Skipping the escalator
Chris Robinson
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Taking the Stairs, by John Stiles (Nightwood Editions), 212 pp.
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John Stiles' Taking the Stairs (happily) adds no grand conclusions
Jarod Palmer is an aspiring 30-something writer from Nova Scotia who has moved to Toronto to pursue his desire to become a great writer. The stubborn Palmer is a walking artist cliché. He will not take hack screenwriting jobs from his friend Elliot nor will he get a real job to please his Spanish girlfriend. Instead, he's content to drift through life, wallowing, unable to function, let alone live. He talks about being a "real" writer but does little about it. He abandons short stories and a novel ("Lana Banana," based on his teen girlfriend). He wastes his days in a series of dead-end temp jobs (including time as one of those annoying electrical company reps who go door-to-door trying to sucker people into signing long-term contracts with their company). Palmer lives everywhere but his life. As his Spanish girlfriend Adrieneese tells him before she eventually dumps him: "When I first saw you in the bookstore I was sort of intrigued by you, by your intelligent mind and your absolute lack of awareness with what is going on in this world we live in... But now I'm starting to see that you're just kind of a scared bitter anachronism who finds fault with absolutely everything."
Ouch.
And yet, Adrienesse (who Jarod notes has a keen awareness of describing people) is spot on. Jarod is so critical of everything around that he ends up shutting himself off from the world. He's repeatedly told that he could write good screenplays and make easy money, but he refuses to take the work because he doesn't
respect it. Exploring the nature of the artist isn't exactly an original idea. There have been streams of books about the process of being a writer (and artist), but Stiles (a Nova Scotia-born writer now living in London, England) approaches the subject with warmth, humour and economy. You won't find the hysterics and hyperbole of Balzac's Frenhofer. Jarod's doubts and failures are just part of that thing called living.
Stiles offers no grand conclusions. Jarod doesn't become a rich screenplay writer and win back his girl, nor does he become a forgotten drunk languishing in the back alleys of Toronto. Instead Jarod eventually comes to an acceptance that this is the life he wants to live, no matter how much it bothers Elliot, Adriennesse or his parents. As he tells Elliot: "I have my own dreams. They are as real to me as the day we met and slowly and methodically I am hammering them down and assembling, editing and revising them. I'm not happy in the slightest with the way things are, so I'm writing about that."
Jarod might well succeed or fail as a writer. Writing might be a way of "endlessly walking away from the complications of his life." It doesn't matter because Jarod finally seems to be aware of who and where he is. And as some old Greek said, if you know yourself, the rest is peanuts.
