Jennifer McCartney Reviews Brent van Staalduinen's Boy

Boy. Brent van Staalduinen. Dundurn Press. $21.99, 312 pp., ISBN: 978-1-45974-588-9

Fiction is often prophetic. Things that seemed wild and unlikely in many 20th century novels are here, today, and unremarkable: the total government surveillance of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the virtual reality of Gibson’s Neuromancer, and, newly relevant, the pandemic world of Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness – a 1981 thriller about a supervirus originating in Wuhan, China. Earlier this year, even, Lockdown by Peter May was rushed to press after failing to find a publisher in 2005. Its premise – a pandemic requiring the world’s population to shelter in place – was too unbelievable, according to editorial feedback at the time.

Boy by Brent van Staalduinen (also the author of Saints, Unexpected, Invisible Publishing, 2016) is not a pandemic novel, nor is it science fiction. Nevertheless, this sensitive and unusual book about a grieving high school kid (Boy, of the title) who meets a hermit under the QEW overpass in Hamilton – a hermit who can stop time – is an eerie read during this pandemic year.

Boy, we learn, is a bit of a loner. His late sister is an amiable ghost, while his father is imprisoned at Kingston Penitentiary, and his mother suffers from a gin habit. The brief dose of the ethereal, here – his sister’s ghost, a time travel trick – isn’t the point of the novel, which delves into family relationships and obligations, friendships, and what, exactly, constitutes doing the right thing. But the release of Boy coincides with one of the strangest periods in modern history – a world on pause – and its premise, that a magical hermit can keep us safe by stopping time and that only by stopping time can we keep ourselves safe makes it feel a bit prophetic. Uncomfortable, even.

Time is a central theme in Boy. The nature of it, how it slows and stretches amidst the experience of grief, how it stops – and the second chances we get when it does. On the question of pausing time as a solution to Boy’s problems: “Though what’s fixed, really? It’s just another sort of delay. An imperfect solution. As it has been all along….A stalling strategy at best, regardless of whether it seems as though it might be helping.” As we sit inside, waiting out the virus, this is a valid question, both for Boy and for the reader. After a confrontation with the hermit, Mara, he remembers, “When it comes to bad things there is only forward motion imperfect though it might be...Still, there will be anguish and grief.” Indeed.

Then there’s the visceral description of a cramped bus as Boy “folds himself into a space designed for shorter people...Doubly claustrophobic, his own body, everyone else's, all wedged in together.” It’s enough to make an isolating reader have a panic attack.

The city – its buses, shoreline, streets, and diners – features prominently and there are some glorious Hamilton moments: “They fall silent as the city slides past, the synchronized stoplights along Main moving them steadily eastward without pause.” This green-lit magic is real joy, for anyone that’s experienced it, and a uniquely Hamilton rite of passage. In contrast, there are some areas where the reader wishes for more clarity. Boy’s cadet life, its teachings that are of such importance to him, his dream of being a pilot, remains tantalizingly out of reach – often referenced but never realized or understood.

The real magic comes, though, in the contemplation of the what-ifs. And the acknowledgement that nothing, for any of us, Boy and reader, will ever be the same. I took a walk, while reading the book, down to the shore of Lake Ontario near where the QEW looms overhead. Many safe metres between myself and the rest of humanity, it felt good to look out on the water – the constant, reliable lake so integral to Hamilton’s identity, and its success. I thought a lot about Boy, down there by the lake, and about what it means to be alive, to submit to something for the greater good, to pause everything, together yet separate, and about what comes next. Relief, grief, normalcy. “When everything starts up again, most of the world will resume pace, seemingly unchanged and unaware,” van Staalduinen writes. “Yet change always happens, even when nothing moves or breathes.”

Jennifer McCartney is the New York Times bestselling author of The Joy of Leaving Your Sh*t All Over the Place and 8 other books. Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, she lives in Brooklyn, NY.