Literature is most easily digested when it comes in movements. Especially if the writing's a little off the wall.

If you know you're dipping into some Beat writing, for example, you can steel yourself for a little drug-induced haze, a little perspective-shifting prose reconstruction, a little self-important articism. And if you know going in that some book's written by a Modernist, and that Modernists have a nasty tendency to subtly allude to any number of obscure texts during the course of a poem or a story or a novel, you can either put off reading it until you've completed your degree in comparative literature or know when to let your eyes glaze over because this poetry by Li Bai really doesn't concern you.

So, though it's probably reductivist to corral these most individual of people and their writing into groups, there is some practical purpose to it.

Which brings me to Hal Niedzviecki. A real Toronto gadabout, this guy. You've seen him on Pamela Wallin, the front page of the Globe and Mail's Arts section, profiled in these very pages a couple of weeks ago. This season he's got a small piece in an anthology called Burning Ambitions from one of the city's newest micro-presses, as well as an anthology of his own device coming out from that most redoutable CanLit presses, McClelland & Stewart, who've brought young Hal on to try to get in touch with a new generation. But the heart of Niedzviecki's ambitions lies with his own writing and he's got a book of his own brand of fictive writing, Smell It, from Coach House Books. And it's this writing that belongs, I think, to a just now coalescing movement, which for the time being we'll call subrealism.

I first noticed this sort of writing, in a highly polished form, when I read The Roaring Girl by Edmonton writer Greg Hollingshead in 1996. It won the Governor-General's Award for fiction that year, and deservedly so - it remains one of the best pieces of writing this decade's produced. But something set it apart from the sort of writing that usually produces G-G winners - Guy Vanderhaeghe, Carol Shields, Alice Munro. Unlike our more revered and well-bought writers, Hollingshead's narrative perspective was distinctly wonky, working a really calm and intelligent sense of humour and displacement into the very essence of the stories and characters he was creating. When Stephen Smith reviewed the book he said that reading it was like looking at the world from on top of your house - everything's familiar, but the perspectives are all just a little off, and you can see just a little more at a glance.

Since reading The Roaring Girl I've noticed David Sedaris, Elise Levine, Tony Burgess and Stuart Ross all working, with varying degrees of success, along the same broad lines, writing often very short pieces that remove or distort contexts to give the reader a fresh look at something utterly familiar - like neighbourliness, or standing in line, or masturbation.

And though Niedzviecki is far more intense, far more abrupt than these others, his small, tightly-wound prose fits right in. With stories as short as six words and as long as about 3,000, Niedzviecki's first collection is made up of a sort of pared-down prose of the Gordon Lish school of editing (Lish, an American of some past renown, was known to edit out 80 or 90 per cent of stories he worked with, paring them down to mere strings of images). This allows the writer very little room to hide. There is so little connective tissue here that any phrase that's banal or limp or doesn't do its job stands out like a boil. And there are enough of these in Smell It - as well as enough pieces which read more like writing exercises than actual writing - to reserve any really enthusiastic praise for future efforts.

But there are also enough pieces in the book - pieces like "Lines" and "Bowel" and "The Earth Is An Anus," pieces that take advantage of his sort of prose-lapse exposition, a writing equivalent of time-lapse photography that makes jumps not in time but in description, in facts, in context - to make Smell It well worth looking into. A fine sensibility in development.

The same cannot be said of Burning Ambitions. Of the 50 pieces, portentously but meaninglessly described as being told "in the hang-time of a mushroom cloud," there are 10 good ones. Ten pieces - all uniformly under 1,000 words - that are not either facile (like Amanda Kelly's piece) or pretentious (like Phlip Arima's) or mere strings of words that sound very much like writing but aren't (like J ason Copple's). Ten pieces that don't suffer from being wrongfully spliced from something bigger and perhaps better for the sake of cool brevity. For the most part, the pieces in this anthology prefer making statements to saying anything - like the nose-thumbing art of the early and middle portions of this century. Trite stuff, frankly - like Jeffery Kennedy's "The Answering Machine" and Christopher Paw's "The Wedding Snapshot" - dressed up as edgy.

The good ones are good in mostly minor ways. There are no hints of genius here. But there is a bit of fun. "Casper J." by Heather O'Neill has some fun with thriller pulp fiction techniques. Dianne Cauzillo turns a rat-pack '50s guy moment into a pretty effective mid-'90s gal moment, and Crad Kilodney has some fun with a one-note jig that caps the book off nicely. Others, like Degan Davis' "Bathurst, 1951 (Watercolours)" and Jim Monroe's "Pleasant Diversions With The Iconoclasts," are simply quite pleasant descriptive prose moments (Niedzviecki's contribution could also be included in this group). Writing by Ruba Nadda, Fiorella Grossi, Joe Maynard and Jason Gallagher round out the pieces that belong in an anthology like this one.

Toronto literary journalist Bert Archer writes a monthly small press column for these pages.

Smell it
Rob Payne
Quarry
v.45(3) 1998

From the wilderness of urban chaos emerges Hal Niedzviecki, co-editor of the alternative magazine Broken Pencil, editor of Concrete Forest: an anthology of urban fiction (M&S, 1998) and guru to a new generation of young writers determined to break the bonds of mediocrity that enslave much of the Canadian Book publishing industry. Though Smell It is somewhat conservative, Niedzviecki manages to shadow his short pieces with the chaos, confusion and rebellious spirit of his generation. The most innovative feature, however, is the almost Joycean use of a fragmented style of narrative that is concerned with moments, over-tones and interludes that define us as individuals within society. Niedzviecki is not consumed by the need to tell a story, simply to document that we live and that the world swirls strangely around us. His lean prose and pinpoint direct confrontation of pain, love and identity as a member of a disenfranchised generation is both ironic and sensitive, sceptical but not pessimistic. Hal Niedzviecki's first collection is immediate and honest, concerned with surviving the daily nuances and anti-dramas of modern life and pop culture. The message for his readers: Here's life. Deal with it, good and bad. Take a deep breath and just Smell It.