The midlife crisis, a period of anxiety brought on by the passing of youth and the looming spectre of death, has long been embedded in the cultural consciousness.
Since Toronto-born psychoanalyst Elliot Jaques coined the term itself in 1965, it has become an absurd image in popular culture, conjuring a tragicomic vision of a sad sack in a toupee, leering at younger women from behind the wheel of a phallic sports car.
The Bourgeois Empire, by Evie Christie, ECW, 111 pages, $18.95
Evie Christie’s debut novel, The Bourgeois Empire, is an acerbic portrait of one man afflicted with the dreaded midlife crisis.
Christie, who published a volume of poetry, Gutted, in 2005, navigates the manic mind of Jules, the patriarch of a family in the upper-class Toronto neighbourhood of Rosedale, as he dives into a drug-addled affair with Charlie, a 15-year-old nymphet.
Indeed, the novel owes a great deal to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita – like Humbert Humbert, the unrepentant Jules presents his underage lover as a hyper-sexualized, precocious siren who lures him into her snare of iniquity.
But it also owes a great deal to Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in its frenzied, confessional tone and candid consideration of male sexuality.
Unlike Humbert and Alexander Portnoy, however, Jules is not plagued by his erotic obsession, but rather by the perceived stasis into which his life has settled. He complains that his family life has become static to the degree that it is thrusting him toward death, the ultimate standstill.
He sees youth, on the other hand, as a state of constant movement. Alistair, Jules’s teenage son, “was always busy and active, as though he were your mirror opposite.” To stave off the frozen inertia of old age and death, Jules plunges himself into a pattern of behaviour characterized by rashness and frantic activity, from his affair with Charlie and their drug use to hiring prostitutes in two brothels called Heaven and Hell. “You always believed that constant movement … could occupy you to distraction,” the novel suggests. “You just kept moving, aimlessly forward.”
Ironically, Jules’s escape from the quotidian sluggishness of his mainstream existence does little to propel him forward. As he and Charlie delve deeper into a life sustained by sex, pills and booze, Jules once again finds himself languishing under a spell of inactivity. They seclude themselves in bed, losing track of time while high on various drugs. It becomes evident that contrary to his belief that life constitutes motion, Jules’s life is a cycle of stases.
The novel’s frenetic stream of consciousness mirrors Jules’s need for movement to both ward off death and distract him from its inevitability. Christie crafts short, feverish chapters of radiant prose. In their whirlwind series of images and ideas, they blur the lines between the imaginary and real worlds, entrenching the reader in a surreal and slightly sinister landscape.
Meanwhile, one of the novel’s highlights is Jules himself, a quick-witted monster refreshingly free of redeeming qualities. While Humbert Humbert’s velvety prose and Alexander Portnoy’s self-loathing render them almost sympathetic, Jules hides behind no such delusions of honour. His self-addressed diatribe is startlingly forthright, acknowledging his selfishness and unapologetic about his disdain for his family; encounters with his wife and children are described as “distressing occasions of unplanned proximity.”
Jules’s faults are laced with a mordant sense of humour. While he barely blinks an eye at the thought of sleeping with a teenager, he is quick to catalogue the lines he won’t cross: “needles, bestiality, hugs, kissing untidy girls, and relations with relations.” Meanwhile, his vanity borders on ludicrous – when a rival for Charlie’s affections calls him an old, perverted pedophile, Jules takes comfort in the fact that the boy didn’t call him fat. Like so many of us, although few will admit it, Jules’s moral compass is not dictated by the inherent “right” or “wrong” of his behaviour, but by the consequences of being caught.
In The Bourgeois Empire, Christie shapes a keenly observed, carnivalesque romp through middle age, addressing the menace of mortality while lampooning comic stereotypes. Although her novel does not break any new ground in its meditation on life, death and underage sex, Christie’s audacious writing pulses with life and, yes, movement.
Emily Landau is a writer and reviewer in Toronto. She has yet to experience a midlife crisis.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
National Post
The Bourgeois Empire
By Evie Christie
ECW Press
111 pp; $18.95
Reviewed by Alex Good
The most striking thing about Evie Christie’s unconventional debut novel, The Bourgeois Empire, is its point of view — not because of its use of the second person, which is a formal device that Christie is willing to let slip on occasion, but for the withering cold eye it casts on masculine stereotypes.
The story’s anti-hero is Jules, as in the family jewels that define him: “the saddest of male anatomy, the cowardly half-formed unit of masculinity, keeper of life — the balls.” Just to reinforce his role in the story as Everyman, he is frequently referred to as a dick. Fleshing things out a bit, he is also representative of the modern haute bourgeois male: a corporate suit whose home life is a model of domestic decorum characterized by all “the confinements of refinement — the wife, the silk ties, the furniture” — that can be stuffed into an opulent “filthy-posh five-bedroom Georgianesque reno.”
Of course, everyone knows how beastly the bourgeoisie, with their sham morals and hypocrisy, really are. And so it comes as no surprise when Jules falls into a squalid mid-life crisis involving a 15-year-old wannabe Internet porn starlet named Charlie Baby Love.
In outline, the story suggests another variation on the archetype of the stripper-fatale, and it bears an interesting relation in this respect to such recent books as Russell Smith’s Girl Crazy and A. J. Somerset’s Combat Camera. The difference here is in the narrative voice, its accusatory “you” arraigning contemporary masculinity with sympathy and scorn.
Jules is not just a pair of walking gonads. In fact, he’s less a swaggering, macho CEO, or even dirty old man, than a clingy and somewhat pathetic figure. Immature, emotionally needy and living in a dream world most of the time, he relies on his wife, Nadine, to handle “adult” life. He doesn’t care for his children as much as he envies them the privileges of youth. Even his precious genitals are ruthlessly dismissed when he is discovered (crying) in front of a computer screen filled with indecent images, cradling his package “like it were a dead baby.”
This is drawn cruelly true to life, an indictment not only of a depressingly recognizable character type but of an entire culture, the 21st-century version of H.L. Mencken’s booboisie: a demographic of vulgar yet affluent consumers trying to buy an escape from reality.
That the book works so well is testament both to Christie’s wonderfully alert writing and the way she maintains a perfectly balanced moral tone throughout. In some ways, Jules really is a kind-hearted adult child, and he is allowed his share of redeeming moments. Equally often, however, he is a figure of contempt, simply too selfish and irresponsible to be allowed to get away with it.
Which is why I think this is, finally, his wife Nadine’s story — someone “serious and kind and intelligent” who understands Jules but confesses she cannot love him. It’s a testament to Jules’ level of self-absorption that he is shattered to learn this. One wonders if he thought she was his mother.
• Alex Good is the editor of Canadian Notes & Queries and runs the book review site goodreports.net.
By Evie Christie
ECW Press
111 pp; $18.95
Reviewed by Alex Good
The most striking thing about Evie Christie’s unconventional debut novel, The Bourgeois Empire, is its point of view — not because of its use of the second person, which is a formal device that Christie is willing to let slip on occasion, but for the withering cold eye it casts on masculine stereotypes.
The story’s anti-hero is Jules, as in the family jewels that define him: “the saddest of male anatomy, the cowardly half-formed unit of masculinity, keeper of life — the balls.” Just to reinforce his role in the story as Everyman, he is frequently referred to as a dick. Fleshing things out a bit, he is also representative of the modern haute bourgeois male: a corporate suit whose home life is a model of domestic decorum characterized by all “the confinements of refinement — the wife, the silk ties, the furniture” — that can be stuffed into an opulent “filthy-posh five-bedroom Georgianesque reno.”
Of course, everyone knows how beastly the bourgeoisie, with their sham morals and hypocrisy, really are. And so it comes as no surprise when Jules falls into a squalid mid-life crisis involving a 15-year-old wannabe Internet porn starlet named Charlie Baby Love.
In outline, the story suggests another variation on the archetype of the stripper-fatale, and it bears an interesting relation in this respect to such recent books as Russell Smith’s Girl Crazy and A. J. Somerset’s Combat Camera. The difference here is in the narrative voice, its accusatory “you” arraigning contemporary masculinity with sympathy and scorn.
Jules is not just a pair of walking gonads. In fact, he’s less a swaggering, macho CEO, or even dirty old man, than a clingy and somewhat pathetic figure. Immature, emotionally needy and living in a dream world most of the time, he relies on his wife, Nadine, to handle “adult” life. He doesn’t care for his children as much as he envies them the privileges of youth. Even his precious genitals are ruthlessly dismissed when he is discovered (crying) in front of a computer screen filled with indecent images, cradling his package “like it were a dead baby.”
This is drawn cruelly true to life, an indictment not only of a depressingly recognizable character type but of an entire culture, the 21st-century version of H.L. Mencken’s booboisie: a demographic of vulgar yet affluent consumers trying to buy an escape from reality.
That the book works so well is testament both to Christie’s wonderfully alert writing and the way she maintains a perfectly balanced moral tone throughout. In some ways, Jules really is a kind-hearted adult child, and he is allowed his share of redeeming moments. Equally often, however, he is a figure of contempt, simply too selfish and irresponsible to be allowed to get away with it.
Which is why I think this is, finally, his wife Nadine’s story — someone “serious and kind and intelligent” who understands Jules but confesses she cannot love him. It’s a testament to Jules’ level of self-absorption that he is shattered to learn this. One wonders if he thought she was his mother.
• Alex Good is the editor of Canadian Notes & Queries and runs the book review site goodreports.net.
Telegraph-Journal
Told as a second-person narrative, Evie Christie's debut novel is brutally brilliant. The protagonist is a man - "oldish, hot, tired and in the throes of an impressive existential failure" and hopelessly in love with a 15-year-old girl. Christie puts you in the shoes of this despicable man, but ties the laces with compassion. "This is you, your one life ... And this is it?" writes Christie, judging you more for wasting your time as a businessman than your pedophilia. This is a man whose bourgeois empire life hardly mattered. His deviant behaviour is framed as a sad, hopeless answer to what you want from life: "something different. Not really better, just something else."
Q&Q...
The Bourgeois Empire
by Evie Christie
Jules, the protagonist of Toronto poet Evie Christie’s debut novel, is a successful lawyer with a wife and kids, but he’s also lonely, bored, and saddled with a porn addiction. To make matters worse, his marriage is on the rocks and he’s falling in love with a 15-year-old girl named Charlie. As Jules descends deeper into depression, he becomes more and more detached from his life and family.
Closer to American Beauty than Lolita, The Bourgeois Empire examines unsatisfied middle-class urbanites struggling with the shame and emptiness that are byproducts of their distorted values. This is a well-worn theme, which Christie attempts to rejuvenate by experimenting with narration and structure. The book is narrated in the second person and jumps back and forth in time. Unfortunately, these devices are insufficient to rise above the story’s essentially clichéd nature.
Christie’s use of the second person is at first jarring, but it does serve a purpose: as a result of this narrative intimacy, Jules comes off as even more dislikable. However, he remains for the most part one-dimensional, whining repeatedly about the state of his life. This is especially unfortunate given that he is the most fully realized character; everyone else is a type. Jules’s yuppie wife wears couture-yoga clothing. Jules barely acknowledges his almost non-existent children. Even Charlie, Jules’s obsession, is little more than an off-kilter pixie dream girl.
There are scenes that work nicely. A chapter detailing Jules’s shameful, secret porn stash is sympathetically rendered. And during an encounter between Jules, his wife, and the couple’s dying dog, Christie takes us, briefly, beneath the veneer of Jules’s superficial surface.
The best feature of the book is the writing. Christie’s prose is precise, propulsive, and often funny. In an early chapter Jules wonders what would happen if his house caught fire while he was hidden in his office gorging on Internet porn. Would he make it out in time or remain shackled to his computer? “Do you hope your robe abides, drape yourself over the screen? Hope a testicle doesn’t drop aside.…” Such sequences show that Christie is talented, but her talent needs a subject worthy of it.
Reviewed by Chelsea Murray (from the November 2010 issue)
by Evie Christie
Jules, the protagonist of Toronto poet Evie Christie’s debut novel, is a successful lawyer with a wife and kids, but he’s also lonely, bored, and saddled with a porn addiction. To make matters worse, his marriage is on the rocks and he’s falling in love with a 15-year-old girl named Charlie. As Jules descends deeper into depression, he becomes more and more detached from his life and family.
Closer to American Beauty than Lolita, The Bourgeois Empire examines unsatisfied middle-class urbanites struggling with the shame and emptiness that are byproducts of their distorted values. This is a well-worn theme, which Christie attempts to rejuvenate by experimenting with narration and structure. The book is narrated in the second person and jumps back and forth in time. Unfortunately, these devices are insufficient to rise above the story’s essentially clichéd nature.
Christie’s use of the second person is at first jarring, but it does serve a purpose: as a result of this narrative intimacy, Jules comes off as even more dislikable. However, he remains for the most part one-dimensional, whining repeatedly about the state of his life. This is especially unfortunate given that he is the most fully realized character; everyone else is a type. Jules’s yuppie wife wears couture-yoga clothing. Jules barely acknowledges his almost non-existent children. Even Charlie, Jules’s obsession, is little more than an off-kilter pixie dream girl.
There are scenes that work nicely. A chapter detailing Jules’s shameful, secret porn stash is sympathetically rendered. And during an encounter between Jules, his wife, and the couple’s dying dog, Christie takes us, briefly, beneath the veneer of Jules’s superficial surface.
The best feature of the book is the writing. Christie’s prose is precise, propulsive, and often funny. In an early chapter Jules wonders what would happen if his house caught fire while he was hidden in his office gorging on Internet porn. Would he make it out in time or remain shackled to his computer? “Do you hope your robe abides, drape yourself over the screen? Hope a testicle doesn’t drop aside.…” Such sequences show that Christie is talented, but her talent needs a subject worthy of it.
Reviewed by Chelsea Murray (from the November 2010 issue)
Friday, September 12, 2008
Books in Canada (and Jonathan Ball's take)
Books in Canada Review for Evie Christie's Gutted
Books in Canada
Evie Christie's Gutted is violent; the reader is frequently confronted with images like "blood-slick knuckles," or "brain matter and bone fragments exploding". Yet the violence remains contained and controlled: it does not take over, never bleeds into the gratuitous or the exploitative. Take, for instance, the "Slaughterhouse Sonnet":
A million smiling Isaacs before you
Stab cherry coin slots into the thick pink collars.
Those who refuse to die, those who twitch, who,
With bloated eye and rancid hoof, take their time
In dying, will of course be shot in the face.
When you've been here as long as you've been,
They give you the company stopwatch:
Chain link vest, glove, glove, coveralls, light
Jog to station B and a piss takes 15 minutes,
Anything beyond and you're docked. Don't even
Think about a quick jerk for Christ sake, do it
On lunch or on the fucking drive in and you
Know for damn sure there's a God who's given such
Glorious freedom, endless vistas of blood and bone.
Not a textbook sonnet, perhaps, but an astonishing poem embodying all the qualities that make Christie's debut collection remarkable: her unabashed, tell-it-as-it-is poetic voice, deft handling of sensitive and shocking subject matter, precocious use of repetition, disregard for taboo, and her empathetic eye.
Christie gives us narratives of a contemporary urban environment: glass and steel and metal twisted in a bus wreck, desperate people driven to bar fights or suicide, domestic and drug abuse, "Porn Stars and Pharmaceuticals", and the scars left by love. The book jacket claims "this is essentially love poetry"-fair enough, but it is the kind of love that keeps "legs pinched together against buzzing schoolroom/ busy-bodies," the love of "the doctor who slipped it in first (without the glove) and winked." Many of the titles imply Christie is forging a new definition for love: "Not a Love Poem", "Reckoning a Different Kind of Love", "Zombie Love".
One of Christie's most unique talents is her use of point-of-view in these pieces, her ability to shift her speaker between not only male and female perspectives, but any range of experiences contained therein. Men who ogle barmaids, take mistresses, get into bar fights, lose wives, and women who cheat, are cheated on, see unscrupulous psychiatrists, move to the city, marry carpenters-all are treated with the same respect and grace, and rendered with the same precision and raw veracity. And none is spared the scalpel of Christie's wit and insight.
The only time Christie disappoints is when her drive for concision forces her more personal or character-based poems into hard-to-decipher narratives. To be sure, certain of these confessional poems are brilliant: "Letters Addressed to 745 Palmerston Avenue", "Sweet Revenge", and "I Don't Know, It May Just Be the Weather" pose no problem for the reader and offer tender but unflinching looks at leaving and returning home, dealing with family, and loss-themes to which anyone can relate. Likewise, the love poems addressed to an unspecified second person, as in "Reckoning a Different Kind of Love":
Not love at all really, but I spent hours
and months drinking gin or beer on your balcony
into daybreak. I wouldn't tell you how your posture
and stride reminded me of my father's, or the cool,
ritual way a heart can beat, knowing what is not right,
what it doesn't want, and beat again.
Other poems, however, delve so far into one individual's experience that, in their private details, they shut the reader out; "Picking Up My Brother on the Way to Hastings", "Riding County Road 3", and "Twenty-Fifth Birthday Suit", for instance, do not offer enough clues nor broaden sufficiently in scope to be accessible.
That said, Christie's craft never disappoints. She is at her strongest when she uses repetition; for example, the way she can repeat "I am afraid" in three stanzas of "This Is a Picture of Us" and make it always seem fresh and new in meaning and appropriately beautiful in sound. Her sense of line is exquisite. One notable departure from her standard free verse is "Zombie Love (Haikus)"- a series of haiku poems which are simultaneously macabre reflections on love and heart-felt tributes to zombie flicks. Christie repeats key phrases and images throughout the various haikus to create a surreal and bizarrely affecting poem. Far from being one of the living dead, Gutted is a refreshingly vital and shockingly vicious first book.
Matthew J. Trafford (Books in Canada)
Jonathan Ball on Gutted
March 19, 2010
One of my frequent complaints about poetry is that so much of it feels “bloodless” — the poems may be beautiful, well-written, precise, and well-structured, but lack a certain life, a rawness to which I respond. Evie Christie can’t be charged with any such thing — these poems are visceral and kinetic, and even the poems I liked less had a raw edge to them. No snowy landscapes or quiet contemplation of nature here — you’re more likely to find broken bottles and loud sex in these poems. The first poetry book of the year (for me), and though I may end up reading better poems this year (we’ll see!) I don’t know if I will end up reading any poems with more vicious, animal vitality.
Books in Canada
Evie Christie's Gutted is violent; the reader is frequently confronted with images like "blood-slick knuckles," or "brain matter and bone fragments exploding". Yet the violence remains contained and controlled: it does not take over, never bleeds into the gratuitous or the exploitative. Take, for instance, the "Slaughterhouse Sonnet":
A million smiling Isaacs before you
Stab cherry coin slots into the thick pink collars.
Those who refuse to die, those who twitch, who,
With bloated eye and rancid hoof, take their time
In dying, will of course be shot in the face.
When you've been here as long as you've been,
They give you the company stopwatch:
Chain link vest, glove, glove, coveralls, light
Jog to station B and a piss takes 15 minutes,
Anything beyond and you're docked. Don't even
Think about a quick jerk for Christ sake, do it
On lunch or on the fucking drive in and you
Know for damn sure there's a God who's given such
Glorious freedom, endless vistas of blood and bone.
Not a textbook sonnet, perhaps, but an astonishing poem embodying all the qualities that make Christie's debut collection remarkable: her unabashed, tell-it-as-it-is poetic voice, deft handling of sensitive and shocking subject matter, precocious use of repetition, disregard for taboo, and her empathetic eye.
Christie gives us narratives of a contemporary urban environment: glass and steel and metal twisted in a bus wreck, desperate people driven to bar fights or suicide, domestic and drug abuse, "Porn Stars and Pharmaceuticals", and the scars left by love. The book jacket claims "this is essentially love poetry"-fair enough, but it is the kind of love that keeps "legs pinched together against buzzing schoolroom/ busy-bodies," the love of "the doctor who slipped it in first (without the glove) and winked." Many of the titles imply Christie is forging a new definition for love: "Not a Love Poem", "Reckoning a Different Kind of Love", "Zombie Love".
One of Christie's most unique talents is her use of point-of-view in these pieces, her ability to shift her speaker between not only male and female perspectives, but any range of experiences contained therein. Men who ogle barmaids, take mistresses, get into bar fights, lose wives, and women who cheat, are cheated on, see unscrupulous psychiatrists, move to the city, marry carpenters-all are treated with the same respect and grace, and rendered with the same precision and raw veracity. And none is spared the scalpel of Christie's wit and insight.
The only time Christie disappoints is when her drive for concision forces her more personal or character-based poems into hard-to-decipher narratives. To be sure, certain of these confessional poems are brilliant: "Letters Addressed to 745 Palmerston Avenue", "Sweet Revenge", and "I Don't Know, It May Just Be the Weather" pose no problem for the reader and offer tender but unflinching looks at leaving and returning home, dealing with family, and loss-themes to which anyone can relate. Likewise, the love poems addressed to an unspecified second person, as in "Reckoning a Different Kind of Love":
Not love at all really, but I spent hours
and months drinking gin or beer on your balcony
into daybreak. I wouldn't tell you how your posture
and stride reminded me of my father's, or the cool,
ritual way a heart can beat, knowing what is not right,
what it doesn't want, and beat again.
Other poems, however, delve so far into one individual's experience that, in their private details, they shut the reader out; "Picking Up My Brother on the Way to Hastings", "Riding County Road 3", and "Twenty-Fifth Birthday Suit", for instance, do not offer enough clues nor broaden sufficiently in scope to be accessible.
That said, Christie's craft never disappoints. She is at her strongest when she uses repetition; for example, the way she can repeat "I am afraid" in three stanzas of "This Is a Picture of Us" and make it always seem fresh and new in meaning and appropriately beautiful in sound. Her sense of line is exquisite. One notable departure from her standard free verse is "Zombie Love (Haikus)"- a series of haiku poems which are simultaneously macabre reflections on love and heart-felt tributes to zombie flicks. Christie repeats key phrases and images throughout the various haikus to create a surreal and bizarrely affecting poem. Far from being one of the living dead, Gutted is a refreshingly vital and shockingly vicious first book.
Matthew J. Trafford (Books in Canada)
Jonathan Ball on Gutted
March 19, 2010
One of my frequent complaints about poetry is that so much of it feels “bloodless” — the poems may be beautiful, well-written, precise, and well-structured, but lack a certain life, a rawness to which I respond. Evie Christie can’t be charged with any such thing — these poems are visceral and kinetic, and even the poems I liked less had a raw edge to them. No snowy landscapes or quiet contemplation of nature here — you’re more likely to find broken bottles and loud sex in these poems. The first poetry book of the year (for me), and though I may end up reading better poems this year (we’ll see!) I don’t know if I will end up reading any poems with more vicious, animal vitality.
Broken Pencil
Broken Pencil Review for Gutted by Nathaniel G. Moore
GUTTED, poetry by Evie Christie
ECW Press
Throughout most of her first book Evie Christie's poetry is masterfully calculating and focused. In "Twenty-Fifth Birthday Suit", Christie manages to catapult us through her origin, her present and future with all the frightful deadpan she later uses in "Zombie Love" which livens up the collection with an unexpected turn and philosophy about Zombie's true appetite. "The properties of loss" evokes road kill, unstable weather and urban atmosphere. "There is a Place in Trois Rivieres" uses synthetic coconuts and its predecessor the synthetic lawn chair and pits them against the raw human experience of these trapped and released memories. These poems are an endearing feat, a peek into the tattooed mental plateau of the artist. Whether its "bones of our habits" or "to wake up alone, corrupt and queasy," these poems are read best in the mercurial way in which they were germinated; discover each one slowly, and stumble upon a nostalgic tomb of depraved suburban love wreck.
The poet is not identified as a "poet" in these poems, which benefits us all. The best thing about these poems is at least Christie is trying and refusing to sustain the stereotype of Canadian poetry, or the retarded image of the tortured and underrated poet. Christie is clearly in favour of torture, poets or otherwise.
In Gutted there are no remains, just dramatic and engaging emblems, sour wafts of cruelty, fully developed abandon and Olympic quality regret, a miserable postcard of a worn-torn life and the confident rejection of hope.
GUTTED, poetry by Evie Christie
ECW Press
Throughout most of her first book Evie Christie's poetry is masterfully calculating and focused. In "Twenty-Fifth Birthday Suit", Christie manages to catapult us through her origin, her present and future with all the frightful deadpan she later uses in "Zombie Love" which livens up the collection with an unexpected turn and philosophy about Zombie's true appetite. "The properties of loss" evokes road kill, unstable weather and urban atmosphere. "There is a Place in Trois Rivieres" uses synthetic coconuts and its predecessor the synthetic lawn chair and pits them against the raw human experience of these trapped and released memories. These poems are an endearing feat, a peek into the tattooed mental plateau of the artist. Whether its "bones of our habits" or "to wake up alone, corrupt and queasy," these poems are read best in the mercurial way in which they were germinated; discover each one slowly, and stumble upon a nostalgic tomb of depraved suburban love wreck.
The poet is not identified as a "poet" in these poems, which benefits us all. The best thing about these poems is at least Christie is trying and refusing to sustain the stereotype of Canadian poetry, or the retarded image of the tortured and underrated poet. Christie is clearly in favour of torture, poets or otherwise.
In Gutted there are no remains, just dramatic and engaging emblems, sour wafts of cruelty, fully developed abandon and Olympic quality regret, a miserable postcard of a worn-torn life and the confident rejection of hope.
Quill and Quire
Quill and Quire Review for Evie Christie's Gutted
BOOK REVIEWS
Gutted
Evie Christie; $16.95 paper 1-55022-710-6, 80 pp., 5 x 8, ECW Press, Nov.
While it's not yet clear whether confession is, in fact, good for the soul (the eschatological jury is still out), one thing is clear: the confessional mode has resulted in a lot of bad poetry. Thankfully, Gutted, the debut collection from Toronto poet Evie Christie, manages to avoid most of the pitfalls and clichés of confessional poetry, despite its roots in the approach.
Gutted is an emotional travelogue, a helter-skelter Bildungsroman moving from a semi-rural girlhood to boisterous contemporary life, love, and heartbreak in downtown Toronto. While Christie occasionally succumbs to too-poetic excesses ("In the Cold Months," for example, which describes "food served from the rare and hoarded porcelain/of grandmothers"), most of Christie's poems benefit from an almost brutal frankness. Christie writes with a plainspoken directness, in largely unadorned free verse that's nonetheless capable of jarring the reader with sudden, unexpected metaphor and imaginative leaps.
The poems here are thematically strong, if formally straightforward. "Twenty Fifth Birthday Suit" shifts effortlessly from a rigorous self-examination to an extended intimation of the speaker's mortality. "Letters Addressed to 745 Palmerston Avenue," meanwhile, charts the slow dissolution of a friendship through the titular correspondence. Throughout the book, Christie deftly captures the violence and victims of contemporary urban life with a cutting verisimilitude and keen familiarity.
Gutted is not the sort of poetry volume that is likely to win prizes, since it largely lacks stylistic daring and formal experimentation. It is, however, a confident and winning collection that will make a genuine connection with its readers – a trick substantially more difficult to pull off. This is the sort of poetry that will actually be read, rather than admired from afar.
Reviewed by Robert J. Wiersema (from the January 2006 issue)
BOOK REVIEWS
Gutted
Evie Christie; $16.95 paper 1-55022-710-6, 80 pp., 5 x 8, ECW Press, Nov.
While it's not yet clear whether confession is, in fact, good for the soul (the eschatological jury is still out), one thing is clear: the confessional mode has resulted in a lot of bad poetry. Thankfully, Gutted, the debut collection from Toronto poet Evie Christie, manages to avoid most of the pitfalls and clichés of confessional poetry, despite its roots in the approach.
Gutted is an emotional travelogue, a helter-skelter Bildungsroman moving from a semi-rural girlhood to boisterous contemporary life, love, and heartbreak in downtown Toronto. While Christie occasionally succumbs to too-poetic excesses ("In the Cold Months," for example, which describes "food served from the rare and hoarded porcelain/of grandmothers"), most of Christie's poems benefit from an almost brutal frankness. Christie writes with a plainspoken directness, in largely unadorned free verse that's nonetheless capable of jarring the reader with sudden, unexpected metaphor and imaginative leaps.
The poems here are thematically strong, if formally straightforward. "Twenty Fifth Birthday Suit" shifts effortlessly from a rigorous self-examination to an extended intimation of the speaker's mortality. "Letters Addressed to 745 Palmerston Avenue," meanwhile, charts the slow dissolution of a friendship through the titular correspondence. Throughout the book, Christie deftly captures the violence and victims of contemporary urban life with a cutting verisimilitude and keen familiarity.
Gutted is not the sort of poetry volume that is likely to win prizes, since it largely lacks stylistic daring and formal experimentation. It is, however, a confident and winning collection that will make a genuine connection with its readers – a trick substantially more difficult to pull off. This is the sort of poetry that will actually be read, rather than admired from afar.
Reviewed by Robert J. Wiersema (from the January 2006 issue)
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