Book Review
KID STUFF
by Tom Walmsley
Arsenal Pulp Press, 284 pp.
Tom Walmsley won the 3-Day Novel competition in 1979 with the all-but-legendary Dr. Tin. His next novel, in 1992, folded the original Dr. Tin into a longer, more sustained narrative entitled Shades: The Whole Story of Dr. Tin. Finally, 11 years later, we get Kid Stuff. He’s not exactly prolific, so this better be good.
The territory Walmsley treads in Kid Stuff is the same that S.E. Hinton covered for the teen set: kids with nothing to do but fight and break things and get into trouble. Kids from broken or troubled homes. Their broken and troubled parents.
It’s strong stuff, this. Lots of tough talk, some broken bones. Some bodies. The first chapter is one of the best things I’ve read in years – a brutal and utterly believable description of a boxing match featuring Moth, our protagonist of sorts. The whole book is a far cry from the internally focused, angst-ridden, portentous, historically laden, middle-class psycho-effluvia that the major fiction prizes – and much of the Canadian reading public – venerate.
Walmsley succeeds in making his characters’ psychically barren internal landscapes compelling, in part because he understands deeply the rules of plot tension. He keeps changing the rules, shifting points of view as often as something actually happens, with the effect of compelling the reader to keep plowing through the book. The symbolic and melodramatic excesses of Shades are a thing of the past. With Kid Stuff, Walmsley has finally arrived as a major novelist, not just a cult writer.
About two-thirds of the way through, as Walmsley unwisely begins to stick more closely to central characters’ points of view, it becomes apparent that nothing in these people’s lives will ever change, that the limit of logical extension has been reached. So if, in the end, Kid Stuff drags, it’s no blot on the book’s central achievement. It still stands as a testament to literature’s power to surprise, delight, shock and disturb.
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