Mark Jordan Manner explores the complications of memory
Mark Jordan Manner’s debut novel Most Perfect Things About People is categorically not light holiday reading. Manner, who received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph, published his novel through Tailwinds Press.
Within the opening movements of the text, an eight-year-old boy murders (whether there was preconceived intent is deliberately omitted) another boy by hitting him repeatedly in the face with a brick before fleeing, allegedly never to be seen again. From there, Most Perfect Things spirals out slowly across several decades, characters, and locations, often giving the reader little to no nominal or pronominal reference.
Manner’s novel is a text that dives deep into the suburban gothic of the Greater Toronto Area. Hamilton, Aurora, and Mississauga all have a place here, and they all become uncanny versions of themselves.It becomes delightfully unnerving then, should the reader be familiar with any of the GTA towns, to read quiet depravities happening just beneath the familiar surface.The story plays out over the modern day devil’s crossroads; gas stations, no-name diners, Tim Hortons, tiny Toronto apartments, bus stations. Liminal spaces take on an excruciatingly permeable quality. Suddenly, the events of the text become half-heard conversations from the back of the GO bus line, an overseen text on the subway, a strange argument from a few tables over at some nondescript Tims.
Manner’s characters resist sympathy because their emotions, thoughts, and reactions are incredibly unpredictable.
When we read, we instinctively want simplicity; we want the intrigue, rising action, climax, denouement, conclusion presented with a neat bow. We like simple characters with understandable motivations and emotions. Manner’s characters can flit between several different emotions and motivations in the span of a paragraph. They mimic our own ephemeral state of being, how nothing we say is simply the precise connotation of each word combined to generate rational meaning. Words, looks, and touches carry infinitesimal levels of meaning.
This is one of Manner’s greatest strengths; he captures the fringes with almost painful realism, whether these fringes are the very real, very desperate fringes of poverty, or the fleeting misunderstood fringes of emotion and intent.Because Manner allows us to locate ourselves behind the eyes of his characters, I can forgive him his tendency to be overly gritty.
I must admit that, while reading Manner’s book, I couldn’t tell if I quite enjoyed it or if I actually really didn’t like it. It was a little too intentionally gritty, sometimes played a little too hard, a little disingenuously at profound. Each character was a little too self-destructive to be realistic, each one had to have some kind of bizarre, painful vice.
I suppose it could be argued that he was mythologizing humanity, and so, extremes were necessary, but reading about how every character put their fingers in hot coffee or against burning light bulbs became unbearably trite. It became a lazy form of self-destruction and lent an irritating deprecating quality to the writing. He loses the reader in these moments, which number far too many. Profundity gets lost in the moments of cliche, in the “sparkling beauty” of a painful snowfall. Ultimately, memory and childhood become a playground for experimentation and reflection. Narratives are vague. Punctuation is limited to necessity; periods, commas, question marks. The reader is left to assign speaking parts, assign memories, and divine intent.
Photo by Mariah Bridgeman/The Ontarion.