See Magazine on The Milk Chicken Bomb
Growing up weird in small-town Alberta
And what the hell is The Milk Chicken Bomb, anyway?
By Andrew Wedderburn. Coach House Books, 291 pp., $21.95
When is a coming-of-age novel not a coming-of-age novel?
When nobody changes, nobody learns anything, and nothing happens.
Such is the case in The Milk Chicken Bomb, the debut novel by Calgary author (and rock ’n’ roller) Andrew Wedderburn. Which isn’t to say that’s a problem, exactly. What Wedderburn has done is to craft a sort of existential bildungsroman. It’s probably been done before, but if so, I haven’t seen it, so it’s new to me.
Plot: Kid from small-town Alberta sells lemonade with his friend, goes to school, deals with bullies and watches the adults in his life as they cope–or don’t cope–with unemployment, suicide, and exploding hot-water boilers.
Though our 10-year-old narrator, whose name we never learn, is occasionally found at Greyhound stations trying to buy a ticket for Calgary or the Yukon, he mostly seems content to stick around fictional Marvin, AB. This isn’t a book about a small-town kid suffused with longing for the wide world and the big city. He doesn’t seem suffused by much of anything, actually, besides a fascination with lemonade, comic books and the Russians from the local meat-packing plant.
Wedderburn wrings some convincing pathos from this kid’s attentive, inquisitive perspective–though he’s only beginning to comprehend the trifling troubles of the adults around him, the reader is all too aware of the petty miseries of everyday life in an economically depressed prairie town.
But there are two major problems with the book. The first is the prose style, filled as it is with sentence fragments, comma splices, and other elementary linguistic no-nos. (Wedderburn also seems averse to conjunctions and quotation marks.) So we get a lot of passages like, "He looks at the waitress. Hello, Hoyle. Nods his head toward the coffee pot. She pours him a mug. He pushes away the little bowl of creamers. Has a little sip... I play with my pie, tap the crust with the bottom of my fork."
Sure, it’s "literary," but the whole book is written this way. The sharp little sentences don’t allow the reader any time to settle into the flow of things. (Wedderburn is the rare young writer whose prose isn’t flowery enough).
The other problem is that there are only a few tenuous plot threads: Will the Russians win the curlng match? Will we ever find out what the milk chicken bomb is? Who is the mysterious Québécois woman who runs the antique shop?
On the other hand, Wedderburn is a small-town Alberta kid himself, and he’s packed The Milk Chicken Bomb with wonderfully knowing details, from McClaghan, the local hardware store owner who habitually spits into a jar on his counter ("McClaghan’s jar is the worst thing in town") to believably weirdo characters like Deke Howitz, who’s trying to wangle a $400,000 loan from the bank to buy a surplus Soviet submarine from Uzbekistan.
Wedderburn’s ear for the non sequiturs and weird rhythms of kid-speak is also ace. Example:
"Drinking root beer is easy, says Dwayne Klatz. Drinking any kind of pop is easy, it’s half gas.
I can drink more pop than you can, says Mullen.
I can drink more milk than anybody, says Dwayne.
Milk? says Mullen
Drinking milk is hard. If you drink too much milk you throw up. Milk hasn’t got any gas at all."
And every once in a while, Wedderburn throws in a loopy fantasy sequence straight out of a child’s overactive imagination, like an attack by giant killer "Glue Men," or a scene where a tidal wave rolls across the prairie and uproots the whole town.
These are beautifully executed scenes, proof that Wedderburn’s a real writer, and maybe one with a great book in him. He just needs to get over some of his more off-putting stylistic quirks first.
