sewn paper
e-mail the Author
Fiction/Literary
April 1998
272 pages
ISBN 0-88984-197-7
$18.95
Noise
Russell SmithA fast-paced comic extravaganza from the pen of the author of the runaway
bestseller How Insensitive. Set in the cynical and celebrity-obsessed
world of mainstream media, and alternatively in the stultifying conservatism
of suburban sprawl, a failed musician and intellectual nerd has become
a freelance magazine writer and unwillingly
been cast into the role
of fashion arbiter. Reluctantly, and only for the money, James Rainer Willing agrees to interview the
reclusive nationalist Canadian poet Ludwig Boben for the
prestigious American magazine Glitter.
Willing's insanely busy and competitive life
provides glimpses into the world of fashion photography, small-press poetry readings,
expensive and fashionable restaurants (he is a restaurant critic), `lifestyle' magazines,
and a return to the suddenly-quiet life or non-life of ghostly
New Munich, Ontario, where Willing revisits his one-time peers, the People Who Stayed Behind.
`You don't have to like James Rainer Willing to like Noise,
the exuberant lampoon of which he is the over-elegant centrepiece.
And a good thing too -- dour, self-absorbed, the most pretentious
restaurant critic ever to hit the pages of a trendy tabloid, Willing is
a throwback to the hilariously unsatisfactory heroes and heroines
of Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh. Smith, whose 1994 novel,
How Insensitive, mined similar territory -- the lives of Toronto's helplessly hip --
offers here a more polished portrait of a distracted magazine writer for whom la vie boh[e`]me
is rapidly becoming La vie ho-hum. ...
Smith picks on the effete and the dowdy with a bracing
even-handedness: he's just as good at nailing what makes motel dining rooms
so creepy as he is at skewering performance poets.' `Noise is not so much a novel as a series of sketches. Many of them ... are priceless.
In one episode, Willing and his girlfriend visit an upscale restaurant and witness its
famous chef and his boyfriend, the sous-chef, having a colossal hissy fit....
In these and other scenes, Smith plays to his strengths -- a well-tuned
ear for speech, a keen eye for absurdity, a wicked aptitude for ridicule.
These are writerly strengths that Canadian literature badly needs.' `The brain-rattling sounds of the city frame Noise Russell Smith's
smart and engaging follow-up to his popular debut novel, How
Insensitive Our hero, James Willing, finds himself caught between the
placid but boring world of the suburbs he left behind and the noisy,
ultra-hip downtown scene that feels just as alienating. He stumbles into
a job as a restaurant critic, writing pretentious reviews that make him
an unwilling arbiter of all that is cool in Toronto.
`When James loses his apartment in rather dramatic fashion, he crashes at
his friend Piers De Courcy's place, where they wax philosophic, mainly
about James's life, and drink copious amounts of fine wine, which they
describe in hilarious detail. (A '79 Les Ormes du Pez, declares De
Courcy, offers a "quiet voice of reason ... whimsical, patient, tolerant
of human foibles.") James is terrorized by De Courcy's Maritime roommate
and her jock boyfriend, an arts-grant-gobbling performance artist, and
finds his attention divided between two women who personify his struggle
between the suburbs and the city: Alison, a single mother from back
home, and Nicola, a tattooed and studded überbabe photographer whom
James enlists to shoot an overrated Prairie writer he is interviewing
for a large American publication. Alison turns out to be less grounded
than she appears, while Nicola is the type of high-maintenance slacker
that has driven millions of men to despair. James is both drawn to and
repelled by the terrible beauty of city women and the charade of city
life, and Smith paints trendy Toronto with an accuracy that will have
you either cringing or laughing your head off.'
- Saturday Night
- The Toronto Star
- Moe Berg, amazon.ca
Photo by Ceri Marsh