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Once You Break a Knuckle

by D.W. Wilson; D.W. Wilson

The challenge of giving literary voice to working-class characters too inarticulate, unselfconscious, and just plain beaten down to do so for themselves has been taken up by authors as diverse as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Flannery O’Connor, James Kelman, Russell Banks, and, here in Canada, David Adams Richards and Alice Munro. The methods employed by these and other authors vary, but they usually depend on the trick of writing from within the narrow boundaries of fictional working-class lives while also transcending those boundaries through literary techniques that don’t jar the reader into disbelief. Good dialogue helps, as do keen observations on the social fabric that ties lower-class communities into collectively defined units.

First-time author D.W. Wilson hits those latter two targets in a big way with Once You Break a Knuckle, a collection of loosely connected short stories set in the rough mill towns of B.C.’s Kootenay Valley. The stories weave in and out of the lives of Will and Mitch, childhood friends coming to adulthood under the long shadows of their powerful fathers.

Will’s father, John, is the primal sire extraordinaire, a legendary and very tough RCMP constable who distills brutal life lessons into aphorisms like the one that gives the book its title: “Once you break a knuckle, you will break it again.” John is no brute, though. He merely wants his son to get through his small-town upbringing with his dignity and teeth intact, then get out of town and make a better life for himself. The scenes of hypermasculine one-upmanship and verbal sparring between father and son are moving and funny, especially in the opening story, “The Elasticity of Bone,” in which John and Will square off in a judo tournament.

John and Will’s bond, largely defined by non-verbal rituals, acts as a template for the male relationships that dominate the collection. Men don’t talk about or express their feelings (except for anger), even when a bit of intimacy would greatly ease the suffering around and inside them. Drinking, fighting, and hard work eventually replace all other forms of bonding. 

Wilson’s tight, rhythmic sentences underscore the men’s exhausting cycles of hard work and half-consummated intimacies: “It’d been an extra eight hours shoving lumber and he was gamy with the smell of sawdust and that metallic thing tools do to your hands. Everything ached.” Even the harsh landscapes mirror the men’s lives, with cold mornings that “smell[ed] like winter, the scent of brick and pale sunlight.”

The men aren’t much better at expressing intimacy with their female lovers, siblings, or friends. Relationships start in the heat of need and affection but eventually fizzle out into betrayals or domestic routine. Only the story “Reception,” which introduces readers to Mitch’s stable family life, offers an alternative.

More typical is “The Persistence,” in which an emotionally shattered middle-aged electrician making a last go at a dignified working life considers getting together with a woman on his crew. He senses the spark between them, but through harsh experience he has already assessed and written off any chance for happiness: “Broken people are drawn to broken people. That’s the love life he had to look forward to with Kelly: a three-legged race.” Here Wilson illuminates the unspoken yearnings and quiet poetry of a broken man’s hidden life with an immediately visual, visceral, and completely apt metaphor.

Such literary techniques are used too sparingly,  though. Wilson seems intent on proving his characters’ masculine cred by overwhelming the reader with repetitively plain descriptions of cars, fights, calloused hands, industrial buildings, six packs, fumbling dialogue, and inner monologues that trail off into brute incomprehension. Working-class masculine life is far richer, far more eccentric and riven with mystery, than what is depicted here.

It’s true that men with such elemental personalities and life stories would not walk around analyzing their deepest feelings like characters out of a Woody Allen film. The problem is that Wilson too often presents his characters’ rough surfaces and blunted speech as the final word, as if his characters were incapable of insincerity or of adapting eccentric personae like their middle-class brethren.

There are hints of a more unhinged, mysterious identity throughout the collection, especially in the best story, “Valley Echo.” Here, in a story rich enough in character, imagery, and incident to fill a novel, Wilson drops the Hemingway-esque mannerisms and plunges deep into the psyches of some compellingly unrestrained characters. A surreal but utterly believable scene in which the naive teenage protagonist is confronted by a naked thug at a back-road hot spring hints at what Wilson is capable of as a writer.

This reader hopes Wilson embraces more of that wildness and leaves kitchen-sink realism to lesser talents.

 

Reviewer: James Grainger

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Canada

DETAILS

Price: $32

Page Count: 260 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-670-06574-5

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2011-11

Categories: Fiction: Short