sewn paper
e-mail the Author
Fiction
1995
176 pages
ISBN 0-88984-159-4
$16.95
The Lusty Man
Terry GriggsTerry Griggs's first novel is a comic extravaganza of life in an island community. It is also about the lake surrounding that island, about water itself. The events of the novel are weirdly refracted. This is the story of a christening, a portrait of a community, a story of a quest - the search for the Lusty Man, an iron-age Celtic fertility figure transported to these shores in the nineteenth century, which presides over the novel's loving, quarrelling, and begetting.
The story revolves around members of the Stink family who live in unwholesome closeness at the clan home in Stinkville, Belchie Township, and in satellite mobile homes. Chet Stink plays `Jingle Bells' by hitting diverse portions of his skull with a wrench; Tennessee Ernie Stink practices fire-swallowing with a BBQ-starter and a marshmallow on a toasting fork; the entire pack is reputed to live on road-kill. Into these lives and through them drift angels, ghosts, and an androgynous school teacher whose subversive methodology renders intriguing consequences.
The Lusty Man is a novel experience indeed. It is rather like watching the frozen activity of a Hieronymus Bosch painting or seeing a Breugel explode into manic life.
`The Lusty Man is a very different kind of book, a Rabelaisian romp, a
roaring whirl. The comedic Terry Griggs conducts a veritable "three-ring
circus," to use Ruthie Stink's words, as a hapless quasi-scholar from
Toronto (where else?), with the hegemonic name of Innis C. George (a
comic fusion of the names of Canadian scholars Harold Innis and George
Grant, no doubt), penetrates a Northern Ontario island community in
search of an ancient Celtic fertility figure, the "lusty man" of the
title. Unceremoniously dunked into the lake upon arrival, red Triumph
TR4 and all (at which point he loses his lucky charm, a stone penis
glued to his dashboard -- so much for the virility of academic men), Innis
is rescued and reborn into a raucous world dominated by the Stink
family, a clan wherein fertility is hardly a symbolic issue. For the
Stinks are real-life lusty men. They exude body heat, and those around
them sooner or later capitulate to the bawdy as if the very atmosphere
about them is saturated with irresistible male pheremones. Ruthie
Stronghill marries Gram Stink in spite of the fact that his hands smell
of dog food, because he simply makes her "eyes pop out" and her body
"say howdy." Young Rita Cabel seeks her own entry into the world of
lusty men via membership in the all-male "Snakes Club." Even the
resident nun, Sister St. Anne, takes a flying leap into carnal
temporality before the story ends."'
- Canadian Literature
Photo by Jerry Golab
Griggs's first book, Quickening, was nominated for the Governor General's Award in 1991. She has published in magazines and anthologies, including The Journey Prize Anthology and Writing Home: A PEN Anthology. She is also the author of a children's book, Cat's Eye Corner. Her latest novel, Rogues' Wedding, was published by Random House in 2002.