BANG CRUNCH STORIES
By Neil Smith
(Vintage, pp242)

WITH some books, you either loathe from the first page onwards or, like this debut effort from a Montreal writer, you decide it will stay permanently amongst your other favourite works.

Far from being conventional, this collection of nine stories will tease, provoke, frustrate and astound you with its complexity. There is a thread that binds each and every of them but alas, I am only privy to one or two clues; the rest will require repeated reading, a much closer scrutiny and a keener mind.

As with all things, it’s always best to start at the beginning. Isolettes, which launches this collection, begins by examining a couple’s seemingly detached approach towards having a baby. For reasons both unconventional and modern, they have decided on this cold arrangement to bring forth a life into this world.

“I don’t love you,” they chant to each other every day even as they proceed to go through the clinical motions of making a baby. Their living arrangement is just as bizarre: “Proximity without intimacy” sounds good to her. For him, it’s this old joke — “If marriage is an institution, married people should be institutionalised” — which seems to make a lot of sense.
Things, however, do not go according to plan — the baby comes out premature. It’s as if Nature herself abhors such an unnatural union and forcibly aborts the outcome.

What to do now? Luckily, it’s not all gloom and doom. The final scene to this first Act, written in wickedly surreal fashion, shows the mother eyeing the baby, tubes and all snaking in and out of the baby’s airways and body, in the arms of a loving father, cooing away for all it’s worth. Ah, love may have found a way into their lives, after all.

Green Florescent Protein, the second tale, is not as easy to digest. It’s a study of two individuals and their lives are played out in their uneasy relationship with each other. On the surface, theirs is a warm camaraderie but underneath there is a simmering sexual tension.

Are they gay? It’s hard to tell. Even as the protagonist convinces himself that he is straight by reliving his sordid encounter with a girl (“All the parts work,” he mulls, not without a measure of satisfaction or relief), he fantasises about “some weird calisthenics for gym class” with his male best friend.

In the background is his widowed mother who talks constantly to his late father’s ashes, stored, in all places, in a hollowed-out curling stone.

She’s the link to another story later in this collection. Fast-forward to Funny Weird Or Funny Ha ha and the reader soon realises how clever the author is.

The shift in point of view is a powerful device indeed — it brings into sharp focus the whole picture, at least where the mother-son relationship is concerned.

To recap, the second story may have been told from the viewpoint of a juvenile struggling to come to terms with his sexuality and his father-less situation but the latter tale balances it with his mother’s perspective and motivations.

One telling example: We may have chuckled inside when we first read of how she constantly talks to the curling stone; later this hilarity changes dramatically to sympathy.

For me, the story that stays in my mind is The B9ers, about a man who starts a support group for victims of benign tumours. It’s black humour at best, and a nice distraction before the tales that follow: the obscure Bang Crunch, the conversational Scrapbook and the highly disturbing piece, The Butterfly Box, with its subtle themes of incest and revenge.

Extremities, meanwhile, reminds me of a schoolboy exercise in writing about the day in the life of something, in this case, a pair of gloves. And finally, Jaybird concludes with a thought-provoking piece about an actor who is asked to strip for a performance on stage for his peers. The arguments are persuasive and the build-up gradual and convincing. It reaches a crescendo and then... crash, bang, crunch! Sorry, you will have to read it to find out what happens.

To me, the power of this novel is the way the author discards with the conventional and presents his collection of stories in a seemingly disjointed yet somehow coherent whole. We read on, lost at times because of the obscurity but just as we want to give up, a door opens and we nod approvingly at the new direction the story is heading.

His is a prose that exasperates yet excites, plodding yet unstoppable, and which ultimately, lifts it above the mediocre. To me, this is a fine first effort but it is certainly not for everyone.

Bestsellers

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1. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow
2. A New Earth: Awakening To Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
3. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
4. How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be by Jack Canfield
5. Why Mars And Venus Collide by John Gray
6. The Law Of Attraction by Michael J. Losier
7. It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be by Paul Arden
8. Obama: From Promise To Power by David Mendell
9. Living History: Memoirs by Hillary Rodham Clinton
10.An Hour To Live, An Hour To Love by Richard Carlson & Kristine Carlson

Fiction

1. A Thousand Splendid Sun by Khaled Hosseini
2. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
3. Ps, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern
4. The Choice by Nicholas Sparks
5. Thanks For The Memories by Cecelia Ahern
6. The Last Empress by Anchee Min
7. Smart Vs. Pretty by Valerie Frankel
8. Sunday’s At Tiffany’s by James Patterson
9. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
10. A Prisoner Of Birth by Jeffrey Archer

Local Author

1. Reaching For The Stars by Sheikh Mustapha Shukor Al-Masrie
2. Tipping Points: Viewpoints on the Reasons for and Impact of the March 8 Election Earthquake by Oon Yeoh
3. Failed Nations? Concerns Of A Malaysian Nationalist4. Keganasan, Penipuan & Internet: Hegemoni Media Daulah Pecah by Hishamuddin Rais
5. Social Roots Of The Malay Left by Rustam A. Sani
6. Growing Up In Trengganu by Awang Goneng
7. Wang, Anda Dan Islam by Zaharuddin Abd. Rahman
8. Glimpses: Cameos Of Malaysian Life by Adibah Amin
9. Secrets Of Intelligent Investing by Ken Lo & Yu Foong Sin
10. How A Company Creates Shareholder Value by Radhakrishnan Subbrayan

Weekly list compiled by MPH Bookstores, Mid Valley Megamall, Kuala Lumpur. For week ending May 11, 2008.