Some actually fall out of love in Paris
Strange Ghosts
A Toronto playwright and novelist ponders love, self-identity, art theory, global conflict, economics and a whole lot of other stuff
by Darren Greer
Cormorant, 174 pages, $24.95

reviewed by Suzanne Alyssa Andrew
Toronto Star Sunday, August 27, 2006

For a collection of essays that begins, "In 1995 I checked into a drug and alcohol treatment centre in Ottawa, where I stayed under supervision and in therapy for eleven months while I rid myself of a nasty and progressively worsening cocaine habit," Strange Ghosts is a remarkably placid meditation on art appreciation, family, identity and travel.

Darren Greer is a Toronto novelist (Tyler’s Cape and Still Life with June), playwright and AIDS activist who uses this collection of essays to reminisce about difficult events both global (9/11, the socio-political climate in South Africa) and personal (discovering his HIV status, breaking up with a lover in Paris). His casual, philosophical tone is a metaphysical notch above the glut of self-pitying addiction memoirs in the Betty Ford section of the bookstore.

Greer is candid about his status, background and homosexuality, but he’d rather tell you about his writing process, his family’s response to the war in Iraq, the "famine of economic equality" in South Africa that he equates to a "famine of economic human rights" and the need for a new visual aesthetic in contemporary art.

While writing in a style more congruent with a Harper’s magazine essay than a page out of A Million Little Pieces allows Greer to analyze multiple ideas, he does sometimes ripple his non-fiction narratives with humour. While he doesn’t offer the rapid-fire comedy of, say, a David Sedaris or a David Rakoff, Greer is nonetheless able to use wry realism to force life’s continuous merry-go-round of disasters and disappointments into slow-mo.

"Most people go to Paris to fall in love. I fell out of it," he writes in "Our Beloved Paris." Describing a 3 a.m. fight with his lover in the middle of rue d'Austerliz, he notes the squabble lasted "until some old man hollered ’Silence!’ from his fourth-storey window in what was likely the only English he knew besides hello and goodbye, please and thank you."

The most compelling essays in the collection are about identity and Greer’s father, described as a hard-working Nova Scotian dreamer who passed his desire to write on to his son. Describing his father’s gradual acceptance of Greer’s sexuality, he highlights how wider public acknowledgement will mean this century’s gay literature will be like anyone’s ? involved in the universal struggle for self-definition "without the moral codes and religious definitions of the previous centuries."

Illustrating this universality, the titular essay finds Greer’s father wrestling with redefinition when he discovers his ancestors are not, in fact, Italian (as his foster parents had told him), but aboriginal. Disrupting the longstanding myth affects the whole family:

"We were so heavily invested in the Italian theory that spaghetti night was a regular occurrence at our house, and my father would often shout out ’Mama Mia!’ in the middle of the meal and make us all laugh. And then, suddenly, we weren’t Italian anymore. We were Aboriginal, a somewhat murkier proposition, even in 1996."

Like his father’s aboriginal ancestors, the eponymous strange ghosts, the apparitions in Greer's memories are non-menacing obfuscations one encounters en route to revelation.

When Greer does talk about horrors, they are usually in an international context: 9/11, the Cambodian killing fields, corporate globalization, poverty and oppression.

Riding the languid merry-go-round occasionally loses its magic when Greer overuses repetition ("I am not ashamed to admit once more, that I enjoy Hollywood crap") or lapses into cliché ("It was a sign of things to come," or "I saw on the faces of those women the look of the hopelessly oppressed").

Greer could also amplify his philosophies by citing more theoretical sources behind the ideas he espouses. Such lines as "my mother used to say that for every negative there is a positive" and "a friend of mine believes it takes five generations for a system that has been thrown out of balance through oppression to right itself" lack the gravitas needed to underscore his musings.

Nonetheless, Strange Ghosts is a thoughtful guided tour, taking readers beyond simple reflection or narcissism across four continents, and through a mélange of economics, politics, art theory, history and relationships. In doing so, it accomplishes what Greer believes all art should do ? it restores a little bit of your faith in the world.

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