Hannah Barrie Reviews Rae Spoon’s Green Glass Ghosts
Rae Spoon. Green Glass Ghosts. Arsenal Pulp Press. $19.95, 252 pp., ISBN: 978-155152-838-0
Green Glass Ghosts, author and musician Rae Spoon’s newest novel, is a revelatory glimpse of queer and trans youth on the precipice of adulthood. Set in Vancouver at the start of the 2000s, the novel draws on events from Spoon’s life to tell the story of a young queer person finding their way after moving to a new city. The unnamed protagonist narrates their entry into a queer scene and community in what feels like one long exhale, moving through new streets and interactions with joy and fear interchangeably, or sometimes all at once.
Spoon’s attention to detail sets the scene with precision: pagers clipped on belts, that new show Survivor, the end of smoking indoors. Vancouver at the turn of the millennium is rendered with nuanced care. The city shifts in atmosphere from one neighbourhood to the next, green glass towers lining downtown streets making way for the Downtown Eastside, which is deserted, “as if the buildings had been forgotten by whoever owned them.” The particular setting evokes a familiar feeling: stepping, for the first time, into new streets that will one day become home. Gem Hall’s illustrations reflect Spoon’s careful atmosphere, depicting characters spirit-like, smoky, trailing through city streets.
The narrator, newly nineteen, enters this landscape from Calgary with their guitar and a backpack. Despite knowing just one person in Vancouver, they are quickly welcomed into this city, which has room for people like them. As readers, we are pulled into the whirlwind of the young queer and trans Vancouver scene, first heading to the beach, then a party, then another. By the second night in town, the narrator has fallen for their new friend Riki. (Spoon uses the gender-neutral pronoun ‘they’ for all characters, creating welcome fluidity and ambiguity throughout.)
Spoon’s protagonist details the quiet intricacies of learning to be around new people, narrating their introspective experience of social situations. Their narration reveals the importance in finding queer and trans community as a young person, especially after growing up with an abusive or intolerant biological family. The shared understandings and easy generosity of the friends they meet in Vancouver offer a sorely needed sense of safety and comfort. Spoon’s descriptions of emotion are bodily, visceral. When the narrator feels safe and loved, their body responds in kind: from “plummeting towards the earth’s core” to the sensation of “a liquid light” cascading like a waterfall from their toes to their head and back again. But alongside the deep warmth and generosity Spoon conveys in these new connections, Green Glass Ghosts also explores the harm that can occur in queer relationships. The protagonist’s interactions depict the luminous possibility of such connections while delving into their complexity, portraying how queer and trans people can bring each other solace from trauma and re-enact harmful patterns at the same time.
The characters’ pasts are an integral part of how they move through the world. Trauma is widespread in the characters’ histories, but always depicted in context, never gratuitously. The narrator grapples with their past experience of abuse from their Pentecostal family while meeting other queer, trans, and gender non-conforming youth who have come to the city carrying the weight of their own pasts, playing out old dynamics and creating new ones, finding ways to manage and move forward. Spoon deftly portrays the narrator’s corporeal reality of living with trauma, describing memories of abuse like being “boiled in poison.” To cope, they and their friends drink often and hard. Drinking is a central facet of the narrator’s life, and its facilitation of connection and social ease are clear in the novel. Spoon shows the utility of alcohol without romanticizing it. During a party, the narrator soothes their anxiety with a drink, noting, “the panic slowly sloshed back down my throat to wherever beer went in my body.” But empty bottles beside the bed nearly every morning and regular descriptions of dull hangovers give the sense that the protagonist’s drinking is unsustainable. The epilogue, in which the narrator considers sobriety, offers a potential fresh start and a sense of hope.
The rapid action and introspection of Green Glass Ghosts makes for an engrossing and accessible read, one that immerses the reader in its world, moment by moment. The narrator is seeking a new kind of life, facing the decision to keep living over and over again, reaching with each choice toward the self they want to become. In the end, the book holds two seemingly contradictory truths side by side: each small action in a day adds up to the life you might want; and at the same time, each new day is another opportunity to start over.
Hannah Barrie is a researcher and writer living in Hamilton. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Law and Social Policy and the Journal of International Women’s Studies. You can find her at hannahbarrie.ca.