A frenzied Valley of the Dolls
Sextant
A form as disjointed as the street life it vividly describes
by Maya Merrick
Conundrum Press, 249 pages, $14.95

reviewed by Suzanne Alyssa Andrew
Toronto Star Sunday, November 6, 2005

If Sextant were an album it would sound like the Cure’s Disintegration. In other words, it’s a good book to practise slitting your wrists to. Or commiserate with, after a weeklong bender and a cataclysmic hangover.

Cassy Peerson is Sextant’s alcoholic and pill-popping protagonist, someone used to the semi-consciousness of inebriation. She feels safest underwater, where "it doesn’t matter that I’m crying, feeding the salt sea with my own tiny tide." So it’s fitting that she’s a mermaid in a bar, a job she’s found thanks to resident drag queen and seamstress Owen, who takes Cassy under his/her wing.

After experiencing childhood neglect, adolescent gang membership and traumatic abuse, Cassy is street- and shelter-hardened. Friends, lovers and family members have died or drifted away. She’s on her own, invisible, just the way she likes it.

Cassy lives in a small car on the beach somewhere along the California coast. She befriends street people, navigates what could be an intimate relationship and tries to avoid Freakboy, a man who seems to be stalking her. She’s also haunted by her past. "And I’m remembering this all at once," she thinks, "every bloody thing all mashed up together, squished into a tiny ball."

That ball is the fragmented structure of the novel. Author Maya Merrick’s ramblings form a contemporary, street-level stream-of-consciousness. Her attention deficit-disordered narrative style isn’t as technically polished as the work of her Modernist predecessors, yet what seems to be a haphazard mix of disconnected memories and events often results in startling juxtapositions.

Instead of chapters, Sextant is divided into three large sections, each told in channel-flipping segments. Cassy’s half-page reminisce of how she once rode her mom’s bike concludes: "She never talked to anyone but me. Who did she have to talk to now?" Click: "Because everyone else was going somewhere, to work, mostly." For a few clipped paragrphs, Cassyrumnate about how, in both appearance and lifestyle, she is a radical contrast to the "suits" she crosses paths with downtown. Another click, then her sister: "I rode Pony’s bike around in circles in the scraggly front yard."

This makes for rapid if sometimes jarring prose. Merrick, a Montreal "barmaid," should be commended for such risk-taking in her first novel, but the price for her innovation is the occasional loss of cohesion, and in some cases, comprehension.

Sextant may be a dysfunctional mess of a novel. Yet Merrick's flawed, unconventional storytelling compliments her convoluted invention. With prose as fragmented as Cassy’s torn and dirty clothes, Merrick suggests that the violence and disorientation of street life can't be written about authentically without challenging readers through form as well as content.

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