Recent Reads - Coyote's Bow Grip

I recently found myself staring at the Canadian Lit stacks on the ninth floor of the Wells' Library and came across a smallish novel set in Alberta. I do find myself quite interested in literature with a strong sense of regionalism/place. I grabbed the book, thinking that it might help me with a poetry series I was building on words and the Canadian landscape. I didn't get around to reading Ivan E. Coyote's Bow Grip (Arsenal Pulp Press 2006, ISBN 1-55152-213-6), until almost a month after the whole poetry series was completed for class.

The book won a ReLit award in 2007 and was the first novel for Coyote. Ostensibly, Bow Grip is about a Drumheller, AB car mechanic who is trying to get over a divorce and the loss of his father through developing the hobby of playing cello. Bow Grip contains a certain amount of alluring quirkiness that really helps to pull the reader in. The narrator is strong enough to pull us through his odyssey from rural Alberta town to Calgary and place into a world on the outskirts of "successful" urban life. The characters that inhabit the world of this book are notably and recognizably working class. There is a familiarity in them that is welcoming and embracing.

The single biggest downsize to the book is that it just doesn't seem to linger on scenes or characters enough. It's short, only 217 pages, and seems to need another 100 pages or so just to fulfill the promises afforded by the strong set up of characters. There does seem to be some loose ends that need to be tied up, or closed off. As a writer and a reader, I feel that everything that appears in a work should be there for a reason. I don't always feel that Coyote pulls some of these threads into any sucessful meaning. The most notable of these in the novel is the presence of a french waitress whom Joey's (narrator) friend Hector is trying to set him up with. She appears for a scene and then simply disappears, never thought of or seen again.

All in all though, this is an interesting book and quick read. If anything, Coyote's Bow Grip is a solid way to start off your summer reading.