Women, drink, tales within tales

Doubting Yourself to the Bone
By Thomas Trofimuk
Cormorant Books, 255 pages, $23

Reviewed by Ariel Gordon

THE opening of Thomas Trofimuk's second novel encapsulates the Edmonton writer and poet's favourite subjects: women, drink and stories layered within stories.

An embedded story and single malt whisky in the slanting light of late fall signals that Ronin and Moira, the main characters, are about to be parents.

It's a pretty way to begin a novel, but as Ronin himself comments, "I think your story needs some conflict, or tragedy, and soon, or you'll lose your listener."

Fast-forward 70 pages, and Trofimuk has dutifully served up both, as Moira's hypercritical response to a romantic dinner at a favourite restaurant (accompanied, of course, by drink and an embedded story), telegraphs that their relationship is over.

The rest of the book details Ronin's attempts to reconcile loss and longing, risk and places of refuge. Because this is a Trofimuk novel, these attempts involve a carload of Buddhist monks, several crates of liquor and a sympathetic Frenchwoman who knows Mavis Gallant well enough to have had coffee with her several times.

And because Trofimuk clearly appreciates cheek as much as he appreciates sensuous detail, he has Ronin interrogate and subvert every story-within-a-story.

Given the territory -- and Trofimuk's authorial tics -- it is astounding how infrequently Doubting Yourself to the Bone drifts into syrupy sentimentality or pert precociousness.

That said, this is a novel of the upper middle class. Moira's idea of a trial separation includes taking the summer to drunkenly brood at a cabin on Vancouver Island, while Ronin trades his empty house in Edmonton for Paris because he knows it will be "a beautiful, exotic distraction."

It is also a writerly novel, in that every character is a writer of some stripe. Moira is a storyteller and Claire (our sympathetic Frenchwoman, who is the least realized character but the closest thing to the ultimate male fantasy), is a technical writer who has published short stories in literary magazines. Ronin, we are told, is an emerging poet.

But despite its metafictional and overtly literary modes, Doubting Yourself to the Bone is also a clear-eyed meditation on the gulfs between separation and divorce, and grief and acceptance.

As such, Trofimuk moves into the territory covered by other male writers from the Prairies, including W.D. Valgardson in his Girl with the Botticelli Face (1992) and David Bergen in his recent books, including the Giller Award-winning The Time in Between (2005).

But instead of the spare prose on offer in Valgardson and Bergen, Trofimuk uses almost dizzying excess to wring emotion from his stories.

Those readers who appreciate long unravelling tendrils of ideas and feelings will revel in Trofimuk's decadent visions, both here and in his previous novel, The 52nd Poem, which was published in 2002 by Winnipeg's Great Plains Publications.

But those who appreciate their prose tight and their plots linear would do best to steer clear of this one.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer.