| Not many authors return to books they wrote almost 30 years ago and take another crack at them. But Keith Maillard has not only revisited the fictional world of his two early novels, The Knife in My Hands and Cutting Through, he’s also given it nothing short of a complete overhaul. His new project, Difficulty at the Beginning, has taken those two books as its source but stretched the material into four new works: Running, Morgantown, Lyndon Johnson and the Majorettes and Looking Good.
The first novel, Running, traces the early adolescence of John Dupre, a young man whose main interests are Kerouac, running and girls. The time is the late 1950s, where you’d still grease your hair, wear knee-high socks and be interviewed by your date’s parents. John and his best friend Lyle spend their time as many young teenage boys do, drinking and thinking about/staring at girls. For both of them, though, running – both at school and outside of it – becomes the way in which to test their inner endurance, the physical act transformed into a force of spiritual and physical experience.
As the tetralogy continues (with the three remaining novels to be issued later this year by Calgary publisher Brindle & Glass), John moves on to college, where he grows his hair out and strums his guitar, emulating the early ’60s folk troubadours. It isn’t long before America gets drawn into the long, bloody hell of Vietnam, and he evades the draft, becoming an activist in hiding. It was this aspect of the novels that held particular resonance for Maillard.
"Sometimes, when I look south to the border, there’s an uncanny resemblance to the high ’60s and Vietnam," says the West Virginia-born, B.C.-based author, whose other works include Gloria and The Clarinet Polka.
One of the most striking threads of Running is John’s affinity for femininity. Today, with psychological definitions being much more fluid than they were 50 years ago, one would be tempted to categorize him as having an associative disorder. Maillard’s descriptions of John as a child asking his mother to buy him dresses for costumes and, later, secretly reading Seventeen for fashion and beauty tips are delicately drawn, and the author says this element will be pursued in the next novels.
In order to write the series, Maillard returned to his early manuscripts to steep himself in material written three decades earlier. "I’ve done so much new writing that it’s like a new work," he says. "As I went forward, they resembled (the original novels) less and less. In the third instalment, only four pages were salvaged, and over 85 per cent is new in the fourth – much more than a cosmetic change."
So far, Maillard’s favourite response towards the book has come from his 16-year-old daughter. "One of the things that amazes me, watching my kids grow up, is how much has changed and a bedrock of things that haven’t. There was a lot that was oppressive (in the ’50s) and not everything transcended it. If she, in 2005, enjoys it, that is gratifying."
Maillard reads at Pages on Kensington this Thursday, November 17 at 7:30 p.m.
Pages has two other readings this week, the first (in conjunction with the Council of Canadians) on Monday, November 21 at the John Dutton Theatre in the W.R. Castell Central Library. Maude Barlow presents her new work, Too Close For Comfort, which explores the American influence on Canadian culture. Back at the store, on Wednesday, November 23 at 7:30 p.m., local poet Richard Harrison is launching his new collection of poems, Worthy of His Fall. Consisting of dark poems about war and death, it sounds like a change from his previous collections, Big Breath of a Wish and the hockey-themed Hero of the Play.
At McNally Robinson, Gordon Cope promotes his new travelogue, A Paris Moment, an account of his year in the beautiful city, on Thursday, November 17 at 7 p.m. The next evening, Friday, November 18 at 8 p.m., crime author Michael Slade reads from his new thriller, Swastika, where a manhunt for a Vancouver serial killer is set against creepy SS officer Ernst Streicher’s development of weaponry in wartime Germany. And on Sunday, November 20 at 4 p.m., Canadian novelists Barry Webster (Montreal) and Suzette Mayr (Calgary) read from their recent novels, The Sound of All Flesh and Venous Hum, respectively. As well, if you’re interested in learning more about the publishing game, and how to get published, the folks from Ink Tree Press will be at the bookstore giving a free seminar on Wednesday, November 23 at 7 p.m. |
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