Wastelands

The Tenants 
by Pat Dobie

Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2024
$18.00 / 9781772142297

Reviewed by Jessica Poon

*

The Tenants, by Pat Dobie, which won the forty-fifth annual Three-Day Novel Contest, has three appealing main characters. One of them is Maeve, a visually distinct, vibrant character in her uniform of a tweed suit, tight bun, and lavender Crocs, a look reminiscent of “a librarian on a mission.” Maeve lives in a tent, eats blackberries, and describes herself as “a scientist of time.” 

There’s Scott, an arborist dedicated to frugality and one day owning a home in Vancouver. His longtime partner, Dave, works from home as a “consultant slash contractor, which means no benefits, dental or otherwise.” Dave has a predilection for pricey beard products, enjoys gardening, and doesn’t mind renting in Vancouver indefinitely. The couple’s financial goals are at odds, with Scott advocating for austerity and Dave complying and repressing the depths of his discord.

Whereupon Scott is comfortable making his opinions and feelings known, Dave is more reticent with his feelings—“The thing about Dave’s voice is that it’s neutral most of the time. It’s hard to tell when he’s happy about something.” Their three lives intersect in Vancouver. A city with preposterously high rent where the “working poor live in their cars, if they’re lucky,” the largest number of unhoused people in Canada, and the perennially unattainability of home ownership, Vancouver’s unaffordability is a supporting character.

Scott and Dave eat out at restaurants twice a year and eat “beans and rice, beans and rice, beans and rice. Pasta and canned sauce on sale. Beans and rice.” Dave reflects that 

I took him as he was. I enjoyed the best of him. Isn’t that love? I never needed him to change, but his austerity program of the last five years needed me to and I felt myself changing for the worse. … If I were honest with myself, I’d acknowledge that if he’d been who he is now when we met, I wouldn’t have gotten this involved. This demonstrates that the nature/nurture question applies to couples too. We influence and are influenced; we affect and are affected…. So how is it we see each other change into the wrong person?

Although the reader never learns how Maeve’s life trajectory led to her living in a tent and sourcing food from bus benches and blackberry bushes and the occasional tussle with a raccoon, we do learn that she has siblings and has visited London and that she feels wistful for her youth. Her feelings are evocatively rendered: 

Sometimes I wish in those years when I had my whole life in front of me that I’d dressed better. It didn’t seem to be an option, and also, I wasn’t interested in clothes. I wanted to look as appealing as possible with no effort, and it turned out that looking appealing took some effort, day in and day out…. Ironic that now I’m in a wasteland in the bushes off a highway, where the fumes and the grit and dust gather on everything I use and wear, the effort to look not appealing but just presentable is intense.

Scott’s frugality credos are not without moral judgement and sanctimony:

You cannot be lazy, that’s just a fact. 
… The crazy thing about people who pay full price for everything is that many of them are one paycheque away from starving or losing their homes…. Most of the working folk don’t have a cushion; nothing in savings, lots of credit card debt, nothing put aside for retirement. They’re living in a rosy dream where the credit will never run out.
Not me. I take this shit seriously. I’m ten paycheques away from a problem. I want to be a hundred paycheques away from a problem. Or better yet, a thousand.

Scott makes good points; however, his “extreme frugality” doesn’t permit oppositional views, deleterious mental health issues, or burnout in a world he accurately recognizes as “capitalistic and materialistic culture.” 

When Scott learns what Dave has been concealing from him, their relationship is tested in a way that results in Scott appreciating radically different lifestyles and limitations—through Maeve.

In fewer than ninety pages, Dobie (Pawn to Queen) has produced an incredibly nuanced, eminently readable novel full of insights on being unhoused, a disappearing middle class, and the difficulties of romantic relationships, particularly when both parties have differing communication styles.

Maeve gets the last line, which encapsulates the isolation of living in a city where rampant, external markers of success are, all too often, prioritized above connection: “People living in cities have to respect each other’s privacy.” 

But maybe they don’t.

Originally from East Vancouver, Jessica Poon is a writer, former line cook, and pianist of dubious merit who recently returned to BC after completing a MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon has reviewed books by Giana Darling, Umar Turaki, Katrina Kwan, Jane Boon, Terese Svoboda, Maia Caron, Wendy H. Wong, Andromeda Romano-Lax, Sarah Leipciger, Katrina Kwan, Shelley Wood, Richard Kelly Kemick, Elisabeth Eaves, Rajinderpal S. Pal, Keziah Weir, Amber Cowie, Robyn Harding, Roz Nay, Anne Fleming, Miriam Lacroix, Taslim Burkowicz, Sam Wiebe, Amy Mattes, Louis Druehl, Sheung-King, Loghan Paylor, Lisa Moore (ed.), Sandra Kelly, and Robyn Harding for BCR]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster