Author Paul Quarrington
The temptation to read fiction as autobiography is often too strong to resist. I can’t read Nabokov’s Lolita without pondering the author’s sexual proclivities; Great Expectations without imagining Dickens’s Victorian childhood. While this impulse was discouraged in my undergraduate English classes, I confess that interviewing authors has only reinforced this approach. Although there have been exceptions to this rule, when I read a novel featuring a fortysomething writer trying to pull out of a mid-life nosedive, I generally expect to meet a novelist that closely resembles their protagonist.
Fortunately, Paul Quarrington is far too interesting a writer to pass off his diary as a work of fiction. Clearly aware that The Ravine (Random House Canada, 292 pp.) may appear to be a thinly veiled autobiography (one clever subplot features a literary poseur who writes a roman a clef featuring Paul, a character based on the author’s surrogate Phil McQuigge), Quarrington uses the clay of his experience to sculpt a work of art that transcends it. While he admits that Phil shares many of his traits and experiences, including an imploding marriage and a childhood trauma, he uses the specificity of these details to tap into something much more universal.
“I use some of the aspects of my own life, and then I have fun with them,” says Quarrington. “Some of the things I do are to support my novel-writing habit. Like the television and film work, although there are some pretty good shows that I’ve worked on, it’s sometimes just a job. Phil is a television writer who’s trying to sort of redeem himself. It’s not that I feel ashamed of writing for television or anything, but it’s something I wanted to explore.”
Quarrington, who has written for Canadian television programs like Tom Stone and Due South, in addition to critically acclaimed novels like his Giller-nominated Galveston, combines a television writer’s ability to hit dramatic beats with a novelist’s understanding of emotional subtext. When Phil decides that he can trace the beginnings of his downward spiral to a murky incident in a suburban ravine, he sets off on a quixotic journey to find out once and for all what really happened when he set off for an afternoon adventure with his younger brother and their hapless tagalong.
“I wondered what would happen if my brother and I tried to find the other boy,” Quarrington says. “I said, ‘Well, that would be intrusive, what would I get out of it, would it be for me or him or whatever....’ So that’s what actually made me think, maybe I’ll make it up — I’ll sort of try to imagine my way through that.”
Their quest takes them on a road trip through northern Ontario, during which Phil is forced to come to terms with alcoholism, infidelity and his life’s downward trajectory. The story loses some steam in the last act, and Quarrington is the first to admit that he struggled with finishing it. “What happened at the end was not so much that I lost control, but for some reason I sort of hit a rut and I couldn’t quite see where to get out of it. Since I wrote this book and Galveston at the same time, I went back and finished it and then got back to this book.” Though the finale will doubtless leave many readers scratching their heads or shaking their fists, The Ravine is nevertheless an engrossing and entertaining read that shines brightly despite its dark subject matter.
