matrix

ECW Press, 2007

Read by Hermonie Xie

Rick Crilly’s The Tablecloth Trick is ninety pages of prose, footnotes, and endnotes; it is a collage made of hard facts and unusual images, which together serve to tell a tale of a vulnerable young man, who is this story’s unnamed narrator. His timid sincerity draws our sympathy from the beginning:

“I was born premature (4 pounds, 5 ounces) with a two inch tail appended to my spine.”

The narrator, born colourblind and a Roman Catholic, is a peculiar fellow who spends the majority of his childhood in the Winnipeg Centennial Library, reading and dissecting books with Caroline, his friend and willing accomplice. We learn that he loves Caroline, but she doesn’t love him back. As the story progresses, Caroline notably becomes the center of gravity to the narrator’s universe; her relationship to him is the glue that holds his story together as a cohesive whole.

To read The Tablecloth Trick is to engage in an extensive game of guesswork, where each fact unearthed opens to any number of interpretations. Crilly is an unconventional storyteller who likes to present hybrid ideas, coupling trivia torn straight from wikipedia with a toss of descriptions to paint abstract images that tickle the mind:

I left the meeting early and emerged into a dark, overcast night — St. Peter’s Apocalypse I jokingly told myself — “flesh devouring worms so many in number as to form a colossal black cloud.”

While his tale progresses in a chronological fashion — more or less — the storyline moves in an erratic manner. The narrator’s mind often flits from one idea to another, pulling parallels between yeast and heaven, astronauts and Caroline’s boyfriends. Flashbacks and memories are hung like loose strings waiting to be assembled into a coherent bundle of meaning. The resulting compilation is, at its best, stunning; with sparse-lined compositions of seemingly unrelated facts singing to life emotions of great profundity, e.g.,

There was a big oak in Caroline’s backyard called the Cancer Tree, because no matter what her father did to it, it kept growing into infinity.

At its worst, the narration is like disorientation in a way that distracts rather than entrances. Despite such faults, The Tablecloth Trick succeeds most remarkably in making readers empathize with its roundest central anonymous character whose tenacity both frustrates and endears. This book is neither a safe nor easy read. But it is a book that has much to offer.