Naked in the city
The prince of the anti-CanLit gang just can't hack convention
From the Toronto Star, September 10, 2001

Ditch, Hal Niedzviecki, Random House, 230 pp., $24.95

Those skeptics who continue to demand proof that Can-Lit exists need only to observe a new generation of writers determined to dismantle the genre, sentence by sentence, trope by trope. Be it the minimalist, poetic prose of Derek McCormack and Mark Anthony Jarmon, the anti-stories of Sheila Heti or the raw, sparse, gritty urbanism of Hal Niedzviecki, whatever Can-Lit might or might not be, there's a bunch of young turks eager to dismantle or dismiss it.

If Niedzviecki isn't the most well known of this anti-literati, he's certainly the most prolific -- editor of the Concrete Forest anthology and indie-culture magazine Broken Pencil, plus the author of the short story collection Smell It, the novel Lurvy, and the non-fiction book We Want Some Too. Barely 30, he's done much to legitimize the city as the new, true Canadian landscape and thrown in some cartography for good measure.

Ditch is Niedzviecki's second novel, an attempt to merge the experimental impetus of Lurvy (a frustrating, unfocused, and mostly unrewarding hodge-podge of prose and illustration that purported to retell Charlotte's Web from the point of view of the farmhand) with a more recognizable (read: conventional) narrative structure. Crudely put, Ditch is boy meets girl, boy and girl go on road trip, with murder and Internet porn thrown in for good measure.

This is a bleak novel, populated by an apathetic, inarticulate protagonist (Ditch), his unsatisfied and unappreciated mother (Barbara) and his love interest (Debs) -- a runway with an enigmatic past and a penchant for posing nude.com. Ditch is 23 and his legs hurt, his life lacks purpose, and "He keeps pouring beer in oblong splashes down into the part of himself he thinks he might be able to fill." Debs, meanwhile, "has eyes the colour of sidewalk, cracked and dead, poured slabs -- she's crazy, Barbara can feel it, a setting concrete, names etched into accidental permanence." Ditch and Debs tumble into lust, secrets emerge, and eventually they abandon Toronto and head toward Maryland in a stolen van to rejoin Debs' family.

Ditch retains the taut, staccato sentences of Niedzviecki's previous work: "A baby gets born, keeps quiet, does what he's told. One day he smells the night. The night is simple. The dark concedes a destination." Niedzviecki evinces incredible restraint in his prose, combined with an ability to create curt, vivid bursts of description and meaning, a skill requiring equal amounts courage and confidence.

Niedzviecki relies heavily on punctuation to generate mood and pacing: "Ditch swings the beer bottle. He hears a sound: the satisfying shatter of a grin; and under that, the agreeable silence, the bar's hushed complicity -- in this, in everything." His tone and pacing, for the most part, suit the viscera of the urban environment his characters react against. Ditch succeeds in creating a dialogue between the city and its citizens, describing well their struggle: "The sun cuts through the clouds and disappears. Hungover men wearing greasy beards drive the empty streets tossing newspapers on porches. The city licks its wounds. The night tells stories. Everybody listens."

As a "cyberthriller," however, Ditch falters. Debs' forays into online porn act mostly as a convenient plot device, and Niedzviecki is unable to meaningfully weave an ongoing series of emails that Debs sends to her father. Worse, the nuances of Internet porn seem beyond Niedzviecki's grasp. Debs finds work at a Toronto bar, which is soon filled with fans of her website -- the logistics of which remain puzzlingly unexplained. And near the end of the novel, Ditch attends a party for a porn provider called Crabs.com. Naming a salacious site after 1980s STD slang is the equivalent of calling a five-star restaurant Chez Salmonella.

Ditch succeeds at poking and prodding at our understanding of memory, how it is documented and interpreted, in the process forcing us to examine our realities: "Debs holds an ancient wrinkled snapshot. Something about the faces, studied exuberance, failed youth. They remind her of certain photos, of her own photos; pretend permanence, it's all porn, in the end." Disappointingly, Niedzviecki uses the final forty pages to slam the reader toward a migraine-inducing, disconnected, nearly hallucinatory conclusion. After providing page after page of clear, crisp prose, Ditch dissolves at the exact moment the reader seeks clarity and closure.

It's unclear whether Niedzviecki is unwilling or unable to capitulate to the literary equivalent of verse-chorus-verse. He continues to chafe at producing, for lack of a better term, "normal fiction." His willingness to experiment will probably irritate more people than it will please. Ditch is not a simple, easy-to-digest, mainstream novel -- filled instead with disturbing sexual situations and delivered in a disjointed, abrupt, bleak voice. Yet it is being published by a mainstream publishing house -- proof of the influence Niedzviecki and others have had in shaping literature in this country. How fans of Can-Lit will react to such sacrilege is anyone's guess.