matrix

Coach House Books, 2008

Read by Drew Halfnight

In The Steve Machine, the debut novel by Toronto video artist Mike Hoolboom, the reader encounters less a plot than a series of reckonings, less a novel than a video collage of memories, dreams and impressions.

After learning he is HIV-positive, Auden hauls anchor and moves to Toronto, an obscure purgatory of all-night doughnut cafes, hospital waiting rooms and featureless studio apartments. Once there he meets real-life video artist Steve Reinke, who helps him build a machine (read: write a book) that will record and process his new life with the virus.

An ethereal, fleeting presence, Reinke serves as Auden’s companion and alter ego. In meditations on Reinke’s videos and ideas, the aesthetic propositions underpinning The Steve Machine are given full play:

Steve lived inside the books he encountered; he threw himself between the covers knowing that soon there would be no one left to read them. Oh sure, someone would always be able to pick up a book and go through the motions, twitching over miles of letters all lined up in a row like a firing squad. But to really read a book was to feel it as an echo of all the books written before it.

And later:

Personality was only an imperfect collection of memories, and now that art had set itself the task of leaving personality behind, we would pass in and out of one another like so many interchangeable parts. Like a machine.

There is little action to speak of in The Steve Machine, but what does occur – an orgy, some office work, bouts of vomiting – unfolds like a most inconsequential dream. The real action is the steady circulation of pathogens in Auden’s blood.

At points, Hoolboom’s prose is alternatively underdeveloped and overworked, though the same could be said of the prose in most first novels.

Other times, it punches the lights out: “The room swelled up with every breath and then shrank down to the size of a shot-glass.”

At the end of the novel, Hoolboom permits a gust of humanity to blow through his hero’s otherwise cold, detached narration. In a night club, Auden gushes:

I looked down in horror to see that my foot was also keeping time with the beat while my pulse raced with an emotion that could only be named as joy. Ohmigod. I was enjoying this.

After so much morbid exposition, the book’s sudden bright ending stings the eyes. Still, the effect is warming enough.