Only a Clever Writer Could
Make Stupid People This Interesting
by Eve Drobot
Globe and Mail, Saturday, June 6, 1992
Stupid people are not politically correct. Stupid people use racial slurs to describe people of colour. Stupid people who are male regard women as little more than an assemblage of body parts. Stupid people refer to the sex act as getting a "piece tail," and are too stupid even to know that the phrase needs a preposition.
Stupid people use drugs and would rather get their hands on a bottle of cheap vodka than eat. Stupid people think guns are cool. Stupid people do stupid things (sometimes by accident simply because they are so stupid) that other people consider criminal.
Barry Delta is not stupid. But his job is to take care of stupid people. He does it as well as he can, given that he is usually up against total, asinine, glaze-eyed stupidity. He is a Vancouver parole officer, and the hero of West Coast writer and editor Dennis E. Bolen's fine first novel, Stupid Crimes.
What is amazing and endearing about Delta is that he manages to care personally about the stupid people he is professionally responsible for, and - even more amazing and endearing - that he manages to maintain his moral outrage about the stupid things they do.
The novel is oddly constructed and, in fact, does not even become a true novel until chapter 5. The first three chapters are complete short stories, each focusing on a different character and each using a different voice. The first, told in the third person, is a cinematically cross-cut farce in which Delta turns off his beeper for the weekend so he can effectively seduce an attractive high-school teacher, while Steve, one of his charges, gets into more and more stupid trouble just trying to phone him.
The second chapter consists of the innermost, far from deep, first-person thoughts of one Wayne Stickner, "not much of a criminal," who is too stupid to even shoplift ice cubes from a convenience-store cooler without turning the process into an armed-assault racial incident.
Chapter 3 is about yet another parolee, Stanley, who is not stupid but insane. He rapes women. He is a comic-book crazy who believes he is programmed" by some evil power to release his "energy." If he doesn't, "the liquid starts to congeal and fester like mashed-up spiders in my insides, sick and awful, and I will vomit and go crazy. My blade goes dull and will not operate, even to let out those other poisons the government put there." He is so clever that when he does something stupid - sell his prescription drugs on the street - it's a signal of his twisted intentions, which Delta picks up loud and clear.
By Chapter 5, however, the characters start to cross paths in interesting ways, and Stupid Crimes takes on a life beyond a series of disjointed stories. The shifts between first and third person, and between points of view, continue and become gradually less jarring. The narrative remains anecdotal on the surface, but beyond it run serious subtexts of the unbreakable cycle of child abuse, personal and political corruption, relationships between men and women, and the quaint old notion of honour among thieves. And it all builds to a sweetly ironic ending.
Stupid Crimes is a contemporary, experimental and imaginative treatment of very old themes. Its language is crass (making it very difficult to quote from), and doctrinaire feminists will be offended by the neanderthal sexuality it contains. But let's face it: stupid crimes are committed by stupid people, and it takes a very clever writer to make them interesting.
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