John Lavery's Sandra Beck

I get antsy when I hear John Lavery’s prose described as “surreal” in reviews because that is the element I find missing from so much contemporary Canadian literature.

Writing in the hands of someone as talented as Lavery, who grapples intelligently with its potential, can create whole new kinds of emotion out of the raw material of juxtaposed words or striking images. A cop coming home “bursts into the house like a glob of mustard dropped into a crystal goblet of ice-water,” a child feels the “pinkness of the bathroom brushed into her mouth.” These statements are perfect – they create the feelings they’re describing. Lavery’s writing isn’t so much “sur-real” as it is “hyper-real”, illuminating our everyday with newness.

Of course, this kind of power doesn’t come cheap. “I’m a very meticulous writer,” he says. “The passages that seem the most spontaneous – have the most run-on sentences – those are the most worked towards. Every syllable, every comma, every dash.”

The really curious part of work like this is that through the highly technical process of creating with words, the characters that result seem truer, more authentic and more immediate. The people in Sandra Beck almost force themselves to be real. We haven’t merely been the observers of someone else’s senses, but are living in their minds as they observe. This is an astonishing book.

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Sept 23, 2010