More Covid-recovery reading. Finally got to Suzette Mayr 's masterful The Sleeping Car Porter. It is about a queer black porter, Baxter, who aspires to be a dentist, working on a train cross-crossing Canada in 1929.
This thing has so much going for it. There is her characterization reminiscent of Michael V. Smith 's closeted protagonist Earnest in the startling novel Cumberland; social commentary about racism and classism; allusions to exacting customer service; details about a ridiculous working climate; hallucinatory sleep deprivation description and concise landscape description.
Aspiring writers take note-there"s much to learn, here. Mayr's descriptions of an ensemble cast would, in a less mature writer's hands, descend into caricature or pigeon-holing instead of layered complexity.
All this, steeped in an increasingly powerful magical realism. Please note, Elliott Dunstan, if you read this.
And my appreciation for this hypnotic and beguiling novel has no connection whatsoever to the fact I wrote Town & Train, a small-town Canadiana horror novel about ... a phantom steam engine.
All aboard!
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