Review by Heather Mallick (1995)

Highways and Dancehalls
By Diana Atkinson
Knopf Canada, $25

The mournful monotone with which Jackson Browne sang the opening words of The Road, which gave this beautiful novel its title, sums up perfectly the painful tedium of the bad-smell hell that is the life of the touring stripper.

"On this small, round pill of a stage, I feel like something in a Petri dish," says Tabitha, the heroine of Diana Atkinson's autobiographical novel, as she exposes her breasts and genitals to 400 men at the Lions' Club Fund-raiser Stag at the Jade Lotus Restaurant on Granville Street in Vancouver. Tabitha tours the towns of British Columbia, places like Nanaimo, Penticton, Prince Rupert, Dawson Creek, Gibsons, Squamish and Kelowna that would normally make people think of salmon fishing or cedar shakes and shingles. "I can hardly wait to scrub the thin scum of Prince George off my skin," Tabitha writes in her journal at the end of her shift.

This isn't the regular world, "where cars bear ordinary people to schools, well-lit offices, warm houses with real furniture." It's a world of unpleasing textures - stained upholstery on Greyhound buses, barely paid for satin corselets to hide the surgical scars on Tabitha's stomach, the red shag carpeting stained with beer and baby oil on the stage at the bars in Port Hardy. Imagine the horror of arriving at the bus depot in The National Hotel in Vernon, B.C., on Christmas morning - "deserted, everyone at home drinking eggnog and hugging."

Tabitha's journal is more than a litany of sordidness. It is like a key to a locked room. For no one cares about strippers and no one has the slightest interest in their opinions, their health and the slow thickening of their beauty.

If it were not such a boring whine to complain about "marginalized members of society who don't get the care and attention they deserve"-offhand I can think of Tories, the Inuit, heroin addicts, caregivers, waiters and really, really rich people-I'd say Highways and Dancehalls was a worthy read. But that's damnation with faint praise.

Tabitha is real. She's so pretty and delicate and wonderful to know. She is stripping for a living to please her bone-idle brute of a boyfriend Lloyd and to exorcise the pain of a childhood marred by repeated emotionally invasive surgery for ulcerative colitis. As literary critic Judy Stoffman revealed in an extraordinary interview, Atkinson's sense of her own humanity was almost destroyed early in life by doctors treating her bowel disease. They would approach without warning, in teams, and would without a word of warning or comfort, strip her, expose her and probe her as though she were an exhibit on a Pinochet-style torture table, rather than a little girl abandoned on a hospital bed.

Her body was not her own. As an adult, physically scarred but with most of the damage newly concealed within her abdomen, she took her revenge on men. Stripping gave her a power over them. She would show herself, but only under her conditions. They could look but not touch (lap dancing has since destroyed this). They could straddle their chairs and yearn for her but they would never get her.

Of course, as Tabitha learned, even if men (and women) can't get you, they can get at you.

When men have fantasies, they usually involve damage to other people. Tabitha, in her fantasies and in her dreadful job, is exquisitely able to damage herself. Her stripping is not an expression of strength, as women who do it often say, but an act of self-hatred. She doesn't torture herself over the approval of the male audience, but she desperately wants to be liked by her fellow strippers. And what a complicated bunch of masochists they are, Lola and Shayla and Vixxen and Rexella, like Santa's suicidal reindeer. (What obscure need in men is sated by these ridiculous names?)

Atkinson writes with a deceptive brusqueness. "I will erase this night as if it had never been," one chapter ends, but later, whenever the emotional bruise starts to turn yellow, she expands on the untouchable memory.

I don't just read a lot, I read like a combine harvester (which I sometimes regret) and whenever a particularly appealing phrase comes along, X marks the spot. Highways and Dancehalls is marked with Xs and slashes and exclamation marks. Atkinson really does have an extraordinary poetic talent.

"We sat in his old blue Maverick," she writes, "and stared at the Pharmasave across the parking lot as snowflakes slowly obscured the lines between reserved and handicapped and I wondered if everyone is in pain with their life, only in some it's a sliver embedded in a translucent palm and in some it's the heart banging deathlessly on its hinge, like a bird that's been hit by a car and wants to be hit again."

We learn a lot about these damaged women but almost nothing about the one-dimensional male audience. Some of them have "clean-shaven faces, the keen eyes of a bright third-grader watching a gerbil running a race against itself." Some are violent, some are stupid, some emit the high-pitched hum of the psychopath, and all, by definition, are sexual failures. The worst sit in "gynecology row," at the front where they can get the best look, but Atkinson got an awfully good look at them too.

The novel makes the reader despise men who make a habit of attending strip shows, even if previously one had felt only contempt. So effective is Atkinson that after reading her novel, I loathe them right down to the ground. To paraphrase former British prime minister Ted Heath on capitalism, this is the unacceptable face of male sexuality. Stripping is a sad, tawdry, dangerous life and the women who live it may be among the wisest people around.

Journalism will not make you feel this, whatever its competence, nor will leering television "reportage," whatever its slickness. Novels make you feel it. Good fiction has immense power to move readers, and score into the superficial rules of the unexamined life. Whether you have read these books or not, W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind? changed attitudes about racism, Jack Kerouac's On the Road altered our definition of freedom and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook rewrote women's interior lives. Good fiction demands much, achieves much.

Highways and Dancehalls will do for Canadian fiction what Scottish novelists like James Kelman, Jeff Torrington and Carl MacDougall are doing for the charming, heavily accented twee, wee nation with the cabers and the shortie kilts. They're revealing the other Scots, the whiskey-sodden muck-sliding Glaswegian hooligans who are just as much a part of that country.

It's time someone with a keen eye for detail did the same for Canada and described our grubby small-town underside-beer-swilling bigots with bellies like kettledrums and brains to match. They deserve to be documented too.