Conventions bent, conventions broken
I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley
by Thom Vernon
Gananoque: Guernica Editions, 2024
$29.95 / 9781771838795
Reviewed by Logan Macnair
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Told over a twenty-four-hour period, I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley, tells the story of several interconnected characters navigating a large storm (both literally and metaphorically) in the heart of Toronto.
The novel’s point-of-view alternates between three primary characters as they make their way through this single day, the assisted suicide of the high school teacher Albert being the event that ties them (and essentially all other secondary and tertiary characters) together.
The first (and most thematically important) of these characters we are introduced to is Milk, the young man whose journey through the liminal state between childhood and adulthood serves as the understated heart of the story (and who is no doubt the ‘I’ in the book’s title). The stylistic choice to depict Milk’s (and only Milk’s) chapters from a second-person perspective, while one that seems arbitrary and perhaps even jarring at a first glance, is one that is earned by the final page.
Indeed, Milk, for better or for worse, does exhibit a new level of self-actualization by the end, shifting from someone whose story is initially told to him to someone who can now exhibit the agency required to narrate it himself.
The second perspective we are introduced to is that of Sessy, Milk’s mother. While exhibiting paranoia about Jeff, her romantic partner, being unfaithful to her (not altogether unwarranted, as it turns out), and coping with an eating disorder that perverts her relationship with food and self-image (the psychological depictions of EDs/bulimia being some of the more striking and evocative passages in the book), she is propelled in the novel’s second half to head straight into the oncoming storm by a motherly desire to protect her son by any means.
And then there is Ton, a lascivious and macho cop who serves as the third and final point-of-view character, and ultimately the one that must apprehend and interrogate Milk and his friend (the Tom Meuly of the title). Ton’s chapters read as a sort of manic and ribald police procedural, the scenarios and dialogues often surreal and stilted, as if a long-lost episode of Law and Order directed by David Lynch that I watched at 1am after drinking too much NyQuil.
Speaking of dreamlike imagery, the novel’s prose often has a hypnotic cadence about it. Short, often fragmented, sentences that combine stream-of-consciousness thoughts, pop culture references, onomatopoeia, and tangentially related asides create a steady pulsing rhythm that propels consistently forward. It is this animate and bouncing prose, rather than the plot itself, that serves as the novel’s main attraction—
A bat hangs from your ribcage but Mr. P. anchors you. The guys hit. Crack. Crunch. Their breath dissipates. Silence. Fighter jets swoop in low. The girders shake. The alarm squeals again. The guys bolt. The geese scatter. The jets’ roar thins.
Though the terse sentence style is closer here to Palahniuk than Hemingway as the sentences are often laden with explicit carnalities, base vulgarities, and all manner of intrusive thoughts:
At The Vibe next door, guys lined up waving sparklers for a Q-Weiner Fest. And there he rocked it. Julio. Stalker. Silver shorty shorts. Sparkler in hand. Pirouetting on a parking meter. Sees the squad car, and jumps up like a schoolgirl. Fucker. Man. He looked good. Very good. Damn. Streetlight refracted off Julio’s aluminum neon crotch. Shit. Groin meets thigh—muscled, taut, edible. Fucker-fuck-fuck.
The dialogue is often delivered in a similar manner, with characters speaking in impulsive half-sentences, with the reader left to fill in some of the gaps and bridge the connections. While this style does lead to a percussive and kinetic reading experience, across 300+ pages the ‘volume’ of the prose can occasionally overpower the character moments and underlying themes themselves and invite the desire for some room to breathe. A good DJ knows that a song with a strong and fast beat will get bodies on the dance floor and moving, but they also know when a switch-up in the tempo is needed and appropriate.
That is not to suggest that this book entirely eschews thematic substance in favour of its punchy prose, as there are some interesting ideas and symbolism being explored here. This is particularly true of the character Milk, whose large collection of G.I. Joe action figures is a recurring fixture. Vernon dedicates significant time to the descriptions and names of the various figures and, eventually, to their destruction at the hands of Milk himself.
While perhaps the most obvious interpretation of this act of destruction is to view this as Milk ‘sacrificing’ and separating himself from the objects of his youth as a means of propelling him into adulthood proper, I suspect Vernon had deeper reasons for selecting G.I. Joes specifically to represent childhood innocence. What are G.I. Joes if not symbols of hegemonic masculinity, of hierarchical order vis-à-vis the military chain of command, of unambiguous ‘heroes’ and ‘good guys’—all concepts that Milk is, to some degree, learning to reject or otherwise rebel against.
There are several ‘rules’ and conventions that Vernon (who currently teaches creative writing at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops) is able to bend and break in this work in ways that more inexperienced writers might not have been able to pull off so effectively. Whether it is the aforementioned stylistic choices, the changes in points-of-view, the occasionally arbitrary use of capitalization and punctuation, or even the general ‘vibes over plot’ style of the book, there is undoubtedly a unique and fully-realized voice that emerges across these pages.
The willingness to forgo these conventions and engage with some gonzo stylistic and narrative choices is worthy of commendation here, as too commonly Canadian writers are being myopically pigeonholed into the rigid narrative and formatting standards that modern publishing tends to demand. And in the end, I would prefer to engage with art that takes these big swings, even if some of them occasionally miss, than to see no big swings taken at all.
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Logan Macnair is a novelist and college instructor based in Burnaby. His academic research is primarily focused on the online narrative, recruitment, and propaganda campaigns of various political extremist movements. His second novel Troll (Now Or Never Publishing, 2023) is a fictionalized account based on his many years of studying such groups. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon reviewed Logan’s Troll in BRC. Logan has reviewed recent books by Daniel Zomparelli, Edward Cepka, Ann Rosenberg, Matthieu Caron, Taryn Hubbard, Tamas Dobozy, Andrew Battershill, Kate Black, Kawika Guillermo, and James Hoggan with Grania Litwin for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), 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