Remind Me

Bob Armstrong -- Night Table Recommendations

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby (Penguin, 2009)

Let's start off with the obvious. I'm publishing a comic novel this fall (Dadolescence, Turnstone Press) about a pop-culture-obsessed middle-aged man who desperately needs to grow up and find a purpose. How could I not be a Nick Hornby fan? In his latest novel, he focuses on Annie, the wife of Duncan, a typically Hornbyesque music obsessive who treats an obscure 1980s rock album called Juliet with religious devotion. Like the rest of Hornby's books, it's funny, sad, hopeful, and honest.

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The Players, by Margaret Sweatman (Goose Lane Editions, 2009)

As a playwright, I've taken some liberties with Canadian history (plunking a pair of French philosophers into a voyageur's canoe, for example). So I've long admired the historical fiction of Winnipeg's Margaret Sweatman. Her most recent novel is an ambitious reconstruction of the event that gave birth to European influence in western Canada - the voyage of Radisson and Groseilliers and the founding of the Hudson Bay Company. Both carefully researched and wildly imaginative, the novel shows us a prostitute-turned-actress who becomes a mistress of King Charles II and is sent to the wilds of Hudson Bay to observe the goings-on for her master. Sweatman takes us inside the Restoration England that funded the French Canadian traders and founded the famous company, but still gives us an arm's-length, outsider's perspective.

The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick DeWitt (Harper Collins, 2011)

I am a sucker for literary westerns. McCarthy, McMurphy, Vanderhaeghe, Stenson - if there are horses in it, count me in. This second novel by Oregon-based expatriate Canadian DeWitt was the discovery of the year for me: a bloody, nightmarish frontier road trip that seems at times like something out of Cormac McCarthy, yet somehow merges laughter and hope with suffering, death and betrayal. In 1850s-era Gold Rush Oregon and California, assassins Charlie and Eli Sisters are on a mission to find and kill a prospector, stopping along the way to drink, grumble, learn about dental hygiene, and encounter a variety of lost souls. It's darkly comic and filled with oddly formal language reminiscent of Charles' Portis's True Grit.

An Empire Wilderness, by Robert Kaplan (Random House, 1999)

I picked up this older book by the prolific, globe-trotting Atlantic magazine journalist this year when I was researching a new novel set partly in the American West. Kaplan spent months crisscrossing the original American Empire - the trans-Mississippi West - to get a glimpse at the future of a country facing growing class boundaries, economic hollowing out and the prospect of worsening droughts and heat waves. His conclusions (two years pre-911 and 12 years before Standard and Poors downgraded U.S. debt) aren't exactly encouraging: "Perhaps only after democracy slips away, silently replaced by the power of corporations and other great concentrations of wealth in a society whose basic instincts are tranquilized by pharmaceuticals, masturbatory gambling, and the voyeurism of coliseum sports, will the true destiny of America reveal itself."

The Canterbury Trail by Angie Abdou (Brindle and Glass, 2011)

I've always loved the mountains. I spent a couple of years editing weekly newspapers in Fernie B.C. and Crowsnest Pass, Alberta, set my first play in a fictionalized Fernie and my first, unpublished, novel in Banff. So when I heard that a Fernie-based up-and-coming writer had published a novel about ski bums and class conflict in a mountain town, I had to read it. The metaphor of mountains as cathedrals and nature-lovers as pilgrims has been around at least since Wordsworth and Co. popularized hiking in Britain's Lake District. Abdou is, therefore, following in a long tradition in The Canterbury Trail. Many of her literary influences actually predate Wordsworth by several hundred years, as she takes readers on a pilgrimage through medieval literature while recounting the story of an unlikely group of skiers, snowshoers and snowmobilers on an unlikely quest for fresh powder.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf, 2010)

Both David Bowie and Elvis Costello wrote songs about goon squads in the 1970s, so it's not surprising that this ambitious novel takes place in and around the music scene. What's surprising is that Egan, instead of producing a novel of interest only to pop-culture junkies, has crafted such a moving meditation on time, family, failure and mental illness. The goon squad of the title is time, which has its way with the characters in a series of interconnected episodes that span the decades from the 1970s to a brilliantly believable mid-2020s.

Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon by Michael P. Ghigleri and Thomas S. Myers (Puma Press, 2001)

Let's close with one you probably can't find on the shelves of McNally Robinson, as it's sold mostly at gift shops around the Grand Canyon, where shopkeepers seem to think that a 400-page compendium of falls, drowning, heat exhaustion, hypothermia, suicide, plane crashes and homicides is great for business. Though heavy, it's a great book to haul along on a camping trip in order to entertain your fellow travellers with tidbits such as this: after the release of the movie Thelma and Louise, the Grand Canyon experienced a string of incidents in which drivers attempted to launch themselves and their vehicles off America's most iconic viewpoint.

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Bob Armstrong is a playwright, novelist, and freelance writer based in Winnipeg. His first novel, Dadolescence, was published this September by Turnstone Press. His plays include the historical/philosophical comedy Noble Savage, Savage Noble, Fringe Festival hits Haven, Tits on a Bull and You Are Here, and a work in progress called Jesus of St. Vital, which explores the years of Louis Riel?s exile in the United States in the 1870s.