A (comic) tale told by a Lemon… signifying amusement

Topology of Sexy Shoes
by Erik Talvila

Altona: Friesen Press, 2026
$15.95 / 9781038354792

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic 

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Type “campus comedy” in a browser’s search bar and not-wholly-reliable (yet) AI Overview offers up a definition: “a genre of entertainment set in a university or college, focusing on student life, eccentric staff, and academic satire.” 

AI Overview… 

(It or they? Is “artificial intelligence” one thing or many? Considering that re: artificial intelligence—again, thanks to AI O—“[n]o single entity owns artificial intelligence as a concept, but control over its commercial infrastructure and leading models rests with major technology corporations like Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon,” artificial intelligence is conceptually singular but plural in a practical, proprietary sense. We say browsers, universities, cars—so until the Singularity that Ray Kurzweil has been talking about for decades as starting seriously in 2029 and becoming irreversibly factual by 2045, we ought to opt for the plural: AIs, not AI. If Kurzweil’s clairvoyance is up to snuff, we—enslaved by AI or liberated by it—can refer to AI in the singular at that historical moment… because it’ll be the Singularity.)

(Kurzweil was perhaps the loudest broadcaster of this concept; math guy John von Neumann discussed “singularity” in the 1950s; his comments were published by Stanislaw Ulam in 1958; Vernor Vinge named it the “technological singularity” in 1993; and Kurzweil published The Singularity is Near in 2005. And James Cameron began a draft of the screenplay for The Terminator 1982, and named Judgment Day as August 29, 1997, when Skynet gains consciousness, at 2:14am, and begins its project of extermination; arguably, Cameron’s screenplay has had more cultural influence than Kurzweil, Vinge, von Neumann, and Ulam combined.)

… but I digress. Following a term definition, AI Overview offers up examples of campus comedy, which range from TV series (Campus, Community, Overcompensating) to films (Animal House, Pitch Perfect, Legally Blonde). 

Readers, though, may think first of novels, whether classics of the genre from David Lodge (Changing Places) and Robertson Davies (The Rebel Angels), or more recent titles by Julie Schumacher (Dear Committee Members), Mona Awad (Bunny), Maureen Medved (Black Star), Janice Hallett (The Examiner) and Suzette Mayr (Dr. Edith Crane and the Hares of Crawley Hall). (I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention Oldness; Or, the Last-Ditch Efforts of Marcus O, by yours truly, which is set at a Department of English that bears no small resemblance to an address where I used to teach.) 

Regarding the genre mechanisms of campus comedy, Coquitlam-based former math prof and debut novelist Erik Talvila knows the pieces well and inserts them competently in Topography of Sexy Shoes. 

There’s setting: Invigus University, a lower-tier (aka “backwater”) university on the muddy Invigus River, which some readers will associate with the Sumas River near Abbotsford, in a sleepy town that’s really the towns of East Invigus and West Invigus. 

Invigus U is not exactly a thriving institution; with its modest heyday already quite distant in the rearview mirror and the overall post-secondary economy one of downsizing, judicious cuts, penny-pinching, quantified performance evaluations, “cost-effective” course offerings (which means, basically, classes with high enrolment and low labour expenditure), and rampant glad-handing of Administration reps wherever and whenever possible, it’s teetering at the edge of oblivion. 

In short, the “academic satire” AI O includes as part of the genre’s definition, is literary terra firma, with Talvila operating within the established parameters. Invigus, at least the mathematics department, is a toxic hothouse work environment that’s non-collegial, panicked, and bad news for the lower rungs of the pecking order. That’s standard for campus comedies. 

As for genre’s “eccentric staff,” Talvila has a full roster. There’s Jeff Orange, a new prof who’s eaten up with the need to develop research that he can publish (while preparing for classes that he’s not particularly fond of or, well, actually prepared for). And: Elaine ‘I’m stuck in my rut in the middle’ Plum, a “hired teacher” of a dozen years—with no PhD, but thinking about it. Toiling in obscurity, she resides halfheartedly with Howard Quince, who runs the department with a prim, if brutal officiousness. He’s silver-tongued but feral. Before his career-killing disgrace, Kevin Spacey could have played him with ease; Quince is at once slithery, like certain accounts of Lucifer, but also steely and faintly ridiculous, like Gillian Anderson’s version of Margaret Thatcher in The Crown.

Rounding out the satiric figures are a visiting scholar, Zaitur Banana, whose absurd and quite unhinged presentation gives the book its title, and Ethelinda Zmeură—depicted as exotic, mysterious, and a “Riemann zeta function” specialist. She’s stalking the hallways and holding secret meetings and—it appears—up to no good: possibly, she’s having an affair. Then again, she might be angling for a job someone else already holds. In due course, the novel, being comedy (with its admirable goal, as Northrop Frye argued, to ridicule a lack of self-knowledge rather than to condemn evil), establishes a new and better and freer social order at IU (which remains no better off in the book’s closing pages), and the burdensome secrets of Lemon, Quince, Plum, and others, are released and lose some of their power. 

After opening chapters whose tonal mock-cheeriness reaches back to Stephen Leacock, Talvila introduces a framing device, which to my eye doesn’t quite work. Ed Lemon, a former math prodigy and go-to source on campus for illicit pharmaceuticals, whose creative tank has run dry and who’s gone off the deep end, narrates. He’s dead: “Hi. I’m Ed Lemon. Not to spoil the plot or nothing but I’m dead during the book. I’m also the editor.” For a few chapters, he ponders death and his steady decline, which he links to his mother: “My mother was nuts. I mean that literally. There were times when she thought she was a peanut and that my father was Mr Peanut, you know, the dapper guy who advertises for Planters Peanuts.” Yet he he soon disappears from the novel, as Quince, Lemon, Plum, and the rest, scramble to track the missing guy down. How he’s an editor and a narrator and a corpse all at once? That confused me, deeply, I’ll admit. 

The story races along, with characters holding an assortment of motivations and levels of desperation on the hunt for Ed, whose death they know nothing about. Reminiscent of the character actors in old comical detective movies like Clue or Murder by Death, they’re types, and enjoyable for the silliness built into them. The genre is largely an entertainment, after all, and the characters do their part keeping the entertainment afloat; as such, a reader does not much feel for them or get invested in their fate. Talvila is not writing realism; and psychological depth is not really part of the storytelling of Sexy Shoes. 

From chapters 1-26, Talvila begins with epigraph-like headers, random idiosyncratic notations from Ed Lemon, it would seem, whose commonality is their eccentricity: “As we entered the crypt my heart froze. On the stone floor was a discarded wrapper of Dracula brand Garlic Eliminator” and “I find silent movies don’t hold my attention. But, they’re better than those old silent records.” And there’s this:

The average person knows nothing of calculus, cannot solve a quadratic equation and is hazy on properties of triangles. They have the mathematical knowledge of an educated person from 500 BCE.

That latter musing stuck with me because the author’s fondness for math proved a real impediment to me. There are pages in the novel that meant absolutely nothing to me. This one, for instance:

Or this:

There are dozens scattered throughout the book. Taking the claim at face value, Ed Lemon is saying that approximately 90% of the population “knows nothing of calculus,” which means that Talvila’s audience in 2026 and after will look at pages and pages of his novel and, by virtue of “knows nothing of calculus,” be unable to appreciate the point, or the joke, or the gist because we’re functional innumerate regarding calculus.

The inclusion of so much mathematic terminology, not to mention equations as shown above, is an interesting choice for an author, insofar is it effectively—and severely—limits the readership who can fully appreciate, which is to say understand, the information on the page. In effect, it’s on par with printing pages in Aramaic. The author may not have wanted to dumb down his book for the 90% of us who cannot fathom the stuff, and that’s his prerogative. Still, if he writes The Topography of Sexy Shoes II using the same approach, I’ll hesitate before committing to it.

Brett Josef Grubisic recently relocated from V8K to V8V. Unpacked boxes remain a priority. Brett assigns, edits, and posts fiction, poetry, and children’s lit reviews for BCR; occasionally, he contributes reviews as well. Less occasionally, he doodles on Cull, his work-in-progress sixth novel. [He’s written about recent books by Vicky Fang, Paul Breau, Charles Demers and Kirsten Pendreigh, Joseph Dandurand, Cathalynn Cindy Labonté-Smith, Susannah M. Smith, Théodora Armstrong, Faith Erin Hicks, Hetxw’ms Gyetxw, Nathan Fairbairn, Otoniya Bitek, Martin Butler, and many others 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.

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