Bookworm, no. 158
Jadine Ngan on Richard Kelly Kemick’s “Decadence.” Grace Henkel reviews Liz Johnston’s “The Fall-Down Effect.” A taste of “The Heart of Man,” by Jón Kalman Stefánsson. Inside the July/August issue.
Decadence
Richard Kelly Kemick
Biblioasis
264 pages, softcover and ebook
Given their tidy narratives, Richard Kelly Kemick thinks memoirs are garbage. That is, of course, why he’s written one—sort of. Decadence is a collection of essays and vignettes that flits from subject to subject, including high school, an American road trip, and man’s relationship with his furry best friend. It opens with the most classic subject of all: one’s consuming, fervent, completely nonsensical obsession with miniature Christmas villages.
Decadence offers up works from ten years of Kemick’s life. There’s a piece recounting the day he spent touring a young Albertan taxidermist’s workshop. There’s a tender reflection on the month his ex-partner Litia came out as gay, only to find out she’s pregnant. Several essays probe the gulf between who the writer is and who he wants to be—a pro volleyball player, maybe, or just plain employed. In “Halloween,” which follows his teenage attempt at popularity by throwing a rager in his parents’ basement, Kemick writes, “I knew that if I could act this person, so impeccably and unceasingly, that in time, I, too, would believe it.” But he can’t escape himself, and Decadence is most compelling when it sits in that tension. “That is what happens when you try to create something beautiful in an unbeautiful world,” Kemick declares just after acknowledging the illogic of his Christmas village. Maybe it’s true of the whole endeavour.
This is writing with a pulse and personality. As a narrator of his own life, Kemick is funny, contemplative, and self-effacing. In the book’s penultimate essay, “The Briefcase,” he confesses that he yearns to publish a novel, but it keeps eluding him. “The faster you run, the faster it flees,” he says. I, for one, hope he finishes it.
—Jadine Ngan
The Fall-Down Effect
Liz Johnston
Book*hug Press
346 pages, softcover and ebook
Set in the British Columbia interior, Liz Johnston’s The Fall-Down Effect follows Sylvia, Fern, and River as they navigate diverging paths and strained bonds after their mother’s sudden departure. Spanning roughly thirty years, from a childhood in the B.C. backwoods to the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the three siblings struggle to restore their uprooted relationships.
In 1989, stifled by the demands of raising her young children, the former climate activist Lynn fixates on the idea that protest is her higher calling. With rosy recollections of demonstrations past, she is unwilling to accept that a period of her life has ended. Eventually, she enlists her children—including six-year-old River—in a desperate attempt to recapture her sense of purpose. Lynn chains them to a tree to block a new logging road. While Sylvia and River are distraught, the middle child, Fern, relishes the fleeting sensation of power. Soon after, Lynn walks out on her family to devote her life to the environment.
Years later, still craving that sense of power, a nineteen-year-old Fern burns their small town’s sawmill to the ground. She flees across the border to the United States, cutting off all contact with her family. Sylvia is thrust into the role of protector, though she resents the pressure. As decades pass with no sign of Fern, a deeper divide forms between her and River. Sylvia contemplates a phenomenon learned in school—the “fall-down effect,” in which a forest, despite replanting, cannot shake the trauma of being clear-cut. The concept resonates with her family: the awkwardness, detachment, and distrust brought on by years of separation persists far into their adulthood. Even as clues of Fern’s whereabouts surface, the truth falls heavy on Sylvia: “Whatever grew back would not equal what had been lost.”
—Grace Henkel
Book Tasting: Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s The Heart of Man
There are very few things that man needs: to love, to be happy, to eat; and then he dies. Yet there are over six thousand languages spoken in the world — why do there need to be so many in order to make such simple desires understood? And why do we manage it so rarely, why does the light in words fade as soon as we write them down? One touch can say more than all the world’s words, that’s true, but the touch fades with the years and then we need words again, they’re our weapons against time, death, forgetfulness, unhappiness. When man spoke his first word he became the thread that quivers eternally between evil and goodness, Heaven and Hell. Words were what hewed the root between man and nature, they were the serpent and the apple, what lifted us from the beautiful ignorance of beasts into a world that we still don’t understand. History says that once, near the beginning of time, the difference between a word and its meaning had hardly been measurable, but words have worn down over the course of man’s journey, and the distance between words and meanings has grown so much that no life, no death, seems capable of bridging it any longer.
But words are simply all we have.
Here we’ve wandered, pale spectres, for almost an entire century, dead, invisible, alone. Others who died were put into the ground and didn’t come up again. It could be painful. Lips that we’d kissed, hair that we’d stroked, hands that we’d protected, all this went into the ground, did not come back, turned to nothing. But we neither sank into the ground nor ascended to the sky. You wouldn’t think it nice to see us now, a crowd of pale, distorted creatures. For a time, despair was the only human part of us, and then we found an out-of-the-way attic in a big house, a forgotten place, remained there in the vain hope that time would erase us, the scum of the world, tormented by memories, regret and self-pity. We were hardly aware of time, out in the world raged war and death, peace and mundanity. Many years passed in static eventlessness, decades, but one day a black cat crawled into the darkest corner where we were keeping ourselves and gave birth to five kittens. At times it went out in the evening in search of food, and something happened on one such trip, the cat didn’t return, perhaps it was run over, and those blind, motherless kittens that it left behind remain the only living creatures that have sensed us. Five creatures that crawled to us trembling with fear, hunger and loneliness in the hope of warmth, comfort, neither of which we could provide. One of them was pitch-black, but with a front paw white as snow, uncomfortably resembling a kitten that a foreign skipper once brought here. It finally died, whimpered like an infant for an entire night, alone in the world, without understanding why these creatures that it sensed did not allay its loneliness. We tried; that was the most painful thing of all, but between it and us was the unnameable, which we couldn’t overcome, couldn’t get through. A blind kitten, black but with a white front paw, died, and that’s why we crawled out to you again, crawled out of our dark hiding place, because we couldn’t comfort a dying kitten, is that how God works or was it merely coincidence that a cat gave birth and then disappeared; is compassion the only thing that can save a person, is it man’s heavenly string? We crawled out to you because it matters to us, and because we long for liberation and understanding. Paradise, is it the place where understanding is unnecessary, or is that perhaps the description of Hell? But this is our final attempt; a crack has opened between us and you, the dead have entered your existence, forgotten storms, vanished eyes, we whisper to you stories full of silver, regret, smiles and cruelty, so that you remember. This is war against oblivion, in the hope that hidden within the stories are words that free us all from our fetters. You as well.
Excerpted with permission from The Heart of Man (Biblioasis), translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton. Read more about this book in a physical copy of the July/August 2026 issue of the magazine.
Inside the July/August Issue
“Investigating homicide isn’t easy, and being fifty-two, single, and disliked by almost every cop in 51 Division doesn’t help.” Kevin Jagernauth gets to the bottom of Don Gillmor’s Cherry Beach.
Rod Moody-Corbett reviews Michael Eddy’s satirical debut novel, Koh-i-Noor.
“Over the previous few years, I had become a proficient flatwater paddleboarder and then discovered the euphoria of catching small waves on Lake Ontario on a SUP when the wind was right. I remember the rush of my first ride. More than anything else — intensity, acceleration, dopamine — it felt like flying.” Dan Rubinstein tackles river surfing in Ottawa.
And much more!