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Young Men

by Russell Smith

These stories, in the main, are a kind of anthropological foray that might have been subtitled “Failing to Come of Age in Toronto.” “Slaves of Queen Street” or “Dimmish Lights, Middling City” would also have served. Russell Smith uses broad satirical strokes to render – sometimes to eviscerate – a vapid tribe of duplicitous, self-inflated, unregenerate, spiritually cauterized, parochial, profoundly shallow assholes. They are, for the most part, “media industry” whores: an incestuous clan of air-kissing, party-hopping, cooler-than-thou film, television, and magazine bottom feeders. Their only loyalties, however fleeting, are to brand names. They embody everything that is ugly about striving, including striving’s usual outcome, which is failure. Dominic’s one of our up-and-coming new director types, his short film was almost nominated for a Genie: about as dunning a career summation as ever you’ll find.

Dominic, who figures in the first three stories of Young Men, betrays his girlfriend by having an affair with her best friend; undermines his associates by dishing them, pseudonymously, in a gossip column; and in a satisfying Darwinian twist is finally relegated to a passive role in the food chain. In “Dreams,” Eddie violates his girlfriend’s deepest privacy to further his careerist ambitions. In “The Stockholm Syndrome,” Lionel Baratelli – an Emerging Canadian Author – grits his teeth through the book tour from hell. Just when you start to pity his lot, he slithers back into the slough of the loathsome by turning what could have been a genuine and transformative chance meeting into something grubby and exploitative. Only the women come off well, although they display a kind of patience with and dependence on the developmentally delayed rotters that makes you both wonder and despair.

The stories in Young Men are very much of a time and place, and readers with a connection – real or imagined – to the hemi-demi-semi-monde to which they are particular will devour them with a roman à clef enthusiasm. Although it is a society from which I am wholly abstracted (Deo gratias), I appreciated the acerbic, quick line sketches Smith uses to depict and deflate the vain and the nasty, but which also reveal the foundation of loneliness on which so many of their mansions are built. Hubris and pathos are the two antique qualities that sustain these stories, and suggest that Young Men, while perhaps not destined for the canon, won’t be dismissed by readers 30 years hence, when Prada and Fluevog may be dust and ash, as just another turn-of-millennium sneer fest.

 

Reviewer: Bill Richardson

Publisher: Doubleday Canada

DETAILS

Price: $29.95

Page Count: 256 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-385-25825-9

Released: Apr.

Issue Date: 1999-2

Categories: Fiction: Short