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The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke

by Steven Hayward

Steven Hayward’s debut novel is a big-hearted fable set in Depression-era Toronto in the enclave of poor Jews and Catholics known as “the Ward.” It begins with a challenge: Bloomberg, the legendary pitcher for the Elizabeth Street playground baseball team, will take on all comers. Anyone who can produce a hit off his signature pitch, the Bloomberg Special, gets to keep the baseball.

Everyone in the neighbourhood wants in on the action, but hitting the pitch is no easy matter. The secret is in Bloomberg’s windup. The pitch is thrown underhand and before the release Bloomberg windmills his arm faster and faster, waiting for the moment when the batter is overwhelmed by a desire to swing. Legend has it that Bloomberg once windmilled his arm 95 times before releasing the ball. His genius is not exactly athletic, but psychological, and as a result, the batter almost always swings too early.

It is that feeling of unbearable anticipation that is at the core of this novel. Hayward’s characters are all waiting for something great to happen to them. Lucio Burke, an Italian Catholic teenager who endures the same taunting calls of “kike” as the rest of his friends, is waiting for the moment when Ruthie Nodelman will finally have sex with him. Ruthie, known to most as “Ruthie the Commie,” awaits the proletarian revolution with the same aching expectancy. Meanwhile, Lucio’s best friend, Dubie Diamond, is looking for something – anything – that will allow him to escape his father’s business. So great is Dubie’s yearning to evolve that he keeps a copy of On the Origin of Species in the same hiding place his brother reserves for pornographic playing cards.

Hayward won the now-defunct Upper Canada Writers’ Craft Award for his collection of short fiction, Buddha Stevens and Other Stories. The same amiable confidence and poise he showed in that collection are on display here. Even when relating the most extraordinary elements of this fable, Hayward’s straightforward prose never wavers. There is a sense of effortlessness here, a nimble grace, as though he has rehearsed the telling a thousand times, taken a long windup for this pitch.

In the end though, the result is a bit too slick, too practiced, too perfect: the charming quirks of his characters have been polished and repolished until they gleam, but all their rough edges have been worn away. What the characters possess in charisma, they lack in depth. It is as though Hayward cannot truly imagine avarice or hatred in a person, so he has edited those qualities out of the main players, and anyone who possesses such unlikable characteristics must be kept well offstage, acting in the background.

That background movement here involves Toronto’s growing racial tension and civil unrest. The population is still mainly British and Protestant, and the strains of the Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe are pushing the city toward one of the most infamous events in its history: the riot at Christie Pits.

Overt anti-Semitism has been on the rise all summer, and members of the local Swastika Club are obviously planning something the day that the Elizabeth Street team is set to play in the championship game. However, none of these tensions affect the novel’s main characters. They move toward the momentous day largely oblivious of the rising tension, uninvolved in the larger emotions, the unbearable expectancy that is gripping the city. Even the one minor player who can actually claim to be a fascist mainly limits his fascist impulses to singing songs and imagining Mussolini on a white stallion.

Where the novel sparkles most is when Hayward indulges in the whimsical and stays away from the deep issues. A brief history of the knock-knock joke, for example, is completely charming, as is a miracle that has gripped Lucio’s family involving the mysterious movements of a statue of a saint holding a chicken. But when the novel turns to the problems of sweatshop workers on Spadina or the racial disharmony of a divided Toronto at a singular turning point in history, the whimsy of the surroundings does a disservice to the issues at hand.

The riot at Christie Pits is quickly becoming an important mythopoetic moment in Toronto’s history. This is the second novel in less than a year to place its characters in the middle of that event. In Karen X. Tulchinsky’s wonderful The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, the riot is the cause of a tragedy and serves as a terrible echo of the Russian pogroms. Here, Hayward uses the afternoon at Christie Pits for the strangest of purposes: to manufacture a happy ending. That he manages to get away with it is a testament to the enduring optimism and good nature of his prose.

 

Reviewer: Ken Hunt

Publisher: Knopf Canada

DETAILS

Price: $34.95

Page Count: 400 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-676-97703-0

Released: Mar.

Issue Date: 2005-2

Categories: Fiction: Novels