WARNING: Spoilers ahead!
For the most part, I enjoyed Smoke. However, a few issues were hard to overlook.
Smoke is about a young man named Brian, nicknamed Buster, a high school senior in 1950’s southern Ontario tobacco country, who becomes sorely disfigured after he is badly burned because of falling asleep drunk with a cigarette. Buster finds unlikely help working through his issues in the faithful Dr. John Gray, who himself has a hidden psychological disfigurement which Ruth unsuccessfully tries to hide until the end of the novel where it is revealed that the doctor is a transexual.
Smoke is full of such parrallels and metaphors. Too full, I found. I liked the interactive quality of the book, but found it slightly overworked. Metaphors are great to a point, but all the fire-related adjectives and adverbs began to get tiresome, and the unidentified robber was just plain annoying. I understand, as she said when I went to hear her speak about the novel, that the robber represented how close the doctor’s world really was, as well as the not-so-novel idea that plots do not always have to be completely resolved, along with several other metaphors, but I think the novel would have worked better without him as he seemed out of place and distracting.
The plot was well planned, but the characters not so much. A couple of times, I had to go back and check which character I was reading about because they all seemed so alike at times, like they were all related rather than from the same small town.
Ruth said she finds it boring to write from an outline. She is the type of writer, as am I, who writes the story in her head first and then finishes developing it on paper. Perhaps that’s why the novel seemed a bit muddy at times, not always crystal clear in the imagery or in the characters.
Ruth does do an excellent job of putting you back in the tobacco fields of the late 1950s. She doesn’t apologize for the smoking pregnant mom, who ends up with a baby on one hip while handling a cigarette with her alternate hand. That’s the way it was then, and I’m glad she didn’t lose the reality of the times in politcal correctness.
I think if I were a transexual, I would feel exploited. Not that no one should write about transexuals, or anybody else for that matter, but the author herself told us that she actually started the book with the doctor as the protagonist and later on found that Buster would be better suited to that role. I won’t go into the sexually explicit part of the book, but suffice it to say that while her descriptions were not gratuitous or offensive, I found it rather difficult to believe that intercourse between the doctor and his wife would have functioned the way she described.
I liked the contrast to the clear sexual roles of the heterosexuals with the perverted roles of the transexuals, which was easily achieved in that setting. Without intending it, Ruth has confirmed my own convictions on the topic even though they are quite opposed to her own.
Most disconcerting was finding out that this book is being considered, perhaps already slated to be included, in the high school curriculum in Winnipeg. My consternation has nothing whatever to do with the fact that the book condones transexuality, but rather that it contains explicit adult content that a teen doesn’t really need to know. I hope the young people who read it receive godly moral guidance.
I liked hearing Ruth speak. She is a lovely, graceful, confident, bright woman, and I wish her much success in her future endeavours.
