Timothy Taylor’s career has had an atypical trajectory so far. In 2000, he placed three short stories in the Journey Prize anthology, including that year’s winning tale. In 2001, his first novel, Stanley Park, hit the Giller Prize shortlist. And in 2002, his story collection, Silent Cruise, received rave reviews, including a starred one from me in these pages.

Taylor’s arc has been near vertical, and that is strange because it is entirely appropriate to his talent. Things don’t often happen as they should in CanLit. Advances, grants, raves, and awards are routinely doled out for books that, once the blinders of hype have been replaced by the binoculars of hindsight, most people can see were duds. Yet of all the Canadian fiction published so far this century, none has been more deserving of celebration than Taylor’s. For once, CanLit got it right. So far.

Taylor may be one of our best short story writers, but as his new novel Story House shows, he is not one of our best novelists. Not yet, anyway. There is much more than just a spark of hope here – there are veritable bonfires of talent – but at over 400 pages, Story House reads as if it barely saw an editor’s pencil. Taylor’s talent rages out of control.

Set mostly in the present time, Story House tells the tale of two half-brothers in their late thirties, Graham and Elliot Gordon, sons of a philandering, alcoholic, genius architect named Packer Gordon. Packer, now dead, is a mythical figure to the brothers. The novel’s narrative trigger is a boxing match Packer forced between them when they were teenagers, in which one nearly died. Taylor uses this match, staged in a building Packer designed, to load the novel with dichotomy symbolism. Graham and Elliot are like opposing halves of one person. Graham, an architect, is a boring, hardworking, morally superior ideas person. Elliot, a counterfeiter, is a naturally talented risk taker who lives in the hard world of crime. Like matter and antimatter, whenever the brothers meet, things explode.

Taylor is an undeniably good storyteller. Identifying patterns and spinning tales around them is his greatest talent, but when left unchecked, it can also be his greatest liability. His relentless, clinical descriptions smother the reader’s imagination. His overbearing adherence to form leaps beyond obsessive. His characterizations are complex jigsaw puzzles – intricate, challenging, and iconic, yet still flat. And there’s the rub: strong characters push authors off the page, demanding their own reality. But with the exception of one secondary character (Graham’s brilliantly portrayed wife, Esther), Taylor’s characters are little more than sources of extravagant melodrama.

These troubles are exacerbated by the novel’s subject. Architecture is static. The subject-predicate structure of English wants verbs, it wants action, and where there are no verbs, writers impose metaphor and simile. This can lead to abstraction.

Taylor handles most of the book’s architecture well, but he trips at the most crucial locus. Packer’s building, where the boxing match occurred, eventually becomes the main point of contention between the adult Graham and Elliot, but it is presented as an ambiguous
structure with no apparent function. No one knows why it was built, despite its central Vancouver location. For Taylor, the building is the nexus of his symbolism, but because he fails to ground the building in reality, it holds no significance for the reader. And whenever novelists ask readers to care about abstractions, they enter dangerous territory.

This reaching symbolism also produces factual gaffes. At numerous points, highly educated characters interpret the building’s spiral staircase as inspired by DNA. Packer’s building went up in 1939. The double helix of DNA was discovered in 1953. Old Packer must be spinning in his fictional grave.

The acknowledged rule for effective paradigmatic storytelling is to give your protagonist(s) goals, then throw up roadblocks. Many will complain this is formulaic and “Hollywood,” but Story House, which features a car chase, Russian mobsters, a native wise man, a crusty boxing coach, and a slick Jewish TV producer, can hardly claim to be eschewing Hollywoodisms.

The paradox of Story House is that its story is so weak. After 350 pages, the brothers finally face a goal, having decided what to do with the building. By then, the slick producer has been dragged forward to jump-start the plot with a reality TV show about them. This is all artifice, heaped on so Taylor can spin out his symbolic conflict to its symmetrical and implosive conclusion. The disappointing outcome, however, is that it is Taylor who crashes down, into the sadly familiar ranks of CanLit’s more dilatory and tedious novelists.

Let’s hope it’s just a detour.