Mark McDonald
Flat
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002
A man, "J." is discovered, dead, naked, sprawled amid the sparse
furnishings of his large anonymous flat in one of the high rise buildings
of the West End, Vancouver's gay neighborhood. A casual acquaintance is
pressed into service to dispose of the body, take charge of the dead man's
effects. The two men, dead and alive, didn't know each other well in life,
but after hauling away the papers, cremating "J's" body, the
living man, who narrates most of this novel, finds himself strangely possessed
first by the dead man's anonymity, then by the nutty imaginings he himself
imagines the dead man shared. Apocalypse ensues, a phantasmal destruction
mirrored by the collapse of the narrative. Readers will find themselves
wondering what is true, what is fictionally "true," what to
do with all this detail.
Flat is illustrated with precise architectural drawings which will
remind San Francisco art lovers of our own art.design team of Castaneda
& Reiman, and with black and white photos by the author himself, studies
of sinister corners and pediments that make Vancouver look endlessly,
chillingly modernist. What I like about Mark McDonald is the casual ease
with which his simple, if Kafkaesque parable becomes an obsessive elaboration
on the architectural themes of Hitchcock's Universal period of the mid
1950s, the estrangements of 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' enjambed. The
story, told so elliptically, makes you double back and back again, afraid
you might have missed some detail that might have explained why the narrator
is so jumpy and weird. Maybe what's between the lines, that white space
equivalent of a space in the social contract, threatens the reader-writer
bargain more than any words or images could do. Did you ever start comparing
the lines at the very top edge of a novel's page to the rarefied heights
of a penthouse, and the lowest lines, down by your thumbs, might be like
the lobby of that same, spooky, over-tall building? I never did either
till I started reading Flat!
--- Kevin Killian
