Like the Bone Weir, Leon Rooke's The House on Major Street also turned up unannounced in my front yard library. I had never heard of Rooke previously, but apparently he's been established in Toronto writing experimental fiction for some time, after moving up from North Carolina. Many of his stories are still set in the American South, but The House on Major Street is thoroughly Canadian, being set on a small residential street in the Annex and with one of the characters a professor (on leave) from the University of Toronto. It's a relatively short book (212 pages with some correspondence related to Rooke's using real-life people as characters in the book). I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had pushed through and read it in a day or two, but I was busy and frankly after the first couple of chapters the manic energy slowed and I just wasn't compelled to press on. This is a thoroughly postmodern book, and it is fair to say I have moved on and am generally uninterested in literary postmodern games. One feature of most (all?) postmodern works is because the artifice is front and center, the plot per se doesn't really matter. The stakes are low (in my view) and I find it particularly hard to be engaged, aside from noticing the construction of the work, but the outcome of the the fates of any of the characters is pretty much besides the point. I've kind of hit that point in Don Quixote as well, after one too many references to the printed version of the first part of the story actually impacting events in the second part! All this is to say, I think it is all but impossible to SPOIL the plot of a postmodern novel. However, I will be revealing the ending, so stop reading now if you find that upsetting.
The through-line plot of The House on Major Street is absurdly simple. Zan, a girl in the neighbourhood is on her bike, running some errands, when she crashes into her neighbour, Tallis. It perhaps should be mentioned that both had mini-crushes on the other. Their heads crack together. Both go into comas, but Zan recovers sooner, while, at the book's opening, Tallis has been in a coma for over a month. Many well-wishers come by to support Tallis's parents, Emmitt and Daisy, and indeed this is spun out ad nauseam into the bulk of the novel. Essentially this is a reverse-Sleeping Beauty tale, so when Zan finally creeps into Tallis's room and tells him to wake up, he does so. And that's it. Curtain down.
I liked the energy of the first few chapters, including the flashback to the accident. It reminded me just a bit of the streetcar accident engineered by the Devil in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. But as more and more post-modern contrivances were layered on top of each other, my attention flagged. Maybe I would have been swept along had I read it in a couple of sittings, but honestly I doubt it. Rooke introduces Sheila, who is one of Daisy's friends and a successful romance novelist. Two of her characters are lifted off the page and start interacting with "real life" characters, just as in Findley's Headhunter. In addition, one of Chekhov's characters, Ryabovich, turns up to convene with Tallis in his coma. There is an entire subplot devoted to the trouble Daisy is in for leaving a rare copy of Finnegan's Wake out in the rain and ruining it. While presumably this was actually a copy from the Fisher Rare Book Library (or why would the university keep hounding her about it), 3 actual real-world book sellers (Steven Temple, Richard Landon and David Mason) turn up to look for it (when it wouldn't be hers to sell even if it was worth restoring). This subplot is dropped without being resolved, as are most of the postmodern touches.
As should be evident by now, as the book went on and on, I liked it less and less, and my overall rating is that this is not a very good book. It is likely only of interest to those who spent their young adulthood in Toronto's Annex or who really are curious about postmodern fiction.
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