One of the problems with writing for a living is that your circle of friends tends to include a bunch of writers. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, these friendships often come with a price those who have normal, respectable jobs don’t have to deal with.
For most people, being pals with someone generally doesn’t require of whole lot of effort. Maybe you help them out on moving day, possibly water their plants or feed their cats when they’ve out of town.
Writers, on the other hand, regularly have to read each other’s books and manuscripts, preferably in a timely fashion, and then are expected to provide constructive feedback. It’s not always easy to find the time, and so you sometimes find yourself avoiding people simply because you still haven’t gotten around to reading their stuff, be it published or still in the draft phase.
"Naw, it's cool. It's not like I had plans for the weekend anyway."
There can be some nice surprises though. My wife is a good friend of a woman who recently wrote a memoir about her adolescence and early adulthood, which was also her first book. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine how anyone would care about someone’s early days if they aren’t famous or Frank McCourt, and the copy she gave us as a present sat unopened on the shelf for months before I finally got around to picking it up, mainly because I didn’t want to run into her in a social setting and feel shame.
Turns out she had a way more interesting upbringing than most and I was barely able to put the book down until finishing it. I also wasn’t alone in loving it — Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, which recounts author Carmen Aguirre’s harrowing days as a member of the Chilean Resistance fighting against military strongman Augusto Pinochet, went on to win the 2012 edition of the CBC’s Canada Reads contest. If you haven’t read it, you should.
How many genocidal dictators did YOU try to stop as a teenager?
Which brings me to my buddy Axel Matfin’s new book, Appetite for Destruction, the second in his ongoing Bartender series about a hard-nosed, hard-drinking mixologist named Tom Wolfe. I’ve gotten to know Axel mainly through his day job as, yes, a bartender because he’s served me more pints of IPA and shots of Jameson than I’d care to admit over the past few years at a couple of different Commercial Drive bars. I wasn’t even aware for a long time that he harbored literary ambitions, and I confess his debut novel gathered a fair bit of dust before I finally cracked it for essentially the same reason I did Carmen’s.
The Bartender: Darkness at the Edge of Town offers an insider’s take on Vancouver’s seedy nightlife underbelly through a fictional lens. Similar to how Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park provided a glimpse behind the scenes of the city’s high-end restaurant scene, the Bartender books offer a thinly disguised portrayal of the local bar biz and some of its biggest players. (Any Vancouverites who have spent any time in local drinking establishments won’t have to use much imagination to guess who the rather sinister owner of “the O’Donnell Group” is meant to be.)
It’s always fun to read a book set inside a city you know well and even more so when, because you have friends in common with the author, you’re able to recognize certain characters by knowing the actual people they’re based on. But I highly recommend the books to anyone even if they don’t. The Bartender pays homage to the noir-ish detective genre, and the author does a terrific job spinning a mystery that anyone who has spent time around any type of bar scene can appreciate. The main character is based on the author himself, although the fictional version is a much bigger badass. I’d probably make myself a lot tougher too if I were to create a fictional counterpart, although it has to be said that it also takes a certain amount of guts to call your second book Appetite for Destruction when your name is Axel.
Sure beats calling it The Spaghetti Incident though.
The first installment ended on a cliffhanger, and I for one am very much looking forward to finding out who sent Wolfe a gun and why. The Storm Crow is hosting a book reading for the next round Jan. 30. Head on out and maybe someday you can say you met him before he became famous. Or at least buy him a drink.
