David Homel on location on a film shoot in the Dominican Republic, on the Puerto Plata-Sosúa road. Photo courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.
Here’s an excerpt from a forthcoming novel by my friend David Homel who, not coincidentally, is going to be the visiting translator at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing winter residency (January, 2011). Go to his reading, walk up and say hello, give him the secret Numéro Cinq handshake, whisper the Words of Power. David is a novelist, translator, and screenwriter. He has won the Governor-General’s Award for Translation, not once but twice. His novel The Speaking Cure won the Hugh McLennan Prize. Last year David and his wife, children’s book author Marie-Louise Gay, co-authored a picture book entitled Travels with my Family.
The Midway is due to be published by Cormorant Books in Toronto in September.
Excerpted from Midway
Author’s note: In this excerpt, the novel’s hero Ben Allan confronts the heart of the male mid-life crisis which manifests itself to him as the fear of death and a desire to destroy everything his life is built on. The real problem, Ben is discovering, is with death itself: it refuses to let itself be known, even after it has visited. Ben has two allies in his attempt to work out a new way of living with his wife. Unlikely allies, it’s true: a couple of plastic dinosaurs. They prove to be pretty good therapists.
“I’m afraid I’m turning into a cliché,” the stegosaurus lamented to the tyrannosaurus. “You know, the one with the discontent middle-age male. The mid-life crisis from which there is no escape. The red convertible and the blond girl with the wind in her hair.”
“Sounds delicious. But don’t worry about being a cliché: there are no new emotions,” the tyrannosaurus answered in his pontificating manner. “The genius is in how you experience them.”
“And I am experiencing them,” the stegosaurus said ruefully. “Human, all too human.”
“Are you complaining by any chance?” the tyrannosaurus asked. “Night after domestic night, isn’t that what you wanted? What you pined for, like in one of those sentimental ballads you liked to listen to when you were a teenager and that formed – deformed is more like it – your emotional universe to this very day? And now that you have a few of those wild, inconvenient emotions you once craved, you hesitate. You retreat. You are becoming human. Careful what you pray for – you just might get it.”
“I was hoping for more empathy from you,” the stegosaurus said. But even in the lower forms of vertebrate life, among the prehistoric, the extinct, empathy was hard to come by.
The tyrannosaurus snorted. “You know my nature. It’s a world I never made.”
Typical, the steg thought to himself, for his brother reptile to quote James T. Farrell, the pugnacious pride of Chicago, that tough-guy writer whom he personally considered one-dimensional. But he kept that thought to himself. He had been drinking, albeit modestly, but he didn’t trust his own thoughts after two glasses of wine. Unlike the tyranno, he was an inexperienced drinker. The stuff went to his head, and sometimes he couldn’t tell which thoughts were his, and which belonged to the wine. The effect wasn’t very pleasant.
Both dinosaurs had been drinking, though they were still within the domain of “moderate.” You couldn’t call them “social” drinkers, since their society had long since disappeared. They were just a couple of lonely guys, up late at night, egging each other on, a meditation for two, spoken out loud. They were lonesome monsters, and they knew it.
The steg was a worn green color, like the copper roof of some university pavilion in an Ivy League school. He carried his characteristic bony plates of defense on his back as if they were a burden, which they had become, now that his place in the world was assured. The tyrannosaurus had no other defense than his famous teeth and nails, powered by an aggressiveness that even scared him if he bothered to consider it. He was earth-brown, but his drab color made absolutely no difference to him. They were both banged up from a lifetime of play: the stegosaurus was missing a horn, and his companion had his tail twisted up at a jaunty angle that seemed out of character for this most fearsome of predators.