Very dark, very funny, very Finkleman
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/08/2010 (5879 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Noah’s Turn
By Ken Finkleman
HarperCollins, 234 pages, $25
The protagonist of this short, dark and compulsively readable first novel is a "fallen upper-class WASP" who commits an evil deed with a machete.
An urban sophisticate, Noah Douglas is also nothing if not self-aware. At 41, divorced and childless, he drinks gallons of alcohol to numb himself against his revulsion for both his stalled career of TV writing and the smug ladder-climbing hypocrites in the literary intelligentsia he moves among.
At one point, in the novel’s third act, he gives a lecture to a university class, subbing for his dead friend, whose first novel had just got a rave from the New York Times.
"Who’s read Crime and Punishment?" Noah asks, a leading question if there ever was one.
Satisfied of the students’ ignorance, he switches topics.
"Does anyone have any thoughts on public broadcasting?"
This comic non sequitur is the kind of thing you’d expect from author Ken Finkleman, the Winnipeg-born film and TV writer and actor best known for his CBC-TV satire The Newsroom.
What comes as a surprise, though, in Finkleman’s literary debut at age 60, is its moral seriousness. Noah’s Turn masquerades as a black comedy but it has a stern and unforgiving heart.
In Noah’s drunkenness, not to mention his affectless sexual exploits, Finkleman seems to channelling the French bad boy Michel Houellebecq, who has published a series of nihilistic novels about European malaise.
He also echoes Martin Amis’s 1995 classic The Information, about a failed writer eaten by jealousy of his successful rival, not to mention David Gilmour, the Governor-General’s Award-winning Toronto writer of elegant forays into the dark heart of maledom.
By its geographical descriptions, this novel’s setting is obviously contemporary Toronto, though Finkleman, who lives there, does not mention the city by name.
Even the word Canada does not appear. To Finkleman’s credit, this seems less his strategy to make a U.S. sale than a philosophical statement about the homogeneity of North America.
More confounding, though, is the tuning of Noah’s ethnic antennae. Finkleman describes his protagonist as the grandson of a WASP society icon. But Noah (with his given name from the Old Testament), has an affinity for Jews and a bizarre obsession with the Holocaust.
In this regard, he might more resemble his creator, a product of Winnipeg’s prosperous South End Jewish community. Is this Finkleman’s dubious way of suggesting that Noah is not entirely beyond redemption?
In the early going, Noah finds himself in a Jewish deli in the city’s northern suburbs, impressed by its jewelry-bedecked customers and their proud forthrightness.
"And this is what Noah admired," Finkleman writes. "He hated himself for being a different person to different people, constantly inventing and reinventing himself depending on the circumstances."
Noah’s Turn is too derivative to be praised without reservation and perhaps too bleak to win the favours of Canada’s polite literary class. But its writing is economical and crisp, free of artifice and often very funny.
Morley Walker edits
the Free Press Books section.
