Week of September 26, 2007, Issue #623
Best let this Black Rabbit get away
MARSHALL WATSON / marshall@vueweekly.com
The short fiction of Salvatore Difalco offers the reader a glimpse into a dark world of desperation, misguided cruelty and violent impulses not unlike our own. However, wherein our world beatings and break-ins and random violence enact a chain of events, and usually (or hopefully) serious repercussions, in Difalco’s book Black Rabbit & Other Stories, not only do such acts seem to go unpunished, but they also lack any sort of significant effect on the reader.Yes, “the world is a battlefield,” as Difalco says in “Skunks,” and he does tell his stories with a refreshing bluntness—they are not flashy or action-packed or overly dramatic—but neither are they as engaging as one might hope. The stories—full of rapes and beatings, rampant drug use and gore—don’t seem eventful, not because we have all been desensitized to such violence but because they often occur with no motivation, significance or justification after the fact.
I admit that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and I would not argue that writing should portray a rigid sense of morality (or reality), but the physical and emotional brutality in Difalco’s writing has a detached and distant aesthetic that renders the stories almost ineffectual.
His characters—the marginalized, often downtrodden outsiders of society—have the potential to pull on the heartstrings of the reader, but the overwhelmingly excessive staccato bursts of details often feel like afterthoughts, unnecessarily thrown into the narration. Difalco’s constantly choppy sentence structure dilutes the desired effect of his dark, violent stories and though such plots do not necessarily require a resolution, long, distant and ineffectual passages and the overwhelming meaninglessness of the violence takes a toll on the reader after a hundred pages or so.
“Then Larry went down to the park near his flat—Duke and Cayuga stood near the swings, selling crack. Duke saw him first and slapped Cayuga’s shoulder. Cayuga looked over with his fake ferocity. He didn’t scare Larry. He was a rat. Whenever he got pinched he ratted out the whole neighbourhood. And Duke was a punk. They knew Larry had been in for beating up a guy from Niagara Falls—put him in a coma. It was over an ounce of weed. The guy, this big mouth bastard, accused Larry of selling him a bad count. Larry didn’t sell bad counts.”
Did you lose interest just there? I sure did.
Though, I must admit, Black Rabbit definitely did have its moments. A handful of the stories are much less dark and a few of those are actually quite brilliant.
“The Venetian,” for instance, subtly (and non-violently) explores identity and belonging within the microcosm of Toronto’s Little Italy; “The Dream of Giraffe,” a whimsical and wonderfully clever story of a half-crazy hospital patient and his bounding, almost schizophrenic, narrative full of colours and textures and safari animal cameos is a story prefectly suited to Difalco’s style of short curt sentences and minimal dialogue. Here, just as in the other stories, nothing is explained, and thoughts, characters and antelopes race by randomly and inconsequentially, but the surreal and lighthearted adventure of following Francois Giraffe around, even though we never (or do we?) leave his room, gives the reader something wonderful, effectual and memorable.
In the end, stories such as “The Venetian,” “The Skunk,” “Maid of the Mist” and “The Dream of Giraffe” are almost enough to make buying Black Rabbit worthwhile, but the other 17 or so often read an awful lot like the way that fat guy in the lunch room at your shitty warehouse job talks: telling you stories about his buddies or some rough guy he once met that you always lose interest in halfway though and then, worse, have trouble believing when they’re done. V
By Salvatore Difalco
Black Rabbit & Other Stories
Anvil Press, $22