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The Dilettantes

by Michael Hingston

In his fiction debut, Michael Hingston, the books columnist for the Edmonton Journal, has delivered a campus novel from the perspective of the students, a clever twist that provides an entertaining – and somewhat alarming – view of undergraduate life.

It’s fall, and Alex Belmont and Tracy Shaw are in their last year as students at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University. They’re editors at The Peak, the student newspaper, and a rival paper – the freebie Metro – is beginning to eat away at their readership.

Drugs, alcohol, and caffeine fuel much of the activity, and sex is something more bragged about than actually engaged in. But Hingston’s strength is in dramatizing how lost and confused these young people are in a world fixated on surface appearances. And he does it all with a delicious sense of humour, eviscerating his characters’ extended adolescence while creating sympathy for their attempt to find a place in the world.

Liberated from the hellishness of high school, Hingston’s undergraduates find themselves locked in yet another codified system. They discover a world in which being a nerd is the highest calling, and blasé disaffection has transformed into hyper-engagement: “If you brought up fashion now, it must have a footnote from Michel Foucault on the tag. All uses of the word Darfur must be followed by a minute of silence. All chocolate-chip cookie recipes must be postcolonial.” Hingston skewers the silliness of students who agonize over trivialities such as the colour of a Che Guevara poster.

The novel is filled with local colour, including SFU’s architecture, movie crews crawling over campus, and the proliferation of weird drinks and ludicrously expensive coffee. It’s loaded with music, movie, and TV references, and lampoons the decline in the newspaper business and education (the school offers a humanities course called “Shakespeare Without Shakespeare,” in which students are not allowed to mention the Bard’s works).

Alex and Tracy know the world they inhabit is deeply flawed, but they must nevertheless try to create a set of standards for themselves. These intelligent, sensitive young people can be found on any campus, and Hingston’s novel, while hilarious, goes beyond the superficial and ultimately celebrates the positive.

 

Reviewer: Candace Fertile

Publisher: Freehand Books

DETAILS

Price: $21.95

Page Count: 288 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-55481-182-3

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2013-8

Categories: Fiction: Novels