14th Canadian Challenge - 3rd Review - The Outside World

While I think of Barry Dempster primarily as a poet, he also writes fiction from time to time.  The Outside World is his 2nd novel.  It tells the story of Robbie, a Scarborough boy facing the twin challenges of dealing with adolescence and the fact that his family situation is quite messed up.  It's almost the mirror-image of Leung's That Time I Loved You in the sense there is considerable dysfunction on a sleepy Scarborough middle class street but is all inside the narrator's household.  (I haven't actually gotten around to reading Catherine Hernandez's Scarborough, but my understanding is it is focused on a lower-income neighbourhood with different sorts of pressures and problems.)  Another major difference is this is set in 1966, representing an era of free-range parenting that is quite alien today, but also before the arrival of a steady stream of newcomers to Canada from East and South Asia, whereas this demographic shift is well underway by the start of Leung's novel.

I won't go into great detail about Robbie's situation, but he is largely in charge of keeping track of his developmentally challenged sister, Lissy.  At some point, an older teen starts picking on Robbie and trying to take advantage of Lissy (not completely dissimilar to the deranged bully in That Time I Loved You).  No question neither author really sells Scarborough as a childhood paradise...  

Robbie's father, Ed, nearly works himself into an early grave as the owner of a service station, perhaps in order to avoid facing up to the fact that his daughter will never be normal and his wife refuses to leave the house.  In fact, Robbie's mother has developed an acute case of agoraphobia (in an era when people were just expected to tough it out and not seek medical treatment!).  After Ed has a medical crisis and is taken to the hospital, she can only be forced to visit him once, and the rest of the time it is Robbie who has to make the trips out to check up on his dad.

That said, one of Robbie's aunts does step in and eventually takes over almost all of the paperwork and much of the management at the service station, letting Ed recover.  While there are severe strains in the family, they don't lose everything in a downward spiral, i.e. this isn't a melodramaic tear-jerker.  Robbie does have a few bright spots in his life, even though taking care of his sister and, increasingly, his mother dramatically curtails the time he can spend with his friends.  He develops a crush on a girl in his class and does his best to navigate the shoals of middle adolescence, having been dealt a somewhat lousy hand.

Overall I enjoyed The Outside World, and at some point I'll probably read some other fiction by Dempster, on top of having read most of his poetry.  There is a short review of The Outside World here and a longer one here.