The debut fiction from Brian Payton sent me back to my book shelf for a fresh look at a couple of classics. Payton may have given himself a tall order in conjuring two of the most famous coming-of-age stories of the 20th century, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

Set in a fictional Vancouver Island seminary, Hail Mary Corner (Beach Holme $18.95) recounts a few months in the life of a somewhat disenchanted young man, William MacAvoy, who is being primed to hear the call to God and live the life of a priest. He is 16, a junior at St. John the Divine, has a best friend with whom he confides all, a girlfriend with whom he is sex-obsessed and a bad case of guilt over his inability to keep his hands off himself in self-exploration. Sound familiar yet?

As the book opens in 1982, young William is on the brink of getting kicked out of school for openly defying the rules, for leading his peer group astray, and for generally exhibiting a poor and unChristian attitude. He discovers two secrets one about his best friend Jon, the other about the ever-watchful Brother Thomas. It all comes to a climactic crux at the Christmas break. Hail Mary Corner's grandest epiphanies rendered in some of Payton's best prose occur in its epilogue when William returns to St. John the Divine looking for resolution and absolution. For 20 years he has carried guilt about the part he played in the accidental death of his best friend at Hail Mary Corner, a treacherous piece of road leading to the Seminary. "I take the last few steps to our pew, genuflect, and then kneel in Jon's place for a while. it is here on tender knees that I realize I'll be bringing back neither forgiveness nor absolution. Instead I will leave something behind."

For me, James Joyce's contemplative Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, along with the more idiomatic Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger shadow every page of Hail Mary Corner. Stephen Dedalus and Holden Caulfield are both in private school with strict academic and religious curricula, and they are typically wayward boys in terms of their burgeoning sexuality.

Most of the action in Catcher takes place at the Christmas break as Holden procrastinates revealing his expulsion to his parents by killing time in New York bars, with girlfriends, and with a bad case of insecure superiority.

Young William mirrors Stephen Dedalus' struggle with his devotion to God, the spiritual teachings, his 'free will' and his attraction to girls. All three wrestle with their inability to control sexual urges, accept doctrine, and stay at peace with their parents. It's not that Payton isn't a fine writer. It's just that his structure is similar, right down to the soccer games; the scenes of awkward and fumbling first sex, the shame-filled confessions about impure thoughts, and the Joycean epiphanies. It was hard for me not to wonder if the similarities weren't in some way intentional. Simultaneously I had a pervasive feeling that this might be a story based on some kind of actual experience. Clearly Payton knows his way around a church, the mass and uses of all the various formal words to describe its elements.

Payton's scenes carry great insights but he too often chooses action over reflection and physical movement over the stream of consciousness that are so vital to the emotional texture of Joyce and Salinger. In the end, these are the necessary ingredients to make any coming of age tale interesting and relevant to readers who may be years older and far wiser.

As well, he often falls prey to Couplandesque pop culture references in place of fully formed descriptions-a late 20,h century literary device that is wearing thin. That all being said, Brian Payton has a keen eye for images, atmospheric details and a talent for bringing his reader directly into his scenes. Stained glass windows are 'a rainbow of cough drops melted together.' The hem of a monk's habit is 'fluttering nervously behind him.'

Though often falling into stereotypes (a monk is caught trying to flush his Playboy magazine down the toilet, one friend is a brute, the other a sensitive type who eventually confesses his homosexuality, another younger seminarian starts out a wimp and turns into a hero) his characters are well wrought and stay true to type.

Payton's non-fiction books are Long Beach, Clayoquot and Beyond and Cowboy. His first play, Weed, premiered at the 1999 Victoria Fringe Festival. 0-88878-422-8 Carla Lucchetta is a Vancouver writer.

[BCBW Spring 2002]