecki uses explicit language to describe the dark content of the novel, a feature that will undoubtedly appeal to some and repel others. He portrays ugliness brilliantly in style and in vocabulary.

Ditch is written to startle. Its content, its unconventional style and its coarse language grab the attention of the reader.

Once mesmerized, the reader is overcome with the despair of Ditch and Debs as they journey throughout the novel. There is no reward at the end of the long road for either the characters or for the reader. This novel is an experience in angst.

Naomi Brun is completing a master of arts in French literature at McMaster University.