Toronto Star Sunday, January 9, 2005
Is CanLit ready for same-sex marriages in suburban Alberta and supernatural vegetarian vampire cannibals? Suzette Mayr is brave enough to say yes. Her latest novel, Venous Hum, is an ambitious mixture of contemporary Canadian themes and obsessions, dashed with Dorothy Parker-flavoured satire and a handful of prodigious plot twists worthy of Dawn of the Dead.
The novel begins calmly enough, with a couple of neighbours who decide to organize a 20-year high school reunion after they find out a former classmate has died and their alma mater is slated to be blown up by an over-zealous, cost-cutting government.
Lai Fun Kugelheim and Stefanja Dumanowski are old high school classmates that end up in the same suburban neighbourhood after university. Back in high school, Lai Fun admired Stefanja, who was part of the popular baked potato clique (known for their puffy ’80s pants). Both are now married, living placid, picket fence lives. Except Lai Fun is married to a workoholic wife, Jennifer Singh, and they’re the only lesbians on the block. Stefanja’s husband, Thor, an unpublished screenplay writer, has considerably more time on his hands.
Lai Fun, pregnant with her second child, is hormonal. But as a neglected same-sex wife, she is left to wonder: "Why in the hell does Jennifer Singh think a job is more sexually exciting than Lai Fun?" Feeling rejected, Lai Fun begins an affair with Thor.
Sleeping with a man is so problematic for a married lesbian, Lai Fun doesn’t even count it as real adultery. In "pink-bummed baboon lust," Lai Fun doesn’t feel guilty about having sex, but she does feel culpable because she’s shagging her best friend’s husband, a fact that "clutches at her heart with sludge fingers."
Between infidelities, Lai Fun is planning the high school reunion with Stefanja, and she can’t stand the pesky practicalities of the Internet detective work involved. She loathes having to co-operate with the overconfident corporate managers the popular kids have become.
Even worse, thinking about high school uproots miserable memories, bringing back a horror show of humiliation, racism and despair. Yet she perseveres, because "Stefanja would hate Lai Fun forever if Lai Fun bailed. And Lai Fun owes Stefanja, she knows she owes her." Always lurking on the periphery in high school, Lai Fun finally has her chance to be accepted by a potato person as an adult.
For a novel set in the present, the continuous spectre of the late Pierre Elliot Trudeau is surprising. Yet Trudeau is a powerful force, both shaping Lai Fun’s family life and giving licence to her desires. His welcome of non-European immigrants brings Lai Fun’s parents into the country: "Those who never felt comfortable suddenly were home. At the time, Trudeau sported a long, flowing haircut. Canada’s hair has been disheveled ever since."
Lai Fun is born in 1971, the year her parents see a touring Trudeau, who has all the popularity of a rock star. Trudeau is also notable as the country’s founding sexual liberator: "Trudeau said, ’The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation,’ and the beds of many nations promptly spun out of control." From this, Lai Fun finds the freedom to be a married gay philanderer.
Mayr is a mischievous writer. Her characters, such as Lai Fun’s sexy, albeit aging, supernatural mother, and exercise-obsessed Stefanja, are unusual for CanLit. Even Lai Fun is named after Chinese food and fondly referred to as "the noodle," although she is not Chinese. Mayr’s satire is barbed. When her blond high school classmates are cast for a musical production of The Mikado: "Lai Fun knows it would be f---ing unbelievable for a brown girl to dress up like she’s Japanese. She doesn’t even have to say it; no one asks. She volunteers for wardrobe."
Mayr elevates her satire by weaving it with threads of magic realism. Lai Fun’s elementary school teacher Mrs. Blake is so mean, she’s vampiric. When Lai Fun dreams of the griffin statues on Calgary’s Centre Street bridge, her mother’s interpretation of the dream is "watch out for monsters." The griffins wind up at her wedding reception, and later, at the reunion.
The overall effect is something both stranger and more humourous than the delicate filigrees of magic realism in Hiromi Goto’s A Chorus of Mushrooms, or the spiritual resplendence of Isabelle Allende’s The House of Spirits and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. Mayr roots her novel in practical details of day-to-day suburban life. The crescendo to the fantastical so subtle that by the time the undead show up to party, the reader’s disbelief is sufficiently suspended to accept the appearance of dancing ghouls.
That this novel doesn’t degrade into generic pulp fiction validates Mayr’s gutsy writing. Instead, following neither the formula of genre nor the rules of literary fiction, Venous Hum explodes obvious stereotypes about prairie Westerners, multicultural schooling, lesbian relationships and vegetarianism, without trying to stuff ideology down your pants. Mayr sutures the plot velocity of a genre book together with literary language and politics, creating a Frankenstein’s monster of a novel, one with more elegance and brains than you’d expect.
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