Wayne Tefs (1947–2014)

This is the first book of Wayne Tefs that I have read. It was also his first novel. I can see that Tefs has talent. He has a beautiful way of describing ordinary actions viz. this paragraph about making tea:

He poured boiling water over the tea bag slumped in the pot. Wait till the bubbles are as big as peacocks' eyes, his mother had said. Now she was a woman with iron-gray hair and a stoop when she walked: all the muscles in her upper back and neck were hard as wood. But when she had told him that, she was almost a girl, the two of them making tea while they waited for Michael's father to come home, silent as lovers. And wait three minutes before pouring. He stirred sugar into the cup and started back toward the office. (p.57)

However, (you knew there was going to be a however, didn't you?) his portrayal of a cheating husband is so charitable and the picture of the wife is so uncharitable, that I got steadily angrier as I read the book. Only a man would think that telling a woman to stop drinking beer because all the calories are making her fat while he continues to drink Scotch and rum and almost any other beverage sold in a liquor store is a reasonable thing to do. And only a man would want to have sex with his wife after she knows about the affair when his mistress is out of town. Unlike the quote from the back of the book (What becomes apparent is the way real relationships form and break.), I could not understand either the formation of the new relationship or the breaking of the old one.

I think Michael got tired of his wife and enjoyed the sex with Mary. He then equates that with love. Anyone with any life experience knows that sex is not love. Sex can be fantastic but if that person doesn't support you in times of trouble, if they don't care for you when you get fat and grey, if they can't make you laugh then it's not love.

When Wayne Tefs wrote this book (1983) he was 36 and I think he should have gotten beyond that rather juvenile approach to love and sex by that age. I see from the internet that he has written a memoir about his bout with a rare cancer. They also mention that he has a wife and son so I hope that he at least now understands that love is not just great sex.… (mais)

Travel as backdrop for human psychology is a traditional and fertile literary device. North Africa scoured the soul in Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. Alex Garland investigated Generation X angst through an island Eden in The Beach.

Now, Manitoba writer Wayne Tefs transforms a 1992 Jeep Cherokee on Highway 6 between Winnipeg and Thompson into a Pandora’s box of familial sorrow, trapping a mother and two sons in a suffocating blend of repressed anger and camouflaged guilt.

4 x 4, Tefs’ ninth novel, mixes a hazardous blizzard, strained relations, and close quarters into a dramatic powder-keg, with concealed skeletons the fuse. As Darryl Dokic quips, they are driving “in a snowstorm on the road to godforsaken Thompson. Lucky thing we don’t have to do this sober."

As befits the title, 4 x 4 relates itself through four dissimilar narrators. Clint Dokic sells real-estate, sees angles in every conversation, and describes life as, “There’s them on the road to success and them dawdling along through the grass in the ditch." Brother Darryl is an under-achiever who dreams of Australia, imagining the Outback as an escape from “the nonsense of industry and commerce and the once-a-week nod in the direction of God."

Mother Meg in the back seat, meanwhile, is a survivor of a marriage reminiscent of Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. As the family challenge rising drifts and poor visibility, Clint’s wife Kaly, the fourth narrator, sits alone at the Burntwood in Thomson, pregnant, scared, and harbouring secrets of her own.

Tefs, winner of the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction for his novel Moon Lake, has a spare, sharp style of writing, admirably capturing the inherent claustrophobia of a lengthy road trip. As the storm’s power and the Dokic’s anxieties begin to swell, the Jeep begins to loosely resemble a Manitoba adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit: “Hell is other people."

The Dokics themselves are archetypes of a dysfunctional family, but Tefs never permits them to slip into unsympathetic stereotypes. As the present and past engagingly unfold from alternating viewpoints, all facets of the family are studied, engendering empathy that might otherwise be nonexistent.

Yet despite the undeniable strength of Tefs’ style and depth, elements exist that seem out of sync with the whole. For all its realism of tone and character, there exist too many mysteries and buried tragedies to be easily believed.

Each character hides some key that, if revealed, would destroy the others. While each is compelling, presented in muted, realistic hues, when put together they lend an awkward soap-opera-like facade that muffles the quality of the storyline, as if Tefs did not trust his characters to be interesting enough on their own.

Luckily, 4 x 4 is simply too good to be dismissed for overreaching. If the story at times stretches credulity, it is salvaged by Tefs’ honest humour and compassion. In 4 x 4, Tefs has fashioned an impressive tale of unflinching humanity and ultimate redemption, a road trip where “the destination only makes up half the journey."… (mais)