Guy Vanderhaeghe

I have recently finished Man Descending (Macmillian, 1982; Stoddart, 1992), Guy Vanderhaughe's debut book and winner of the 1983 Governor General's Award.

It surprised me (it was a lot better than I expected), and I have been trying to figure out why.

It was funny, for one thing. For another, it delivers its 12 stories in a variety of voices, each strong, self-confident, fully developed. This is not an apprentice work, though it was written by a young man. It is also a work that doesn't bow before the usual Canlit idols: naturalism, grief, memory, history, romantic realism. Every twenty-five years later, it is (in places) strikingly politically incorrect.

Through the first few stories, the collection seemed to be about the failures of fathers: failure to provide security, failure to provide stability, failure to safeguard meaning. The complaints of youth against adults: the world doesn't makes sense. But this is a more complex book than that. The title is remarkably vivid, as is the title story, which isn't representive of the whole. I will explain why.

The protagonist of "Man Descending" is, strangely, like a later fictional character: Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of Richard Ford's trilogy: The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1996) and The Lay of the Land (2006). That is, he is dreamy. He is impractical. He is failing to chart a solid course through life. In this respect, he is different from earlier protagonists in this collection, who demonstrate high degrees of common sense and are startled when others don't do the same.

The collection ends with "Man Descending" and a sequel to that story, "Sam, Soren, and Ed." Ed is the protagonist of these two stories. Soren is Kierkegaard, the 19th century philosopher. Sam is the lead character in a novel that Ed is writing. The final two stories in the collection bring readers (and Vanderhaeghe's protagonists) fully into the modern world, and they persuade the reader to accept that within this world the old certainties are gone, meaning is fallen, and ambiguity is all around.

As well as being funny, this is a deeply serious book. Something else that surprised me.

I've already mentioned Richard Ford; I should also mention Douglas Glover. And also note that I'm not saying that Vanderhaeghe is a Canadian Ford, a practice I railed against earlier. But imagine you've never heard a Led Zeppelin song and then you suddenly do, and you think: "That sounds like something from the 1970s." That's sort of what I felt like reading this book. It sounded like a Richard Ford book. It had bits that reminded me of Salinger (the funny parts). The earnestness of some of the stories might have echoes of Carver.

Again, this is not to accuse Vanderhaeghe of stealing or in any way being a lesser (Canadian) talent. Instead, it is part of the surprise. He is a Canadian work aligned with the work of these others; it doesn't follow Margaret Lawrence or other prairie realists. It is harsher and also wilder than I had expected, and it is no less fresh now than it was then.

Vanderhaeghe is based in Saskatchewan, as Glover was, too, in the early 1980s. Glover has also drawn from eclectic traditions, studied deep in philosophy, and challenged readers to see the world as a shifting, complicated place. (The prairies: hotbed of modernism?)

It is refreshing to find that books still have the power to startle.