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White Lung (Anvil $15.95)
Grant Buday's third novel, White Lung (Anvil $15.95), is about people whose jobs are at risk in an East Vancouver mass production bakery. Comedic, cynical and strangely redemptive, the novel is a slice of urban Vancouver blue collar life, for better or worse, in a state of flux. It's a tough world as reflected by the title. White lung is an asthmatic condition caused by working around and breathing in flour dust for too many years. It is as Buday describes it, "the baker's version of what miners got from breathing coal dust.";
Graveyard shift janitor Martin Epp is a prime candidate for white lung disease. "When Epp got home each morning, he coughed flour. He picked it from his nose, his ears, even dug it from his belly button. It went right through his pants and clung to his crotch like he was going gray down there.";
Elements of 1990s' social trends such as Free Trade, dwindling highly-paid unionized jobs, an upsurge of poorly-paid service jobs and racial conflicts all effect the characters in Buday's novel. They drink beer at the Blue Boy pub (since renamed), eat at the McDonald's on Main Street and have union meetings in the Cambrian Hall. The Blue Boy on south-west Marine Drive is "a vast hall lined with beer-sodden carpet, where workers from the various riverside mills drank."; A table at the Cambrian Hall is "scarred with carved initials and sticky rings from slopped drinks."; Buday sums up whole neighborhoods in a similarly terse fashion, again through the tunnel visions of his characters. John Stahl is a violence-prone, frustrated and closeted homosexual who looks askance at the hippie-turned-yuppie community of Kitsilano. "Stahl remembered Kits back in the '60s. He'd drive through staring at all the welfare weasels and their bra-less women. Now, in the 1990s, it was a money neighborhood. Whole shops devoted to chocolate, comic books, vitamins.";
Stahl lives up the hill from the bakery, near Fraser and 50th, on the margins of Vancouver's Little India. "Over the years, Stahl had watched the neighborhood change from Scottish and German in the 1950s and 1960s, to Indian and Chinese in the 1980s and 1990s."; He and Sharma, the building's manager, maintain an ongoing feud about who is superior, Europeans or Indians. Sharma, a Hindu from Fiji, counts his arguments on his fingers. "Chess was invented in India, astronomy was invented in India, medicine was invented in India. You Europeans were living in trees while we had a great civilization."; The building manager replies, "Who invented the goddam airplane you got here on?";
One of the more exuberant characters is an irrepressible rabble rouser Scotty Mutton, who is openly and happily gay. He is a disruptive influence in a union management meeting and throws a hard ball of raw dough at the bakery's general manager. "Mutton had the complexion of a freshly peeled scab. The scars above his eyes reflected a habit from his youth wherein he's pried the caps off beer bottles with his brow ridge. Beneath these scars, however, his eyes were merry with a lifetime of jolly sodomy.";
Martin Epp, a runt of a man, finally cracks when his buddy Klaus opts out of their long-held dream of opening their own shop. Epp backs a forklift off the locking dock and vanishes. Epp disappears and a union-management battle ensues. The U.S. parent company is threatening to close down the Vancouver operation.
Grant Buday worked at a unionized mass production bakery in the 1970s and '80s. He has since taught English at the community college level.
"There were a lot of people in the bakery who used the bakery to get educated and then got stuck. Most of them were bitter about this,"; Buday says. The character that most seized Buday's imagination was John Stahl. "He rose up like a genie out of a bottle,"; he says.
Buday worked alongside a baker on evening shifts who was later convicted of raping and killing an 18-year-old boy. The murderer stored the body in a large plastic bag in his apartment for weeks. The bag was a special contraption from the bakery used for storing old bread to be converted into turkey stuffing. Buday chooses to redeem Stahl in his book.
Although he paints unvarnished and unapologetic profiles, Buday has discovered his bakery colleagues were some of the most important figures in his life. "I used to think my time spent in the bakery was eight lost years,"; he says. "Then I realized that what was dramatic and compelling to me were those [bakery] guys. They had stories, real world experiences and were far more interesting to me than any professor I ever met."; 1-895636-20-5
[Beverly Cramp / BCBW Autumn 1999]
Graveyard shift janitor Martin Epp is a prime candidate for white lung disease. "When Epp got home each morning, he coughed flour. He picked it from his nose, his ears, even dug it from his belly button. It went right through his pants and clung to his crotch like he was going gray down there.";
Elements of 1990s' social trends such as Free Trade, dwindling highly-paid unionized jobs, an upsurge of poorly-paid service jobs and racial conflicts all effect the characters in Buday's novel. They drink beer at the Blue Boy pub (since renamed), eat at the McDonald's on Main Street and have union meetings in the Cambrian Hall. The Blue Boy on south-west Marine Drive is "a vast hall lined with beer-sodden carpet, where workers from the various riverside mills drank."; A table at the Cambrian Hall is "scarred with carved initials and sticky rings from slopped drinks."; Buday sums up whole neighborhoods in a similarly terse fashion, again through the tunnel visions of his characters. John Stahl is a violence-prone, frustrated and closeted homosexual who looks askance at the hippie-turned-yuppie community of Kitsilano. "Stahl remembered Kits back in the '60s. He'd drive through staring at all the welfare weasels and their bra-less women. Now, in the 1990s, it was a money neighborhood. Whole shops devoted to chocolate, comic books, vitamins.";
Stahl lives up the hill from the bakery, near Fraser and 50th, on the margins of Vancouver's Little India. "Over the years, Stahl had watched the neighborhood change from Scottish and German in the 1950s and 1960s, to Indian and Chinese in the 1980s and 1990s."; He and Sharma, the building's manager, maintain an ongoing feud about who is superior, Europeans or Indians. Sharma, a Hindu from Fiji, counts his arguments on his fingers. "Chess was invented in India, astronomy was invented in India, medicine was invented in India. You Europeans were living in trees while we had a great civilization."; The building manager replies, "Who invented the goddam airplane you got here on?";
One of the more exuberant characters is an irrepressible rabble rouser Scotty Mutton, who is openly and happily gay. He is a disruptive influence in a union management meeting and throws a hard ball of raw dough at the bakery's general manager. "Mutton had the complexion of a freshly peeled scab. The scars above his eyes reflected a habit from his youth wherein he's pried the caps off beer bottles with his brow ridge. Beneath these scars, however, his eyes were merry with a lifetime of jolly sodomy.";
Martin Epp, a runt of a man, finally cracks when his buddy Klaus opts out of their long-held dream of opening their own shop. Epp backs a forklift off the locking dock and vanishes. Epp disappears and a union-management battle ensues. The U.S. parent company is threatening to close down the Vancouver operation.
Grant Buday worked at a unionized mass production bakery in the 1970s and '80s. He has since taught English at the community college level.
"There were a lot of people in the bakery who used the bakery to get educated and then got stuck. Most of them were bitter about this,"; Buday says. The character that most seized Buday's imagination was John Stahl. "He rose up like a genie out of a bottle,"; he says.
Buday worked alongside a baker on evening shifts who was later convicted of raping and killing an 18-year-old boy. The murderer stored the body in a large plastic bag in his apartment for weeks. The bag was a special contraption from the bakery used for storing old bread to be converted into turkey stuffing. Buday chooses to redeem Stahl in his book.
Although he paints unvarnished and unapologetic profiles, Buday has discovered his bakery colleagues were some of the most important figures in his life. "I used to think my time spent in the bakery was eight lost years,"; he says. "Then I realized that what was dramatic and compelling to me were those [bakery] guys. They had stories, real world experiences and were far more interesting to me than any professor I ever met."; 1-895636-20-5
[Beverly Cramp / BCBW Autumn 1999]
Submitted on July 22, 2003 in By David.
