Review by Heather Mallick (1995)

HOW INSENSITIVE
By Russell Smith
The Porcupine's Quill, $14.95

The horror, the horror.

Russell Smith's remarkable first novel, the nicely titled How Insensitive, takes me back, kicking and screaming, to that savage, Bacardi-soaked, drug-addled angst haze that was my early 20s. It was the worst (fill in blank) of times, it was the worst of times. Like most people who segue to a reasonably stable adulthood, I had hoped never to remember those years again. Thanks a lot, Russell.

Smith's coming-of-age novel is about The Failure Years, when the young and overeducated struggle to have a life - a place to sleep, another young, overeducated body to sleep with, a nightlife and a means of paying the rent that isn't too soul-destroying.

His protagonist, Ted Owen, has a BA from the preppy University of (Southern) Ontario and a graduate degree in cultural studies (read "irony") from Concordia. He has moved to Toronto to become a writer of something, anything.

Coincidentally, Russell Smith has an MA in French literature from Queen's and arrived in Toronto in 1988 for a hoped-for career in the arts, just before everything crashed and then settled into a crater where employers now expect Ted Owen types to work for free.

It's not so much that Smith identifies with his main character as that every relatively young person in Toronto identifies with his main character. Smith's readers are all out there, obedient and captive in the open-plan office veal-fattening pens first identified by Douglas Coupland when he came to Toronto in the '80s to break into the arts scene.

I have a vision of these desperate Generation Xers, looking like Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, lining up to buy How Insensitive to have their reality transcribed, their fears labelled, their sexual disasters recounted and their moments of bliss and horror preserved on paper.

Ted Owen wants to make something of himself. He is encouraged by an encounter with "Max" on the train to Toronto. Max seems to be a plausible, witty, hip success in artsy Toronto, and Ted pegs him as a possible entree, a mentor, a key that will open doors. But Max turns out to be ephemeral, like the brief notoriety/success Ted enjoys and everything else in Ted's transient, underemployed world .Ted encounters life's rich tapestry in Toronto, which is why the novel is being taken as a roman a clef. Smith's rendering of Ted's appearance on the Janni Bolo show, for example, is a perfect little set piece, a damning snapshot of those homegrown excessively feminine daytime talk shows.

Janni Bolo "wore a tight mini-skirt and much jewellery, and seemed supported only by a floating mass of glossy hair. Her legs looked like ropes. Her face, framed by enormous gold earrings and a gold necklace, was deeply lined and leathery, caked with dark makeup. He could almost smell the perfume from the screen.

"The studio audience looks like "a rack of slugs," the level of intellect is pure primary school, the talk is staccato ("Women and architecture. What's the connection? What's the difference? Who cares?"), the participants' credentials are fantasized by Bolo's producers and the whole experience is scarring to Ted's truthful soul.

Ted encounters illiterate magazine editors and the humanoid sons and daughters ("eugenics camp" people) of Rosedale who build their RRSPs starting in adolescence. He meets bicycle couriers who eat dog food, and computer addicts, and shattered young women trying to pass themselves off as sexual virtuosos. What all these creatures have in common is an eye for the main chance.

Best of all are Smith's sideways glances, his small perceptions: A university course entitled "the Disappearing Subject: Sex, Ego and the Self in Japanese Animated Science Fiction;" the way TV shows hand out souvenir coffee mugs like amulets to their idiot acolytes; and the deep boredom of being cornered by someone you slept with that one time. And that the one thing to be said for right-wing young people is they know how to introduce you to perfect strangers and make sure you have a drink at parties.

How Insensitive is mostly composed of dialogue for which Smith has a natural ear. He picks up beautifully the impenetrable pronouncements of deconstructionist intellectuals, the blank prose of suburbanites, the pretensions of grant-grubbing artists and the jargon of journalists.

Ted Owen thinks he is meeting individuals. He is actually meeting a collection of types, and that realization is one of the saddest and most inevitable things about growing up.

Smith is to be admired for one thing in particular. Unlike most novelists, he hasn't dodged the question of money and how Ted manages to survive. Cash doesn't just flow out of nowhere, greasing the skids of the plot. Generally, it comes from parents.

You see, it's easy for the rich to go slumming in Ted's artsy wannabe world. But impoverished students from the Maritimes have had their fill of grunge. The charm of poverty escapes them. They'd like some '80s glitz. And it takes money to be young and hip in Toronto - there are rent, restaurant tabs, cover charges at raves and underground clubs and an elaborate wardrobe to purchase. Capitalism can't be escaped, even if you think you want to, and it always has its price.

How Insensitive is an adept, sad, funny novel that never slides into unjustified sentimentality. Young Ted is a likeable person, emotionally undeveloped but with a good, trained brain. Will he find a job or some semblance of one? Will he find happiness with a PhD student in a long, gauzy dress and muddy drill boots, the young female type of today? Will anyone in their 20s find a place in the '90s? Is Ted Owen, like Mary Richards, going to make it after all?