se who have the
most seem
bent on throwing it away. . . Sometimes those who have the
most seem
bent on throwing it away. . .
Meet
Bob Sterling,
a comfortable middle-aged professor, a specialist in the life of Edgar
Allan
Poe, married to a former student with whom he has a young son. In the
space of
a week his family, marriage, home, career, sanity, and life are brought
to the
brink of ruin in the aftermath of a trip he takes with a student, the
intense
young poet Sienna Chu, who tweaks into florescence a long-harboured,
secret sexual
fetish. Add to the mix the misadventures of his wife's mentally failing
mother,
a shy night prowler, and Sienna's explosive techno-junkie roommate, and
you
have Alan
Cumyn's strikingly original novel Losing
It.
Whether describing
an Alzheimer sufferer, a fetishist, a twisted poet, or a young mother
whose
life is suddenly spinning out of control, Cumyn reveals the eccentric
sub-surfaces of our lives. Poignant and gritty, tantalizingly erotic, Losing
It is a high-wire act that
plays out as a delicious blend of
darkness and
humour. It hurtles forward as it embraces its characters' oddly
intersecting
worlds, the laughable, bizarre, and horrifying conflicts, and the
surprising
emotional connections that are made in the midst of life's madness.
-- Aritha van Herk, The
Globe and Mail
"Here
are all the basic
ingredients for a fairly typical academic comedy of errors à la
Kingsley Amis
or David Lodge... But Cumyn's comedy is both sadder and more sinewy
than his
material suggests. As each chapter shifts to a different character's
perspective, the reader experiences a kind of emotional variegation: a
bold
stripe of comedy yields to a paler, frailer shade of poignancy to a
sudden
black swath of outright distress. One minute the reader gets the low
physical
comedy of Bob...and rolls her eyes in grudging amusement; the very next
page
she sees Lenore wandering unsupervized from the nursing home, where a
distraught Julia has had to commit her, to a nearby waterfall. Only her
own
immense dignity forestalls utter panic, and only immense luck staves
off
disaster. 'Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,' as Shakespeare put
it."
--Annabel Lyon, The Ottawa
Citizen
"To
this slice of
life-in-crisis
Cumyn brings a subtle understanding of volatile family chemisty--how
Julia can
careen from maternal adoration to rage to guilt in seconds, how spouses
communicate in emotion-fraught shorthand. His writing, meanwhile, is
often
virtuosic. The lengthy segments told from Lenore's addled point of view
are
brilliant and moving... Cumyn also presents a vivid impression of
Sienna's
state of mind when under the influence of a stimulant called clarity,
which
sounds like ecstasy. And he must have had a ball penning Sienna's
druggy
poetry, which is spectacularly ridiculous, like Gerard Manley Hopkins
on
LSD."
-- Patrica Hluchy, Maclean's
Losing
It is "an
amazing
achievement ... I was swept up by Cumyn's uncanny wisdom about the
inside of
the human mind, by his mesmerizing devotion to telling detail, by his
vision of
absurdity couched in lovable (or banal) ordinariness. Alan Cumyn's
talent for
fiction is absolutely original; it hits the reader (this one, at least)
with
the most refreshing and exhilarating shock."
-- Bronwyn Drainie
Losing It is
published by McClelland
&
Stewart. Click here
to
read an excerpt.
Return to Alan Cumyn's homepage.