Book offers up only stale stories

Traplines

By Eden Robinson

215 pages, Knopf Canada

$26.00 (hc.)

traplines is a collection of three short stories by Eden Robinson, a young writer from the Haisla National Kitaamat reserve in British Columbia.

There must be a literary equivalent to wanting to chew your leg off. If you get stuck reading traplines, that's exactly how you feel.

The writing is lifeless and banal. Robinson attempts to shock the reader by creating scenarios that blend the "normal" with the bizarre. Robinson succeeds in making the normal dull, but there's no payoff with the surreal elements that are plunked in.

Her writing reminded me of another writer who tried to explore the banality of life, Bret Easton Ellis. Two of his novels, Less Than Zero and American Psycho, attracted a lot of attention. Less Than Zero centered around a group of rich and spoiled Los Angeles teens during a Christmas vacation. The main character watches as his friends self-destruct from boredom, drug abuse and sexual thrill-seeking, American Psycho's main character is a serial killer, who experiments with torture devices but also happens to be a handsome and successful stockbroker.

Robinson fails to write anything meaningful about these losers in life. These are people who are cast into the stormy ocean of life and passively allow themselves to drown.

It would be more interesting to read if Robinson's main characters had anything resembling desire or dreams, but they don't. We're stuck with young people who see their lives as meaning nothing more than making it to another day. They don't seem interested in life and disconnect themselves from any real emotion through drugs, fantasies, suicide attempts or other means of running away. They willingly pay a physical price for their decisions but avoid emotion at all costs.

The trap Robinson falls into is that she believes these stories have meaning and interest because she throws in some graphic and unsettling scenarios. We've seen this before. The dysfunctional is not profound.

If they don't care about their lives, why should we?