Bookworm, no. 39
Rob Benvie reviews Geddy Lee’s “My Effin’ Life.” Andrew Pudlak on Marion Douglas’s novel “The Game of Giants.” Looking back on a tragedy in Nova Scotia. Inside the May issue.
Time Stands Still
My Effin’ Life
Geddy Lee, with Daniel Richler
HarperCollins
512 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook
Crank any classic rock radio station on a weekend afternoon and you’ll inevitably hear the unmistakable sounds of Rush. Since the 1970s, the power trio’s cerebral anthems have been an essential ingredient in Canadian culture. While their high-concept music has often earned derision from critics, their die-hard fans span continents and generations. With the band now defunct following the drummer Neil Peart’s death in 2020, the founding vocalist and bassist Geddy Lee reflects on its legacy in My Effin’ Life.
Lee comes off as the quintessential, affable rock ’n’ roll stoner—enthusiastic about music and eager to ensure his legacy. With fondness and lucidity, he details his upbringing in Toronto, where his parents’ staid outlook as Holocaust survivors conflicted with his nascent art-rock dreams. (Lee’s mother, Mary Weinrib, commissioned a painting for his bar mitzvah portrait to avoid capturing his long hair in a photograph.) An aw-shucks dopiness underpins the memoir, from the title’s schoolyard profanity to Lee’s disapproval of the ill-mannered rockstars he has met. Those seeking salacious accounts of backstage bawdiness, though, will have to settle mostly for nerdy in-jokes and stories about smoking pot.
Rush’s hard-fought rise from clubs to stadiums and onto legendary status flouted critical forecasts. Lee presents the band’s success as a product of old-fashioned hard work, but the group’s enduring renown speaks to its unique, once-in-a-generation alchemy. It’s endearing how, despite ever-shifting tastes and trends, the trio remained aligned. “In forty-five years,” Lee writes, “though feelings about this and that sometimes simmered below the surface, we never once came to blows. We were too busy talking about stupid things!” In many respects, My Effin’ Life reads as a requiem for a bygone era of platinum-selling concept albums and a less fractured, maybe more naive pop culture landscape. Or perhaps the next Rush is already out there jamming, ready for its own moment in the limelight.
—Rob Benvie
The Kid Will Be Alright
The Game of Giants
Marion Douglas
Freehand Books
364 pages, softcover and ebook
With The Game of Giants, Marion Douglas meditates on the fear of abnormality, the acceptance of being different, and the nature of belonging. Set in 1980s Alberta, this charming and introspective novel tells the story of a single mother trying to raise her young son while wrestling with her own identity.
Roger Drury is a “funny-looking kid” who displays the “soft neurological signs” of serious developmental delay. The three-year-old ranks in the third percentile for intelligence, language, and gross motor ability. Cute but eccentric, he obsesses over watches and neckties, shrieks like a fire alarm when excited or nervous, and suffers from seizures. His mother, Rose, wonders what caused the disability: “To consider there is a deficiency with your DNA is to invite the ocean to wash you away and start over with a new stab at evolution.” A psychology student at the University of Calgary, she carries the third edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders like a “concealed weapon” as she searches for answers. She is proud when Roger begins to understand social cues but torn between her desire for normalcy and her aversion to conformity. Her son teeters on the “human edge,” where she fears he might get “sliced off” and “fall away.”
A former psychologist herself, Douglas draws upon ongoing anxieties around viruses and genetics. Her ear for colloquial expression and domestic drama animates her characters. Her prose sings when describing the beauty of nature, where Rose finds comfort and refuge. Mountains are “illuminated from within, as if by lamps.” Desire “comes from a root cellar in the soul,” while belonging sprouts from “roots in the cool old earth.” With such heartfelt offerings, The Game of Giants demonstrates it’s the tiny moments of intimacy that make us human.
—Andrew Pudlak
From the Archives: Commission Concluded
Four years ago this week, a fifty-one-year-old man murdered twenty-two people in Portapique, Nova Scotia, and the surrounding area. Afterward, the Mass Casualty Commission investigated why the RCMP took so long to stop the killing spree and offered 130 recommendations on how to avoid a similar tragedy in the future. But as Paul W. Bennett wrote in his recent review of Dean Beeby’s Mass Murder, Police Mayhem, “the necessary structural changes will not likely materialize” without political backing.
Inside the May Issue
“An accelerating downward trust spiral.” Tara Henley writes this year’s Massey Essay on the state of the media.
Keith Garebian looks at Work to Be Done: Selected Essays and Reviews, by Bruce Whiteman.
“From the top down.” J.D.M. Stewart reviews Statesmen, Strategists, and Diplomats: Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Making of Foreign Policy, edited by Patrice Dutil.
And much more!