Mark Anthony Jarman - Canada's answer to Hannah and Barthelme: creating startling effects with delirious and courageous use of language

Mark Anthony Jarman, 19 Knives, House of Anansi Press, 2008.[2000]

"With characters ranging from desperate to wildly comic, Mark Anthony Jarman's 19 Knives employs virtuosic wordplay and staggering metaphoric powers in every sentence. But Jarman doesn't just write about people; he enables readers to enter his characters' frailty and courage. His vivid wordplay evokes with equal verve the tragedy of "Burn Man," who refers to himself in the third person in order to inhabit his disfigured body; and the cutting comedy of a delusional narrator who sees Margaret Atwood in some hilariously unlikely guises."

"This collection of 14 stories by Canadian author Mark Anthony Jarman is distinguished for its distinctive style and fine storytelling. Each story is good in itself - well plotted and engaging - but what elevates them to a higher level is the daring and bold writing style that pushes language to the limits.The author uses and combines words that one would not normally think to do. (He has been described as Joycean, although he’s far more accessible.) If at times I felt a line or phrase didn’t quite work, that didn’t matter. The rewards come when they do work and that’s most of the time.
A particular favorite is "Cougar." It opens with the dubious alliteration, "Motor to the mega mall and the mall moves me to a minor rage"; but thankfully takes off nicely from there. It’s about a man in the throes of a middle-aged funk, half-heartedly contemplating suicide. He’s a fairly typical character in the collection: a man of around 30-40 years old who has lived hard, worked a lot of odd jobs, etc. He’s been around. He’s smart, familiar with pop culture, listens to the latest alt. rock music, is a bit of a loner, not out to impress anyone. In this particular story, the out-of-work narrator is on his way to get a Christmas tree for the woman he’s living with. He goes into the woods to chop one down and is attacked by a cougar. It’s a scrawny cat, however, and the two have quite a go-round.
In the title story, "19 Knives," the narrator is a recovering heroin addict. His caseworker now trusts him to take his methadone home. That trust is rightly given, but destiny plays a mean role in this new stage of his life. "Eskimo Blue Day" is set at a public swimming pool where a father sits watching his young son in the pool. When the boy starts to struggle in the water and go down, the man jumps up to save him, but the ensuing action takes a strange and menacing turn; while in "Burn Man on a Texas Porch" a man with no real roots, living alone in a camper, awakes one night to a gas explosion:
Propane slept in the tank and propane leaked while I slept, blew the camper door off and split the tin walls where they met like shy strangers kissing, blew off the camper door like a safe and I sprang from sleep into my new life on my feet in front of a befuddled crowd, my new life on fire, walking to whoosh and tourists’ dull teenagers staring at my bent form trotting noisily in the campground with flames living on my calves and flames gathering on my shoulders (Cool, the teens think secretly), smoke like nausea in my stomach and me brimming with Catholic guilt, thinking Now I’ve done it, and then thinking, Done what? What have I done? He survives, but must go through many skin grafts which never quite "fit’ and he ends up with a terribly scarred face. The story gives his view of the world: he’s bitter, of course, but there’s a sort of dark humor in the narrative too.
Fate often plays a strong role in the stories, suddenly throwing characters into a "new life." Jarman captures the moment and aftermath of such fate with a deft and slightly out-of-kilter prose that ingeniously conveys the shock and mental grappling of events that his characters must be experiencing. And where fate doesn’t strike in one fell swoop, it remains a Hardyesque force that moves and shapes lives.
In "The Scout’s Lament" the focus is on a hockey scout who talks of all the boys he’s seen in his years of scouting for the big leagues. So few of them make it - and this is part of his lament. "Song from Under the Floorboards" gives us a narrator who works lubricating cars, lying underneath them as they come into the garage. His mind drifts around while he works under the car, remembering two boys from his high school who committed suicide, etc. His "song" - a circuitous, slightly imbalanced yet poignant rhapsody in blue - ends on a perfect note of clarity.
"Skin a Flea for Hide and Tallow" is the only story that does not have a contemporary setting. Here the narrator is a drifter who has ended up in "Iron Butt Custer’s" army. He knows that it is madness to face all the Indians on the day of the big battle against the Sioux, but he goes along and gives us a rundown of events.
"Subterranean Homesick Blues" is about a young father reminiscing about his boyhood, growing up in a basement bedroom where he raised all kinds of hell. Now his own young kids have a basement bedroom and this sets him to contemplating. "Brighten the Corners" is another story about a young father who has just returned to his family after a trip to England. He is immediately thrust back into the familiar world of kids and all their demands after having had a bit of freedom.
Highly recommended for both the memorable stories - many of which you can relay to others in the old-fashioned tradition of storytelling - and the unique prose style that gives them a sharp cutting edge and lifts them to another dimension." - J.A. @ Barcelona Review
"Canada's answer to Barry Hannah" is how the Toronto Star described Mark Anthony Jarman on June 22, 2008.
Reviewer Derek Weiler wrote:
Readers of Mark Anthony Jarman will likely notice a recurring stylistic tic in his prose: the missing verb. In his new short story collection, My White Planet (Thomas Allen, 2008), the examples are many: "Her enclosed boat a tiny orange orb among mysterious green icebergs." "Her kind sad face by the icy shore, her long wrists."
The dropped verb is a trick with a purpose. It can embed us more deeply in the moment and give the characters' perceptions a greater sense of immediacy. At the same time, though, it suggests a certain aloofness, reminding us that Jarman won't settle for simple "this happened" exposition or conventional sentence structure.
...He most strongly recalls the southern U.S. writer Barry Hannah, whose classic collection Airships (1978) has a similar range of subject matter and a similar interest in sharpened prose. Not having read Airships, I take Weiler's word for it. He's an honourable man and an intelligent reviewer. I am surprised, however, that at this late date there's a need to "explain Jarman" by positioning him as an apprentice of Hannah.
Is this an example of measuring a Canadian's achievement against something foreign and therefore more "real"?
How many of the Star's readers can possibly understand what "Canada's answer to Barry Hannah" means?
On the other hand, we constantly hear Alice Munro compared to Chekhov. And we are all trained to "compare and contrast" as the best way to solidify argument and communicate meaning.
But still. In 2008, can't MAJ be compared to MAJ? That is, doesn't Mark Anthony Jarman have enough of a track record that we can presume he has "found his voice" and that his work isn't merely derivative of something someone else has already done?
I provide one example. Shane Neilson reviewed Jarman's 2000 short story collection 19 Knives and compared Jarman to Rick Moody. That review appeared in The Danforth Review, which I edit. After it appeared, in an email conversation, Jarman told me that he actually hadn't read Moody before writing 19 Knives. If there was a common influence between Moody and Jarman, it was more likely the zeitgeist. They were drinking the same kool-aid, in other words.
Literary influence is highly complicated and very rarely linear.
Weiler's suggestion, for example, that Jarman shares with Hannah a "a similar range of subject matter and a similar interest in sharpened prose" may well be true. But so what?
Weiler writes of Jarman's latest collection:
His work is similarly restless on the macro level: the stories in My White Planet show a striking variety. Some are historical pieces set during the Riel Rebellion or the U.S. Indian wars. Some evoke sci-fi tropes, like the one set on a polar research station that loses touch with the rest of the world. Others read like nothing so much as autobiographical reveries, the narrator ambling around New Brunswick (where the author lives) or London, England.
Riel references or not, Jarman is something of a misfit on the CanLit scene.It's not clear what Weiler means by this claim. Presumably it has something to do with Weiler's belief that "Jarman places a premium on sheer linguistic energy."
Last week, in a post about Rawi Hage, I mentioned Nabokov's term "aboutness" and linked to an interview with Carol Shields, which included her opinion that "the language is always first."
In short, I don't think Jarman is "a misfit on the CanLit scene." That's a misreading of Jarman and a misreading of CanLit.
Douglas Glover, for example, is another writer of "sheer linguistic energy." He has also written an insightful essay on Jarman's fiction in Wild Writers We Have Known, a special issue of The New Quarterly (Volume XXI, Numbers 2 & 3; 2002). Glover's short stories could also be described using the words Weiler uses to describe Jarman's: they are "restless on the macro level." They go backwards and forwards in time and have all kinds of weird shit happening in them.
Isn't that what short stories are supposed to do?
Weiler ends his review this way:
The book is stronger than his previous, 2000 collection, 19 Knives, and I don't think it's because his actual prose has been greatly refined in the interim. Rather, I suspect, it's because in the new book, the prose has been more often married to consequential, urgent, and memorable evocations of character and mood.This isn't my opinion, which is that 19 Knives is one of the great neglected books in the Canadian canon. I believe this, because when I read it I had one of those rare moments of astonishment. THIS CAME OUT OF CANADA? It was unlike anything I had previously read.
Of course, perhaps is it was exactly like Hannah's Airships?
I'll have to check that out.
I doubt it is, though. Jarman has been too consistent over too many books. His work is complex and serious -- and unique. He has created his own imaginative kingdom, as all writers worthy of deep comtemplation do. His work may sometimes lapse into self-parody as a result. It should be measured, in my opinion, against itself. Does it achieve its own goals? Which clearly require more than communicating "aboutness."
Jarman writes with a dedicated intensity, creates stories about a certain kind of masculinity, often places his characters in extreme circumstances and tests their "grace under pressure." Is he, therefore, a latter-day Hemingway? No, this isn't a useful thought-pattern.
We are all children of Hemingway, are we not? He wrote for The Toronto Star, after all!
Sorry, just a diversion and a joke.
Humour, by the way, is also a common element in a Mark Anthony Jarman short story. Perhaps that is another reason he is "a CanLit misfit." No self-respecting high-school teacher in Saskatoon would assign "Burn Man on a Texas Porch" (from 19 Knives), would she?
Here's how it starts:
Propane slept in the tank and propane leaked while I slept, blew the camper door off and split the tin walls where they met like shy strangers kissing, blew the camper door like a safe and I sprang from sleep into my new life on my feet in front of a befuddled crowd, my new life on fire, waking to whoosh and tourists' dull teenagers staring at my bent form trotting noisily in the campground with flames living on my calves and flames gathering and glittering on my shoulders (Cool, the teens think secretly), smoke like nausea in my stomach and me brimming with Catholic guilt, thinking, Now I've done it, and then thinking, Done what? What have I done?Seriously, though. We must ensure that CanLit escapes the stereotype of being Pinch-your-nose CanLit:
Pinch-your-nose CanLit is the CanLit most Canadians teens were force fed in high school, swallowing it because it was good for them. No teen ever got indigestion from CanLit but few asked for second helpings until their literary taste buds matured.
Celebrating the pyrotechnical writers we've already got as home-grown talent (and not reducing them to imitations of others) is essential to this hope and process. At the same time, we should not shy away from looking at the broad range of literary influences at work in our literature. And all the other excellent writers that write elsewhere.As Douglas Glover told The Danforth Review:
Whether Canadian literature is all it's pumped to be is not a question that interests me. On the other hand, there are some books written by Canadians I love.That seems just about right." - Michael BrysonMark Anthony Jarman, My White Planet, Thomas Allen & Son, 2008.

"Mark Anthony Jarman is one of Canada’s most original and compelling writers of short fiction. "My White Planet" is his latest collection of fourteen new stories, many of which have previously won or been short-listed for literary magazine awards. Jarman’s use of language and metaphor is unique in the Canadian literary pantheon. With extraordinary linguistic energy, he pushes the boundaries of fiction and story-telling. Every sentence reverberates with subtle meaning and every reading of a Jarman story brings out ever deeper layers of complexity and nuance. Here is a protean writer who bends form and enters into worlds and people with panache and a verve that is breath-taking. The range of his fiction is stunning: troops undertake a nightmarish march following Custer’s last stand; a father’s dogs tear apart his son and he is accused of cowardice and neglect; seven marooned men at a remote polar station save the life of a naked young woman; domestic squabbles and infidelity abound amidst west coast chainsaws and floatplanes; a dropout skateboarder falls off a railway bridge and drowns in the river; a city bus ride ends up crossing the entire country; a time traveler witnesses Louis Riel’s botched execution of Thomas Scott; a young woman removes her bra from under her shirt and her male friend is paralysed by possible meanings; an outsider plays old timer hockey in the wilds of New Brunswick; Victorian fashion is mixed up with the violent deaths of Custer, Louis Riel and Sitting Bull; a flight attendant is able to read passengers’ minds. A master of literary conceit and a hewer of breakneck language, Mark Anthony Jarman defies categorization and offers us instead a narrative freshness that surprises and offers up a world of wonders."

"Readers of Mark Anthony Jarman will likely notice a recurring stylistic tic in his prose: the missing verb. In his new short story collection, My White Planet, the examples are many: "Her enclosed boat a tiny orange orb among mysterious green icebergs." "Her kind sad face by the icy shore, her long wrists."The dropped verb is a trick with a purpose. It can embed us more deeply in the moment and give the characters' perceptions a greater sense of immediacy. At the same time, though, it suggests a certain aloofness, reminding us that Jarman won't settle for simple "this happened" exposition or conventional sentence structure.
His work is similarly restless on the macro level: the stories in My White Planet show a striking variety. Some are historical pieces set during the Riel Rebellion or the U.S. Indian wars. Some evoke sci-fi tropes, like the one set on a polar research station that loses touch with the rest of the world. Others read like nothing so much as autobiographical reveries, the narrator ambling around New Brunswick (where the author lives) or London, England.
Riel references or not, Jarman is something of a misfit on the CanLit scene. He most strongly recalls the southern U.S. writer Barry Hannah, whose classic collection Airships has a similar range of subject matter and a similar interest in sharpened prose.
But Jarman's work also bears a distinctly Canadian sensibility. His stories have an elegiac, mournful tone that black humour cuts but doesn't quite dispel. Throughout his work Jarman has shown an intense interest in hockey, on both a visceral and philosophical level. My favourite piece in My White Planet is a sort of tribute to the complicated camaraderie of an amateur hockey team.
Even more than Hannah, Jarman places a premium on sheer linguistic energy. It's not that he eschews narrative altogether. Each of his stories establishes the parameters of its own reality, a recognizable milieu, characters with mostly clear attitudes. But Jarman's prose works hard to keep the reader off-balance and therefore presumably more attentive to the wobbly orbit of his words.
There is some marvellous writing here. Take this lovely, note-perfect description of a nighttime winter road trip: "new fallen snow and a full moon on Acadian and Loyalist fields, fields beautiful and ice-smooth and curved like old bathtubs. In this blue light Baptist churches and ordinary farms become cathode, hallucinatory."
Sometimes, though, Jarman kicks up word flurries with more energy than effect. Alongside the striking passages are some overly abstract riffs, and metaphors that are goofily over-reaching or simply non-sequiturs, such as a dog's bashed-in brain "bending like a coconut." At times like that, Jarman's sheer manic industriousness serves to throw a kind of gauze over everything, muffling the human emotions at the core of the stories when it should be amplifying them.
My White Planet still deserves attention. The longer pieces are best, in which Jarman's jittery rhythms and contrarian diction illuminate intriguing situations. The narrator of "Deconstruction of the Fables" haplessly contemplates the seduction of a neighbour woman while he's driving her to the hospital to visit her injured mother. The title story, set aboard that polar research station, is both eerie and sardonic, as a mysterious woman appears to set the men's testosterone racing. (As those examples indicate, it's worth mentioning that Jarman can also be very funny.)
For all Jarman's efforts as a stylist, there's an irony at work in My White Planet. The book is stronger than his previous, 2000 collection, 19 Knives, and I don't think it's because his actual prose has been greatly refined in the interim. Rather, I suspect, it's because in the new book, the prose has been more often married to consequential, urgent, and memorable evocations of character and mood." - Derek Weiler
"Mark Anthony Jarman’s new collection of stories is something of a rarity in Canadian short fiction. It does not follow the tried-and-true template of the traditional Chekhovian story, which prizes naturalism and a familiar narrative arc. Rather, Jarman’s stories more closely resemble the postmodern collages of Donald Barthelme.
Jarman’s focus is not on story in the traditional sense, and although a handful of the selections in the book do end with a character reaching a kind of epiphany, the author’s core interest resides elsewhere – specifically, in the delirious and courageous use of language to create startling effects.
The 14 stories in My White Planet display an author who is positively word-drunk, delighting in twisting language into bizarre shapes, pushing and straining to test its resilience and its torque. There is a palpable giddiness to many of these stories; Jarman writes like a free jazz musician riffing on a central theme, or like a Beat poet jiving to the rhythms of his prose: “They climb up sheepish and angry because they’re not from a ghetto. By not being deprived, they’ve been deprived. O to be born in a ghetto, to get jiggy with the rats and the rasta players.”
Throughout, Jarman’s imagination is robustly catholic, incorporating references from high culture and pop culture, often in playful juxtaposition. The title of the story “Fables of the Deconstruction” is a sly, Derridaesque pun on the name of an R.E.M. album, and its epigraph is from Francis Bacon. Nods to indie rock bands Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Calexico rub shoulders with allusions to Machiavelli and Othello.
The subject matter and tone of the stories are similarly wide-ranging, from the bleak opener, “Night March in the Territory,” which follows a group of soldiers on a trek through unmapped American territory, to “Kingdoms and Knowledge,” which follows a Canadian citizen as he navigates his way through London, England, while tending to his mother who is suffering in an Alzheimer’s ward there. And “A Nation Plays Chopsticks,” about an old-timers hockey league, may be the finest explanation for Canadians’ love affair with the game that I’ve ever read.
The stories in this collection may not be to everybody’s taste. Weighing in at just over 200 pages, the book is a quick read, but not easily digested. Some of the stories are more accessible than others, but the collection as a whole exemplifies Wallace Stevens’ comment that poetry should “resist the intelligence, almost successfully.” In these stories, many of which resemble prose poems, Jarman has taken that dictum to heart, and the results are challenging and surprising." - Steven W. Beattie
Mark Anthony Jarman, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, Brindle & Glass, 2007. [2000.]
"Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, Mark Anthony Jarman's impressive debut collection of nine short stories, presents characters assembled from the depths of the local bars, under the influence, on the run, out of work. They are infused with a dark smoke drawn from the raw side of life — stained, imperfect, energetic and earthy — and fueled by a desire to endure. With language both sharp and fluid, and uniquely lyrical, Jarman explores the circumstances of drifting, destinations unknown. Intense. Tempestuous. A seductive read."

"An important new voice to Canadian literature. No one writes quite like this: Jarman's punch, hard-edged style penetrates to the heart of flakey nights and mornings in the towns of the West." - Globe and MailMark Anthony Jarman, Salvage King, Ya!: A Herky-Jerky Picaresque, Anvil Press, 1997.
"Debut novel from the author of 19 Knives and New Orleans is Sinking. Salvage King, Ya! is a gritty, down-to-earth story of a hockey player’s last few years in the minors. Drinkwater, an almost-got-to-the-NHL tough-mouthed romantic is skidding through the tail end of his 30s on a high-octane journey of self-actualization. Chip-toothed and soaring he struggles to come to terms with the conflicting aspirations of his youth and the reality of inheriting the family junkyard. Roving. Luminous. Rowdy. Funny."

"A collide-oscope of bars and music, incessant music, and beat-up vehicles, and bruising, frustrating, losing hockey ..." - David Ingham

"An important new voice... No one writes quite like this." - Globe & Mail"This guy's stuff is relentlessly good." - Quarry Mgazine
"D-man juggles ex wife, future wife, waitress girlfriend, plane crash, drink-fests, the whole damn kitchen sink. A wild ride. One of those books they say is 'not for everyone', but oh yeah, it's for everyone. Probably helps your perspective if you've played some hockey, but not strictly necessary. Exhausting, crazy - well worth your time. And damn funny, to boot." - Amazon.com

Mark Anthony Jarman, Ireland's Eye: Travels, House of Anansi Press, 2005.
"On August 28, 1922, the martyred Irish patriot Michael Collins was buried. Businesses across Dublin closed as thousands came out to pay their respects. On the same day, Michael Lyons, a cooper from the Guinness factory, drowned in Dublin's Royal Canal. This peculiar confluence is Mark Anthony Jarman's starting point for a meditation on the intertwined history of a nation and his family. Jarman's pursuit of the circumstances of his grandfather's drowning leads him through a modern Ireland that teems with ghosts from the past. Thwarted by family gossip, aunts who can't drive a stick shift, cousins more interested in pubs than lore, and his own fascination with the many Irelands that have been, Jarman finds what he's seeking despite, or perhaps because of, the antics and the unreliable histories. What he reconfigures is a revelation, and an enchanting and engrossing read."

Mark Anthony Jarman, New Orleans Is Sinking, Oberon Press, 1998.

The Fredericton short-story writer and UNB professor has gone from driving trucks for CN to the CBC Literary Awards shortlist
Mark Anthony Jarman: Cougar [story]