Barnacle Love. Why is there a fish on the cover and not a barnacle?
Anthony De Sa’s first book aptly illustrates a lot of the things I find frustrating about Canadian literature. When you think about Canlit in broad strokes, you find that a huge swath of it is coloured with the same themes, the same tropes. There is something about the popular fiction in this country which recoils from variety. De Sa’s Barnacle Love is pretty much the standard, Canadian multi-generational immigrant-family story. It shows the standard-issue disappointment with life, and the repercussions inflicted on the next generation. Like a vast majority of Canadian fiction today, it’s a mournful chronicle of psychological minutia, of the flaws we all apparently end up showing. It provides the same workhorse, realist prose that makes up a lot of the Canlit you see in stores.
Manuel Rebelo is the wild, ambitious, favoured son of a severe and hateful Portugese woman living in an isolated fishing village. He follows his father’s journey and leaves on the ocean, disembarking in Canada. He has a family of his own and the humdrum reality of the life he ends up living makes him wilt under the weight of his unfulfilled ambitions, and he ends up taking it out on his family. That’s the basic premise we’re working with here.
The problem with this work is not that it replicates a theme we see with an intense frequency in Canadian literature, the problem I have with this book is that it seems to understand the industry it swims in and the audience of Canadian literature, and it feels like it is trying to appeal to that crowd, and thus seems manipulative.
Take for example the subplot that starts to be drafted early on in the book “He had reached out as a young boy when faced with the loss of his father. But his trust had been betrayed and his want silenced. He hadn’t thought of Padre Carlos for a while”. Of course this is our introduction to the abuse Manuel suffers at the hands of Padre Carlos. But this small thread emerges from the weave only a handful of times in the book. In the real world of passion and pain and flawed whole humanity these experiences ruin entire lives, they halt the mind and recur as trauma, they don’t just slough off like dead skin but this is exactly what happens in the book. Now I’m not saying that all fiction must be true to the medical, psychiatric realities of the human self, but when a young boy gets abused in a book, one might think it’s worth something, that it’s important. Instead it has no bearing on the story whatsoever. Manuel confronts the aging Padre Carlos, yells a bit, knocks over a statue and for the rest of his days has a mild distaste for the Church. That’s it. That’s the entire saga of Manuel Rebelo dealing with the years of abuse he suffered as a boy.
It’s so half-hearted that I can’t help but think of it as a gratuitous ploy, a something added in to the plot to spice up a straightforward story with overtones of sex and danger and drama. But without a solid grounding, without reason or consequences drafted into the story these scenes just fly around like kites in a silly wind. And this kind of limited impact scenes pop up often in this book, so stories dissolve sometimes into what feels like collage. Manuel’s son Antonio navigates his religious childhood and burgeoning homosexuality in a pretty interesting narrative involving a school friend named Ricky, but in one scene Antonio discovers Ricky outside a Toronto pool hall, where a five dollar bill is pushed through a glory hole, followed by a male member. The whole thing is so jarring that I rebelled against the whole conceit, and instead found the story silly. There’s no consequence to it, there’s no real pain or exuberance or knowledge attached to it.
Essentially, there’s no real pain or grit or hard-earned awareness attached to any of these scenes of extreme discomfort. If anything they just seem like something that De Sa does not actually want to write. He doesn’t delve into them or use them to propagate anything. They just drift in like dust and then drift out. And if someone doesn’t want to write something, its existence seems trivial. As counterpoint, a later scene where Manuel’s daughter Terezhina snaps and kicks her drunken father to unconsciousness is actually affecting and captivating. It’s written with a reality of emotion attached to it – it’s obvious De Sa has a particular connection to it. And this scene has consequence. It finally pushes Manuel into rehab and his long-suffering wife into some form of strength. That scene has power and purpose.
De Sa’s writing style is equally skittish, sometimes veering into language and expression that stands between his story and the reader. You can forgive a small amount of imprecision in description, as the ides of fiction are nothing less than that of imagination itself. But if you write things that are simply wrong enough, then it starts to get simply irritating. Nothing extravagant, no Derridean analysis of language. Just irritating. The first scene of the book is the dramatic retelling of a storm that washes Manuel’s small dory towards the shores of Canada and swamps him.
Again, he pierces the surface, the biting cold filling his lungs as he coughs and sputters. It is the moment he needs. He reaches into his sweater and draws out the crucifix, which glistens in the moon’s light. He twirls it between puckered fingers, places it in his mouth – between his clicking teeth.
But later on De Sa describes the “impenetrable dark” of this storm. There’s no “moon’s light” here at all! Why does a drowning and desperate Manuel “twirl” his cross? Why does he put it in his mouth? Why does any of this happen? It’s just weird. It’s just irritating. Later on De Sa describes Manuel’s face as “perfectly round”, which if it were true would make Manuel a hideous simulacra of humanity, a balloon-headed monstrosity. Is it round? Sure. Is it perfectly round? NO. His mother disciplines his ten-year old brother and he “dangles from her clenched fist”. But I don’t think De Sa means for us to believe Manuel’s mother is possessed of a superhuman brute strength. De Sa also has the very bad habit of single-adjective sentences, most items are described with one descriptor, which isn’t so bad except when you chain them together. Here, take a look: “rubbed their goose-pimpled limbs and their stubbled necks with amber bars of glycerin soap”. When you spend too long with this one particular kind of single-adjective description, it starts to lose its punch and become repetitious.
The characterization I found to be weak too. There’s absolutely no hint that Manuel will become the monster he does become later in the book. he is a good-natured and good-tempered child. There’s a great and fueled ambition in him, but there’s a huge kindness too. He’s never insensitive, he’s never intemperate. And then suddenly we are led from the adult Manuel who nobly buries his mother and loves his family to maybe eight or nine years later, where the middle-aged Manuel cheats on his wife, drinks to excess and abuses the family. Manuel’s wife similarly metamorphosizes from a woman strong and capable enough to blindly leave her family and trust in her future, to a woman who cannot stand up to her brutish husband, a weak and conciliatory woman who hides and obfuscates. It’s unbelievable. The idea of a novel should be to trace the character from here to there, to mark the places in between and tell that journey. But without a believable link to the people they will be in the future, or to the people they used to be in the past, it seems implausible. And I think that’s a small death in fiction.
