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The Master of Happy Endings by Jack Hodgins (Thomas Allen $32.95)
Jack Hodgins, by comparison, is a huge success story. He burst onto the scene in 1976 with a collection of comical short stories, Spit Delaney's Island, which received B.C.'s highest literary honour at the time, the Eaton's Book Award.
Influenced by the 'magic realism' of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and other Latin American authors, Hodgins' audacious first novel, The Invention of the World, received the Gibson's First Novel Award.
With three children, Hodgins continued teaching high school until 1979 when The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, his third book, won the nation's top fiction prize, the Governor General's Award. Hodgins had the bit between his teeth, and he was set to have one of the most successful fiction careers of anyone born in British Columbia.
Ten books have followed, nearly all fiction, except for one children's book and a writing guide, A Passion for Narrative, that arose from his experiences as an extremely popular instructor at UVic's creative writing program. Hodgins won an Ethel Wilson fiction prize for his novel Broken Ground, but his sales have never been stellar.
It hasn't helped that Hodgins' long-time editor and publisher, Douglas Gibson, has left McClelland & Stewart, once Canada's foremost publishing imprint.
Now Hodgins, after a six-year hiatus, is making a comeback of sorts. His fourteenth book and twelfth work of fiction, The Master of Happy Endings, is his first title not published by either Macmillan (books one through four) or McClelland & Stewart (books five through thirteen). And--no surprise--it's about an ex-teacher dealing with the discomforts of being put out to pasture before he feels ready to be sidelined.
The Master of the title is Alex Thorsdal, a widower living on a small island off the B.C. coast, in the cabin that he and his wife retired to.
Alex's wife called him 'The Master of Happy Endings,' sarcastically, because of his optimism about what could be accomplished in the classroom through sharing a love of literature. It's that optimism that is at the heart of Hodgins' work.
Thorsdal is one of those typical, mythic West Coast characters that Hodgins is fond of inventing. He is not just tall; at 6-foot-8, he is "a Norwegian giant of a man,"; who swims naked in the freezing ocean every
day.
The voice of his late wife now inhabits his imagination while Alex, feeling stranded, plays his cello mournfully to an assembled throng of stumps on the beach.
The island harkens back to the animated mindscape of Spit Delaney's Island or Joseph Bourne. It is filled with wild, eccentric characters like Gwendolyn Something, the mother of six daughters, each with a different father, who are named after botanical plants (one is Hooker's Willow). And there's an old abandoned commune in the rainforest, and rumours of shadowy drug dealings.
At 77, Alex knows he's old, but not that old. He is definitely not ready to be a "senior senior,"; someone consigned to the irrelevance that others might wish for him-like the young man on the ferry dock who simply shoves him aside.
Alex must do something before his idle solitude drives him further into paranoia, but what? In the past, he has been a hugely successful teacher, and so he longs to teach again. He decides to place an ad in the newspaper offering his services as a tutor who wants to live with a family.
Eventually, after receiving a number of bizarre replies, Alex does find a student, but instead of tutoring the seventeen-year-old boy in his home on Vancouver Island, he winds up accompanying him to Hollywood, where his pupil has a minor part in a television series.
In the supercharged LA atmosphere, Alex finds himself in danger of being sidelined again, trying to impart a love of Shakespeare to an inexperienced actor who is struggling just to learn his lines. But then the misguided adventure takes a different turn, and becomes a kind of retrospective on Alex's life.
Alex learns the true fate of his father (a Hollywood stuntman) and he encounters a beautiful Irish actress, Oonagh Farrell-who he was once in love with.
Hodgins' fiction isn't everyone's cup of tea. There's never anything ribald, or risqué. There's more of Stuart McLean than Marquez in these pages. Connections between characters don't feel emotional. But, in his seventies, he's got 14 books and counting. He's not quite up to Gordie Howe, but he's getting there.
He's clearly not contemplating collecting any stamps in the near future.
Jack Hodgins has developed his own style, his one lens, with mythic elements, and he has made an enormous contribution to B.C. fiction in the process. As a trailblazer, he's in the realm of Bertrand Sinclair, his Nanaimo-born contemporary Anne Cameron, or playwright George Ryga.
He has dared to be original.
Happy Endings 978-0-88762-523-7
Review by Sheila Munro, who conducts writing workshops & writes from Powell River.
[BCBW 2010]
Influenced by the 'magic realism' of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and other Latin American authors, Hodgins' audacious first novel, The Invention of the World, received the Gibson's First Novel Award.
With three children, Hodgins continued teaching high school until 1979 when The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, his third book, won the nation's top fiction prize, the Governor General's Award. Hodgins had the bit between his teeth, and he was set to have one of the most successful fiction careers of anyone born in British Columbia.
Ten books have followed, nearly all fiction, except for one children's book and a writing guide, A Passion for Narrative, that arose from his experiences as an extremely popular instructor at UVic's creative writing program. Hodgins won an Ethel Wilson fiction prize for his novel Broken Ground, but his sales have never been stellar.
It hasn't helped that Hodgins' long-time editor and publisher, Douglas Gibson, has left McClelland & Stewart, once Canada's foremost publishing imprint.
Now Hodgins, after a six-year hiatus, is making a comeback of sorts. His fourteenth book and twelfth work of fiction, The Master of Happy Endings, is his first title not published by either Macmillan (books one through four) or McClelland & Stewart (books five through thirteen). And--no surprise--it's about an ex-teacher dealing with the discomforts of being put out to pasture before he feels ready to be sidelined.
The Master of the title is Alex Thorsdal, a widower living on a small island off the B.C. coast, in the cabin that he and his wife retired to.
Alex's wife called him 'The Master of Happy Endings,' sarcastically, because of his optimism about what could be accomplished in the classroom through sharing a love of literature. It's that optimism that is at the heart of Hodgins' work.
Thorsdal is one of those typical, mythic West Coast characters that Hodgins is fond of inventing. He is not just tall; at 6-foot-8, he is "a Norwegian giant of a man,"; who swims naked in the freezing ocean every
day.
The voice of his late wife now inhabits his imagination while Alex, feeling stranded, plays his cello mournfully to an assembled throng of stumps on the beach.
The island harkens back to the animated mindscape of Spit Delaney's Island or Joseph Bourne. It is filled with wild, eccentric characters like Gwendolyn Something, the mother of six daughters, each with a different father, who are named after botanical plants (one is Hooker's Willow). And there's an old abandoned commune in the rainforest, and rumours of shadowy drug dealings.
At 77, Alex knows he's old, but not that old. He is definitely not ready to be a "senior senior,"; someone consigned to the irrelevance that others might wish for him-like the young man on the ferry dock who simply shoves him aside.
Alex must do something before his idle solitude drives him further into paranoia, but what? In the past, he has been a hugely successful teacher, and so he longs to teach again. He decides to place an ad in the newspaper offering his services as a tutor who wants to live with a family.
Eventually, after receiving a number of bizarre replies, Alex does find a student, but instead of tutoring the seventeen-year-old boy in his home on Vancouver Island, he winds up accompanying him to Hollywood, where his pupil has a minor part in a television series.
In the supercharged LA atmosphere, Alex finds himself in danger of being sidelined again, trying to impart a love of Shakespeare to an inexperienced actor who is struggling just to learn his lines. But then the misguided adventure takes a different turn, and becomes a kind of retrospective on Alex's life.
Alex learns the true fate of his father (a Hollywood stuntman) and he encounters a beautiful Irish actress, Oonagh Farrell-who he was once in love with.
Hodgins' fiction isn't everyone's cup of tea. There's never anything ribald, or risqué. There's more of Stuart McLean than Marquez in these pages. Connections between characters don't feel emotional. But, in his seventies, he's got 14 books and counting. He's not quite up to Gordie Howe, but he's getting there.
He's clearly not contemplating collecting any stamps in the near future.
Jack Hodgins has developed his own style, his one lens, with mythic elements, and he has made an enormous contribution to B.C. fiction in the process. As a trailblazer, he's in the realm of Bertrand Sinclair, his Nanaimo-born contemporary Anne Cameron, or playwright George Ryga.
He has dared to be original.
Happy Endings 978-0-88762-523-7
Review by Sheila Munro, who conducts writing workshops & writes from Powell River.
[BCBW 2010]
Submitted on June 3, 2010 in By David.
