The Globe and Mail praises The Steve Machine
In 2004, I edited a collection of video scripts by acclaimed Canadian artist Steve Reinke. Reinke is an aphoristic and acerbic writer, but on the page his words weren't quite as beguiling as they were in his videos. This was because a large part of the charm of his work lay in his deadpan delivery, the performance of his own words.
A voice can be as difficult to describe as a colour. Mike Hoolboom, in his debut novel – ostensibly (but obliquely) about his real-life pal Reinke – describes Reinke's voice as a 'satisfyingly mellifluous drawl' and 'summery.' But, for Hoolboom, describing that tone is less important than articulating its effects; in The Steve Machine, Reinke's voice, or at least its fictional analogue, has an uncanny power. It can possess, consume and completely transform you.
The prolific Hoolboom is the most important Canadian 'fringe filmmaker' (his phrase) since Michael Snow, well known for such aggressive, avant-garde fictions as Panic Bodies and Imitations of Life. As those titles indicate, his work is characterized by an obsession with sexual desire, the body's insidious impermanence and the seductions of our image-happy age.
Such preoccupations also dominate The Steve Machine, shot through with the same kind of arch rumination Hoolboom employs in his film scripts. Less obviously funny than Reinke, he shares a fondness for the sharp metaphysical sound bite.
Hoolboom's narrator, Auden, is a less-poetic personage than his portentous appellation would suggest. At the outset, he's a 25-year-old Sudbury mill worker who, suddenly learning he is HIV-positive, escapes to Toronto 'to count down the days.' Auden temps at an insurance company, becomes a gym bunny and starts wearing a series of identical baby-blue T-shirts emblazoned with the name 'Ted's.'
In the wake of his apparent death sentence, Auden becomes determined to slip the noose of his identity, to abandon the body that has already abandoned him; his daily routine includes painful fevers, precipitous blood-count drops.
Equally important, Auden is looking for his own personal body-snatcher. He wants someone else to take over so that he may become someone, something, else. Enter Steve, a video artist who calls his art a 'medium so obscure it makes poetry seem like the daily news.'
But Steve's videos, in fact, do magical things: They cure migraines and allow viewers to see five seconds into the future. Auden is smitten by this mysterious figure (who wears paper suits and becomes part of a reality TV show, The Lofters). They become lovers, then friends. Finally, they embark on a radical project: Steve will tell Auden stories, the story of his life, in fact, and these stories will slowly replace Auden's 'narrative of illness with a healing alternative.' Auden would no longer be Auden but simply part of a 'machine' that the two will build together (and this machine is the very book you're holding). As Auden's namesake wrote, 'A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.'
As 'machine' would suggest, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are the animating spirits here. Hoolboom remarkably reformulates and condenses their sprawling, still-provocative anti-systems of transformation, resistance and escape. It's cerebral, sure, but the novel's exploration of how these theories might translate in the real world (or some version of it) overflows with genuine pain, wit and empathy.
It's no spoiler to reveal that Steve will become HIV-positive, assuming Auden's illness as his own. Hoolboom himself has been HIV-positive for more than 20 years and, while it's sad and strange to say that an AIDS novel, in 2008, feels vaguely old-fashioned, The Steve Machine eschews the sticky sentiment and agitprop that characterizes so much of the genre. Utopian, ambitious and elegant, it's a machine with a very human heart.
