Miss Lamp

The world of Miss Lamp is one densely filled with conundrums. A story in vignettes, the reader is taken from present to past, experiencing the life of Miss Lamp, a Young Miss Lamp, and a Young Young Miss Lamp. Along the journey we are introduced to a cast of characters who provide for a little illumination into the true nature of the protagonist.

Style, meet substance. Substance, style.

Calgary writer’s first novel halfway to greatness

Miss Lamp

by Chris Ewart

Coach House Books, 184 pp., $19.95

Chris Ewart’s Miss Lamp is not a conventional novel.

Miss Lamp

Chris Ewart

Coach House Books, Toronto, 2006

Miss Lamp, Chris Ewart's first novel, presents an oddly rollicking little universe where the eponymous protagonist sits in a hotel room eating grilled cheese sandwiches. Our sojourn with Miss Lamp carries us through a quest for justice against a demented dentist, the romance of Banana Tray Hair and Room Service Boy, and Paper Boy's fight for dignity.

Miss Lamp is a lawyer. Miss Lamp orders a grilled cheese sandwich. Miss Lamp defends an evil dentist.

Just an ordinary day for Miss Lamp.

Miss Lamp is the first novel from Calgary's Chris Ewart. With characters like the bicycle-stealing Delano the dentist, Room Service Boy, Paper Boy, and, of course, Miss Lamp herself, Ewart's novel is like a series of vignettes.

Miss Lamp is the strangest book I've come across in a while. Quirky, sweet, inventive and grotesque, this literary novel is structured in sharp vignettes around Miss Lamp, a lawyer holed up in the Peachland Hotel. We meet her as a teen (Young Miss Lamp) and as a child (Young Young Miss Lamp). The people around her include Banana Tray Hair, a Safeway employee, Room Service Boy, a keener employee of the hotel, and Delano, a sadistic drunk dentist. Ewart has a poet's eye for detail, turns a pretty phrase and gives a good chuckle. This is a unique offering by a clever, skiller writer.

The bicycle brief

DIANE BAKER MASON

Miss Lamp

By Chris Ewart

In the latter half of Chris Ewart's novel Miss Lamp, a cheerfully psychotic brute of a dentist pedals a stolen CCM Supercycle madly through the streets, past jittery squirrels, screaming at children and mothers far too belligerent to see a dentist regularly.