If John Lavery’s stories weren’t so thrillingly careening as to resist description by a single word, “frenetic” might be a good choice. But it’s not. You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off is quick in pacing and wit, sharp of tongue and eye, and filled with smarts both intellectual and emotional. So while the story “Snort” may initially seem too aptly titled, with its clipped humour and sudden shifts of perspective, the weird coherence achieved by the end allows little doubting of the meticulousness of Lavery’s craft. Such dizzying successes transcend “frenetic.”

This is not another overly hip and unrewarding flounce through the often-sloppy carnival of postmodernity. In addition to being an audacious and imaginative stylist, Lavery is clearly a thinker. Many of his paragraphs reward rereading not only for their narrative originality, but for the richness of their vocabulary and the genuinely interesting ideas they embody. Few short stories display an intellectual playfulness to match their surface linguistic flash, but Lavery’s writing is roundly rewarding enough to evoke echoes of Leon Rooke at his most bizarre, or the absurd mini-masterpieces of Donald Barthelme.

But these are not merely stories of ideas. Character is always at the forefront, most prominently Montreal cop PF (Paul François Bastarache), a keen but easily distracted investigator who recurs and grows in rank as the book’s oblique
mysteries unfold. Like most of Lavery’s characters, PF is introduced hazily, gradually acquiring a satisfying fullness as telling details accrue from story to story. This unhurried sense of revelation is crucial to the book’s overall effect, and works to counter the potentially disorienting flits of the narrative eye.

While it’s not a collection of detective stories in any traditional sense, Kwazniev-ski’s enigmatic recurrences – of character, image, phrase – lend the beguiling impression of a key to understanding being dangled just beyond the reader’s reach. Thankfully, Lavery clearly poses neither problems nor solutions, skillfully tempering these carefully pieced-together stories with a sense of spontaneity that keeps them from ever feeling overly clever or willfully obtuse.