population me

Reviewed by Jamie Dopp, University of Victoria

16 December 2010 archive

Population Me

And you want to go to Vegas
You want to go to Tahoe
Cause you won't be shooting craps
With that freaky little side dish
By your side
—David McGimpsey, "Leonard Cohen's 'Suzanne' by Frank Sinatra"

In recent years, David McGimpsey has established himself as one of the most distinctive writers in Canada. With his four collections of poems, one book of short fiction, and award-winning critical study of baseball and American popular culture, McGimpsey has carved out a literary terrain marked by a unique blend of pop culture irreverence and critical perception.

In Population Me, editor Alessandro Porco has brought together nine essays on McGimpsey's poetry and prose, along with a concluding interview. The essays—along with Porco's extensive introduction—showcase some of the best critical discourse that has accumulated around McGimpsey's writing, a discourse that is already surprisingly extensive for a writer still in the relatively early stages of his career.

The essays in this collection, I thought, were unusually well-written and readable, as well as containing much stimulating analysis. In keeping with the style of their subject, there is an element of playfulness sometimes that makes the essays entertaining in their own right, even as they perform genuinely scholarly work.

Some of the notable essays for me included David Vanderwerken on satiric elements in McGimpsey's sport-centred poems, Courtney Richardson on McGimsey's subversion of various Canadian national icons (especially "CanLitTM"), V. Nicholas Lolordo on McGimpsey's complex play with the "McDonaldization" of contemporary society (as revealed particularly in the burger poems of Hamburger Valley, California), and E. L. Vollick on the parallels between the slacker protagonists in McGimpsey's short fiction collection, Certifiable, and the postmodern malaise represented in novels like Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City. The essays are admirably bookended by Porco's introduction, which establishes a helpful context within which to begin an exploration of McGimpsey's work, and the concluding interview, which reveals McGimpsey himself to be a highly reflective and self-aware writer.

A recurring theme in the collection had to do with boundary crossings. McGimpsey's work offers a rich set of challenges to traditional distinctions between the comic and the serious, between high culture and low culture, and (perhaps most challenging to us in the literary community in Canada) between Canadian national myths and American culture.

I have myself taught McGimpsey a number of times in recent years, always to good affect. McGimpsey's work is a wonderful tonic to the sometimes portentously serious writing that dominates literary studies. His writing consistently poses a fundamental question: how can texts that make you laugh—that entertain you in ways often associated with popular culture—also have a serious purpose? In what way is the parody of Leonard Cohen I've quoted at the start of this review (and that I've put up, from time to time, on my office door) also a serious cultural act?

Population Me offers a wealth of useful starting points to examine questions like these. It should be of interest to students, teachers and non-academic readers of McGimpsey, and should remain a key resource in McGimpsey studies for a long time to come.

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