Sep. 19, 2006 - Issue #570: Book ‘Em
The Garneau Block
Garneau Block brings Edmonton home for you and you and you
Sublime. It’s the only word for The Garneau Block, the serial-cum-novel by local golden boy, Todd Babiak. I know, as the alternative press, I’m supposed to say it’s the overhyped work of the Big, Corporate newspaper’s culture writer. And it is. Babiak doesn’t claim to be anything but, and the book suffers for it—but he delivers what he promised.The pitch meeting went something like this: I’m a published novelist who writes for you to pay the bills, says Todd. He shows them his first novel, the aggressive Choke Hold. Then he tells them his Idea.
The CanWest Global suits are unconvinced. Relying on his master’s in English lit, he tells them about Charles Dickens (of whom they’ve heard) and Alexander McCall Smith (of whom they haven’t). Babiak shows them that a serial novel is financially viable. They’re listening.
In the end, he promised them content targeted to almost every readership demographic of the Edmonton Journal. The marketing team took the ball, ran with an unprecedented amount of promotion, and they had a hit. Tens of thousands of people talked about the serialized novel. Locally, it was Survivor-like buzz about a serial story. I wasn’t subscribed to the paper, and I still followed the story by online synopsis and coffee break osmosis.
The result was, again, sublime.
Todd Babiak is a charismatic writer. He also had to put something interesting in every chapter or else he would lose readership. In The Garneau Block, this challenge translates into quick payoffs and description that relies on journalistic shorthand instead of novelistic loquaciousness. Many lives had to be interwoven in broad strokes, and Babiak made me care about most of them.
The disgraced philosophy professor enraptured me. His lifetime of repression and intellectualism erupted very quietly into socially inappropriate, if understandable, behaviour. I watched a transformation worthy of Milan Kundera and admired his fanatical rededication to a new vision.
I cherished every word about the aging leading actor in this theatre-mad town. In the face of his local stardom, his Peter Pan complex and sardonic self-destruction had a beautiful poignancy. Less riveting but more satirical was a Conservative wonk’s fall from grace.
However, the professor’s wronged wife, a Whyte knickknack shop owner and hockey nut, was less enchanting. The plight of the Single and Pregnant main character, full of passive despair at her travel agency job after her master’s thesis on the haiku got her nowhere, left me completely unaffected. That’s OK: they weren’t in there for my demographic.
If I make Babiak sound calculating, that isn’t my intent. He may have planned for every target audience, but the fact remains that I know each person in this story. I know the closeted him-bo from Leduc, the gregarious aboriginal man selling Our Voice on Whyte, and the owner of the travel agency. You know them, too. It doesn’t matter if the ones I know aren’t the ones you know, or aren’t the ones that inspired Babiak: each and every one is so fundamentally Edmontonian that they become a shared recognition.
He brings each of these characters together with delicacy and grace in response to his call for action: Let’s Fix It! The enigmatic signs are duct taped to every tree and light on the Garneau Block, in response to the violence that visited one of the houses only two weeks before. It’s also in response to something more, though, and this is where Babiak reaches for a larger story to tell.
He builds a neighbourhood out of the little group of people that found themselves living next to each other, and he builds a sense of community out of the city of Edmonton. (Granted, he does it by somewhat lazily inventing a single, millionaire philanthropist and patron of the arts.) Both concepts seem outdated and more than a little hokey in the 2000s, but both are prescribed by Babiak as sorely missing. His ending touches the divine, which is just as sorely missing in blue-collar Redmonton.
The worthwhile, quasi-mystical journey of discovery aside, this book offers more visceral enjoyment as well. I’m enough of an Edmontonian to respond to the places he describes. I recognize every one of his landmarks, and wait breathlessly for him to mention the next one. He doesn’t disappoint: he is a culture writer, after all.
He leaps from one reference to another, taking me through the Next Act and the Humanities elevator that really did always smell like boiled cabbage. We visited the Roost and the Summerside subdivision. In one breath, Babiak mentions three tragedies that truly cement the book’s time and place: a 13-year-old girl found on the golf course, a Somali cab driver stabbed and stuffed in his trunk, and a pregnant wife beaten to death and abandoned in a ditch.
Unfortunately, the core of the novel’s appeal to daily readers, Edmontonian ex-pats living abroad, or readers around the world, might well be its downfall here in the city. We have this pathetic idea that great books are set in exotic locales, and Edmonton is simply too prosaic. (Minister Faust’s Coyote Kings might disagree.)
This ridiculous inferiority complex, which manifests in hair-trigger howls of outrage whenever we perceive ourselves snubbed, will lead us to dismiss The Garneau Block and Babiak himself. He will become fabulously popular on the Toronto scene, and we’ll see yet another promising talent follow the artistic brain drain to anywhere-but-Alberta. Until then, go to the launch at the Roxy on Monday evening and buy a damn book.
Twenty years from now, no matter where you are, you will have a sublime book that perfectly captures Edmonton in the first years of the millennium. The book itself offers the additional pleasure of the television-season-on-DVD: instead of waiting to read the next chapter, the entire story can be consumed in one gloriously gluttonous binge. The fast-moving plots, full of intriguing characters and cultural references, were enough to engage dedicated followers of the serial.
Why not grab a piece of local-boy-makes-good before you have to rely on, “Hey—I read that guy when he was just a writer for the Journal!” V
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