Review: Suburban Pornography

Stirring the pot darkly.



For those not familiar with his work, Matthew Firth is a Canadian writer of powerful and concise short stories that dive headfirst into some of the human condition's darker realms. Suburban Pornography, Firth's latest collection, continues exploring this vein with a vengeance, taking no prisoners, amongst either his broken, shell-shocked characters or his readers.

Hailing from the province of Ontario in east-central Canada, Firth sets his stories in this region he obviously knows right down to the marrow of his bones. This is important because this icy northern locale goes far beyond being a mere backdrop and infuses the characters who inhabit it with a kind of interminably cold, windswept bleakness of their own, which drives them deep into their own darkness much more often than not. More specifically, these seventeen stories center around the numbing sorrow and barely contained anger of a cast (or caste, perhaps) of lower-middle-class lost souls, who are stuck in boring dead-end jobs, bad marriages, or just ugly life situations in general, where any relief—especially if it revolves around sex and/or alcohol—is welcome, no matter how obviously destructive said behavior promises to be for everyone involved.

Though virtually every story in this collection "works," among the best or at least most representative, would be 'Sheila Crawford Sucks Cocks,' the book's opening piece, in which a boy's sexual awakening comes thru his spying on the graphic and dismal promiscuity of a older neighbour girl who dispenses her tawdry favors in car backseats and alleys, which nicely shows the kind of beginnings that could lead to the tragic, disillusioned world view that runs thru all of these pieces. Another excellent story is 'August, 1974,' in which the author employs a brilliantly fractured narrative that in the end comes together to show the staggering selfishness and pettiness of a teenage girl who views a horrible tragedy that befalls her family as simply a nice means to and end to finally get a bedroom all to herself. Perhaps the best story in this volume, though, and easily my favorite, is 'The Centre,' which concerns the daily life of a young man working behind the counter of a soup kitchen for the homeless and chronicles the comings and going of the sad, beaten people who flock to the place for at least part of their sustenance. Here Firth's eye for the pathos of such downtrodden characters is never sharper. What makes this story so arresting, though, is that, for once, he allows a small shaft of light to shine thru the darkness of his vision, in the form of a good deed done by his protagonist that adds some heartbreaking cheer to a young, semi-homeless girl on her birthday.

As I have mentioned, nearly every one of these stories succeed, many spectacularly. This is not to say that this is a perfect book, however. Firth writes in a blunt clipped style that for the most part fits his tales of woe perfectly. There are times, however, when this approach becomes a bit too blunt and clipped, which slows down the narrative. There are also moments where it seems as if he enjoys the misery of his characters a touch too much and could be accused of piling on the sorrow more than is necessary to make his point. It must be stressed, however, that these are extremely minor quibbles and very much exceptions rather than the rule—for overall Suburban Pornography is a truly rich mosaic of the human dark side, which captures the soul and heartbeat of his human wreckage in an absorbing, brilliant, and necessary fashion.

[Reviewed by Rob Woodard]

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Suburban Pornography and Other Stories by Matthew Firth
Anvil Press
207 Pages