Divisadero (2007)

I loved his Billy the Kid, his Coming Through Slaughter, his Running in the Family, but then I started into his In the Skin of a Lion and got it all over my shirt. A mess that never came out. So sentimental. From there I stopped, though I continue to give his books as gifts. Books I've read, and those I haven't.

Yesterday I saw a good-condition copy of Divisadero at the SPCA Thrift Store and bought it for a toonie. The book is divided into three sections, and I know the precise spot in the first section ("Anna, Claire, and Coop") where the Story kicks down the door of the Writing. 

The passage in question:

"Anna went into Rex's Hardware in Petaluma and bought a can of blue paint, a specific blue to match the blue on one of the [Buddhist] flags, and lugged it uphill to the cabin. Coop brought his table out onto the deck. She eased the top off the can and stirred the paint. The weather was strange that day, the heat interrupted by gusts of wind, and they watched the flags bucking, almost breaking loose. Anna remembers every detail. She wound up the gramophone for music. They waited to make love. She sanded down the wood while conjugating French verbs out loud and then began painting the table. All that colourless wood in the cabin had driven her mad, and this blue was a gift for Coop. The wind died suddenly into silence and she looked up. The sky was a dark green, the clouds turbulent like oil." (p.30)

Anna, 16, is the farmer's daughter. Coop, who was brought home as a farmhand at the age of four, is four years older than Anna and the other baby her father brought back from the hospital, Claire, because her mom died in childbirth too. After the farmer/father catches Anna and Coop fucking, Coop leaves the homestead for the book's following section where, at 23, we find him running with a crowd of Nevada City gamblers. A fairly jarring gear shift, made more erratic for a section that so far is reading like the worst of Thomas McGuane and Cormack McCarthy. Two writers I admire very much -- for their writing.

How long will I last? How false will Coop's gambler friends clang before I throw the book across the room and return to Lockspeiser's Debussy? Not an entirely bad feeling reading unconvincing characters, especially those at large in the late-1980s, a time when everything was out on the table and no one could convince anyone of anything (those most susceptible had already been turned). That really was the decade when everything changed in the U.S. and Canada. Not just in politics and economics, but in literature, which became less interested in pushing the limits of Writing and, for our sins, became completely concerned with Story.