Double Double: Simple Creatures by Robert McGill
Reviewed by Michael Greenstein
Sometimes, you can tell a book by its cover: Robert McGill’s short story collection, Simple Creatures, pictures on its cover a bird with swirls and spirals of its flight path in the sky. In “The Stress of Lives” one character turns into a goshawk that “circled and circled above the fens, tracing helices.” The significance of these patterns may be found in another story devoted to Alice Munro, which serves as a commentary on both Munro’s and McGill’s fiction: “a way to link everything together, interfolding the objective and the subjective, irradiating the material with the ethereal, until people, places, and happenings that had once seemed separate were revealed as connected.” Simple Creatures contains complex relationships and readings. But hold on: at the edge of the book’s back cover, a monkey hangs from a branch of a tree, yet another trace of interconnection. McGill’s monkey business works its way through each of the dozen tales in this delightful and instructive collection.
“With foot in mouth and tongue in cheek, McGill’s stories are humorous, but that humour goes alongside serious matters that may be ominous.”
“Something Something Aisling Moon” and “Knock, Knock” suggest forms of doubling, which is reinforced by a story about twins, “Confidence Men.” The twins, Sean and Seamus, enter the monkey business: “Sean swinging his arms as though Seamus were an orangutan.” If these comparisons evoke evolution, they also connect zoology to anthropology. Thus, “Report on the Bigfoot Collective” apes Kafka’s “Report to the Academy” and focusses on Darwinian connections: “First, let’s bust a myth: the Bigfoot are not sasquatches. Eddie has explained to me that the sasquatch is a whole other species. The Bigfoot are homo sapiens.” With foot in mouth and tongue in cheek, McGill’s stories are humorous, but that humour goes alongside serious matters that may be ominous. At the end of the first story, “Nobody Goes to Vancouver to Die,” an elderly woman in a wheelchair out of control barrels down a slope: “She’s going so quickly, it’s like skis in a movie, like she’s accelerating into the past, back to a time before the age of the dinosaurs.” McGill’s fossils fuel his tragicomic sensibility. In “The Stress of Lives” endocrinologist Hans Selye dies and is reincarnated as a chimpanzee, only to reappear in “The Thunberg Project” where a divorced endocrinologist is reincarnated as a chimp – the recurrence of recurrence.
Doubling takes on different forms, and one of them may be repetition. In “Nobody Goes to Vancouver to Die” the initial paragraph of narration describes Morley’s running speed, “as he makes the other guys look like chumps.” His wife Gloria immediately echoes: “You make them look like chumps!” This indirect dialogue between narrator and character is another form of interconnection. The narrator continues: “A bunch of old bags …. They’re just old bags.” Repetition doubles down, as does the pun on a placard “MORLEY Obligated!” – for there is an ethical dimension to McGill’s morality and mortality plays. At the age of seventy-six, Morley is able to race well: “he likes running’s simplicity,” but to Gloria, “it doesn’t seem simple at all.” Each simple creature holds a different opinion on the nature of simplicity. The contrast between Morley and Gloria appears when she discovers her husband’s nocturnal habit of visiting a bar featuring: “GIRLS. XXX. 30 LIVE PERFORMANCES NIGHTLY.” (The couple’s surname, Day, contrasts with their nightly habits.) Their marital arrangement is based upon some kind of mutual understanding: “More like don’t ask, don’t tell. Ask obliquely, don’t answer. Answer obliquely.” McGill’s stories tackle simple creatures obliquely, disturbing the symmetry of simplicity. “Gloria waits and waits” at the end of the story, one of many waiting games in this collection.
The second story shifts from geriatrics to a tenth-grade perspective, and begins in medias res with Ava Shapin describing her report to her class: “Whoa! Hard act to follow!” McGill is a ventriloquist, able to project compelling voices, as he addresses his reader. Ava addresses her teacher, Ms. Lam, and her classmates, a collective within “Report on the Bigfoot Collective.” She has a silent partner, Eddie, in her report: “as Ms. Lam has told me since assigning Eddie to me as a partner, embracing others’ ideas is key to success in the tenth grade, as in life.” Embracing partnerships add to collectives within this collection that has a number of hard acts to follow. (Alice Munro is one hard act to follow in the short story genre.) The lesson of belatedness occurs in Ava’s precocious phrase, “esprit d’escalier.”
The French phrase refers to belated wit or the inability to respond immediately with repartee, but Ava is not the only one to suffer from this Word of the Day in her insomnia in McGill’s diurnal and nocturnal rhythms. (The Word of the Day is delayed from the first story about the Day’s marriage.) Esprit d’escalier also belongs to the reader’s response, which is inevitably delayed in the double take of a story’s conclusion. If a story begins in medias res, then its ending’s inconclusiveness invites a pause in interpretation. This story ends with questions – “And Eddie? He’ll be alright, won’t he?” This indeterminacy is anything but simple in the spirit of lingering on stairs – hence the whispers and silences in McGill’s soundscape.
If Ava tracks the Word of the Day, then the next story, “Your Puppy Meets the World,” offers lessons on how to raise a dog. McGill’s investigations of a dog present a long list of instructions in a short parable that culminates in a specific allusion: “Expose your puppy to the films of Claire Denis.” In the list’s multiple exposures, this reference is delayed until near the end, and Denis’s films are further examples of delay – specifically, the post-colonial exposure of colonial behaviour in her most famous film, Beau Travail. She choreographs the exercises of the French Foreign Legion in Africa. The soldiers’ training comments on the puppy’s training in “a simple set of instructions to prepare your puppy for the world.” Once again, the simple lesson is not so simple in Simple Creatures with its animal fables and human foibles.
If the puppy meets the world, then the next story, “Something Something Aisling Moon,” exemplifies a failed meeting between Nessa, a graduate student, and the subject of her dissertation, Aisling Moon, who is a stand in for Alice Munro. Nessa is in a relationship with poet Hadi, who has grown up in Wiarton, Ontario – Munro territory. The doubling (and delay) of “something” appears in the repetition of dialogue that follows narration. The narrator offers a humorous list within their relationship: “it seemed bad luck that he’d ended up housemates, besties, and occasional fuck buddies with someone whose sole scholarly commitment was to the writing of Aisling Moon.” To which Hadi tells Nessa: “Besties and fuck buddies is fine.” Since Hadi is a poet who talks about such esoteric terms as “boustrophedon” and “lipogram,” the match of genres is fine. The juxtaposition of high and low between boustrophedon and besties accounts for some of McGill’s comedy with the double take of punchline, linguistic slapstick, and delayed laughter.
Boustrophedon is both obscure and telling: this rare poetic form reverses alternating lines in opposite directions. McGill’s mirrors reverse reality and image (Aisling means dream or vision in the illusory appearance of Moon). His reversals operate between sophistication and the vernacular, a meeting place for simple creatures. In the same breath that Nessa “was jonesing for a meet-cute with Aisling Moon,” Michael Ondaatje makes a cameo appearance. In the optical illusion or trompe l’oeil of seeing Moon who winks and uses unexpected phrasing, Nessa responds in kind, “winking back and trying for the same ironic tone that had just been modelled for her by the one true Aisling Moon.” McGill mirrors Munro in the refraction of boustrophedon and récit à clef. The missing letter of a lipogram also gets tucked in somewhere in these doubled and deferred relationships – “the friendship, the housemateship, or the fuckbuddieship.” In the twists and turns of this comedy of errors, “Hadi broke into a crooked grin and nodded, triumphantly mouthing the paired words of confirmation, somehow as startling as they were familiar: Aisling Moon.” Breaking into a crooked grin, McGill pairs words, and startles the familiar in his fiction.
The next section shifts perspective to focus on Hadi’s father, a pharmacist who has been selling drugs to Aisling Moon in Wiarton. Father tells his son that he will write about this in poetry or prose – genres tucked within genres. Hadi can’t help but write about his family: “Maybe at some point I will, in fact write about this day with Nessa and you and Aisling Moon.” In Munro fashion Hadi will change the names to protect his mother: “it’s like a dream: I’m not just me, you’re not just you. Even Aisling Moon wasn’t Aisling Moon. This day isn’t about her, though; it’s about Nessa, me, and you. It’s about how you never really know anybody, not even the people who love you most.” In the dream of Aisling, the techniques of boustrophedon and esprit d’escalier mingle in the moonscape and constellation of personal pronouns from you to she, they, and us. “You could probably spend your entire life …. she might try just listening and watching, hoping for an acuity of vision …. You slipped out of yourself, then, and got part-way into the head of someone else …. You never knew when they were going to call on you …. why don’t you tell us about yourself?” This constellation of pronouns shifts perspectives and identities with an acuity of vision that doubles senses and delays recognition.
Doubling recurs in “Confidence Men” where twins Seamus and Sean are called “Mr. Man” by Cam, who looks after them since their parents died in a car accident. The opening repetition introduces the doublings that follow: “We could’ve skunked them, Cam …. You should’ve stayed out of it and let us skunk them.” Cam assists her mother by pouring out ketchup in the kitchen: “Centrifugal force! Centrifugal force!” But this force backfires when she splatters the bottle across the kitchen and has to clean up before the twins see this reminder of blood in their post-traumatic state. “Cam is still shocked by these sudden reversals.” Enter Cam’s friend Peter Gretzky, related neither to Wayne Gretzky nor Peter Gzowski, but possibly to Peter Trotsky. “Cam sees her own life as a story that she’s writing,” in McGill’s recurring metafiction. With new plot possibilities and other heroes, “she has to keep things simple.” Simple creatures morph into Mr. Man, Mr. Happy, Mr. Forgetful, Mr. Prudent. “They have so many choices” in a series of books.
“The Stars are Falling” examines “simple”: “It’s only a simple game,” which the narrator picks up with “It wasn’t that simple.” Simple creatures examine complex language such as the “highfalutin words” in “The Thunberg Pledge”: cagmags, nullifidian, velleity – in the Word of the Day calendar. If “writing about your life is simple,” then the highfalutin words complicate it. The story ends with “I took the simple way out.”
“The Isle of Thanet” begins with a Kafkaesque gatekeeper, even as McGill’s other stories nod to Kafka’s ape in “A Report to the Academy.” Cam reappears in this story as a reader: “She bore down on the page in front of her, trying to gain traction with the sentence she was on, taking runs at it like a driver tackling a too-steep driveway in the snow.” The precarious sentences in Simple Creatures gain traction with each telling.
The final story, “Knock, Knock,” recapitulates some of the concerns in the other stories. Jacob and Melika inspect properties for sale: “open houses were simpler” than following an agent. McGill’s open house of fiction is simpler and more complex. Jacob knows about transference and counter-transference – relationships between characters, and between author and reader. He cooks gazpacho and “creviche” – the latter a portmanteau typo that includes crevette and crevice in the potpourri and fictional recipes of Simple Creatures.
Jacob also specializes in “knock, knock” jokes that tease the ontological identity of who’s there. The main one plays on palindrome, yet another reversal like boustrophedon. McGill may not be the first to knock or the first to enter, but his “little bailiwicks of craziness” tickle the funny bone, for under his sleeve reversals, delays, and revelations spiral through Simple Creatures. These petits récits linger in their afterwit and spirit of the staircase – l’esprit d’escalier.
About the Author
Robert McGill's writing has appeared in magazines including The Atlantic, The Dublin Review, Hazlitt, and The Walrus . He teaches at the University of Toronto. His previous books include two novels, The Mysteries and Once We Had a Country, and two nonfiction books, The Treacherous Imagination and War Is Here .Visit him at robert-mcgill.com.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : Coach House Books (Oct. 8 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 176 pages
ISBN-10 : 1552454932
ISBN-13 : 978-1552454930