As doctored-gene crops and multinational landowners suggest, farming may have outgrown its synonymy with follow-the-seasons simplicity and salt-of-the-earth folk. It seems reasonable, then, that the venerable Farmer's Almanac should undergo transformation as well. While those studying Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki's Lurvy: A Farmer's Almanac can find scarecrow lore and barnyard facts, it's the new elements -- steadfast perversity and intermittent hilarity -- that will keep them attentive.

In keeping with an almanac's original purpose, Niedzviecki's is a compendium of information. The utility of this one is of a special sort, however. In helter-skelter fashion, Lurvy offers the revamped mythology and hard-sell merchandising of its namesake, a marginal presence (as the comical farmhand) in E. B. White's 1952 children's classic, Charlotte's Web. Niedzviecki throws in a snapshot from a 1982 high-school production of Lurvy! The Musical; bits from filmscripts (Bride of Lurvy, Part 3; Lurvy: The Other White Meat) starring Drew Barrymore and Billy Bob Thornton; Act IIIIMVX, from a stage drama called All the Kids Love Lurvy (in translation from the original Teutonic); advertising for Lurvy! The Board Game and Lurvy action figures; and excerpts from imaginary books, such as unnamed elementary school primers and The Unexpurgated Charlotte's Web: Outtakes, Mistakes, Remakes.

Auxiliary parts include a sketch of an interpretive ballet about arachnids; a deranged John Deere motivational video transcript; an arbitrarily ordered table of contents, glossary and index; a miscellany of facts about ham cookery, spider-web types and breeds of pigs; and poetry ("the pig/ is/ in/ his/ sty" ). An additional catalogue of illustrations by Hoge Day and Marc Ngui -- ranging from noirish comic to crude movie-poster -- complete Lurvy's amphetamine dance.

In case it's not clear, Lurvy is a response to Charlotte's Web, and Niedzviecki toys with that story's mousey conventions with a cat's cruel vigour. He partially fleshes out a formerly insignificant character, giving him a motherless childhood, a cruel father, a failed career, an errant sex drive and a bad complexion. Lurvy returns to the farm, now occupied by Mr. Arable (an effete gentleman farmer) and Mrs. Arable (a B-movie sexual predator), as well as other reshaped animal and human refugees from Charlotte's Web -- girl, rat, boy, spider, pig. Each of the figures has it in for poor Lurvy, who only wants to reclaim the farm with genocidal finality.

The distinguished critic Ihab Hassan wrote years ago that "deformation" was a key strategy of postmodernism in the arts, one aspect of a larger effort to dismantle harmful legacies of the past. Lurvy offers deformity by the slop-pail. It is an open question whether Niedzviecki and his fractures and distortions are remotely concerned with the politics of literature. Still, the playful games and audacious performance of his novel recommend it. It's fun and silly and dirty -- an immature yet adult way to revisit a childhood favourite.

New Rules
Dakota Hamilton
National Post

Warning: If you are looking for the cozy sequel to E.B. White's Charlotte's Web, this ain't it. This is more like Charlotte's Web on peyote or acid of questionable quality, guaranteed to send you headfirst, spiralling into either a satanic bummer or snorting-through-your-nose laughter.

All right, let's talk music (which has absolutely nothing to do with this debut novel). If you are the kind of person who is most content to listen to Dave Brubeck, da da da-da-da-da-da dum dum dum, Take Five kind of stuff, pretty, gentle sounds, Eurocentric, traditional, nice melodies that are instantly recognizable, you might find Lurvy: A Farmer's Almanac a pinch challenging. Niedzviecki doesn't follow the standard novel format, but rather jumps from delirious prose ...

His limbs are just hanging. He has one of those twisting dizzy spells he's been having, tiny spider screams and edge-of-the-road field just going upside down against the silvery pale blur, a solitary aching light Lurvy feels slip across his receding hairline.

... to poetry
what I mean is
here is the birth of all
evil
(fear can't hurt you
anymore
than a dream)
... to screen play

Int. Attic room, small, sloped, cramped. Mrs. Arable stands very close to Lurvy. She's wearing a bathrobe, partially open to demonstrate ample cleavage.

Mrs. Arable (closing in): You don't talk much, do you?

... to comic book art, and more. The images can be disquieting. The newly word-sculpted familiar E.B. White characters equally so.

But that's what new does, doesn't it? Shakes us up. Wakes us up. Pushes our noses in it. Shows us what we don't want to see, especially if it's true. Nobody's nice. Everyone's completely neurotic. Greedy. Sexually twisted. Ugly to the bone. The choice is ours -- laugh or cry.

Now, far be it for me to jump on cliches, but the ever-present, pimple-popping, zit-laden, puss-in-boils anti-hero is getting about as hackneyed as "the raging manhood" with which every Harlequin Romance dude is endowed. Isn't there something darker, deeper and more foreboding than blackheads and acne that weeps? Just once, couldn't there be an alternative hero or heroine with skin that didn't fester? I guess that would be as radical as the romance hero not being able to get it up.

Lurvy has metamorphosed into a poor, sexually debilitated schmuck straight out of Death of a Salesman; Mrs. Arable, a rich, fat, disgusting old nympho; Mr. Arable, a rich, fat-cat, cuckolded creep. And the kids, Avery and Fern, "poor dears," are brats. Sounds like just about any cross-section of any North American neighbourhood seen through eyes not obscured by rose-tinted lenses. As for Wilbur (the pig that talks) and Charlotte (the spider that writes), well, they seem to have lost their sweetness. They're just pork and arachnid -- hold the romanticism. In the smorgasbord of characters, we're definitely being served up less pedestrian fare -- humorously.

So, Lurvy: A Farmer's Almanac falls into the category that Ornette Coleman fell into in the '60s. Free-wheeling and not accessible to everyone. To the casual reader, there may appear to be little or no structure, but this novel can still reel you in and make you chortle with wicked laughter. Mainstream it's not, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't drop your feet in, and even get them a little wet or mucky. See, Coleman's name may not be as readily recognizable as Brubeck's, but if you talk to jazz musicians, they'll tell you that the former was undeniably more influential in the big picture and the one who made for more profound changes.

In Lurvy: A Farmer's Almanac, Niedzviecki has the audacity to mess with a practically sacrosanct children's story, to try something a bit new, to toy with prose structure and to push his darkish sensibility squarely in our (zitted or zitless) faces. No apologies here.