- 2009 Re-release of a Cormorant Bestseller

- Winner of the 2004 ReLit Award.

- A NOW Magazine top ten book of the year, and a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction and Pearson Canada Readers’ Choice Book Award.

Still Life with June was, by page 9 or 10, clearly going to be of the best books I’d read all year. Before I’d finished it, it had become a plain favourite book of mine. It’s all there: great writing, a distinctive style, an engaging story told in a calculated way. Also, a key ingredient in the recipe for a great book, I’ve come to decide, is how memorable the book is. This book is in every way memorable. It is also unique in structure: there are hundreds of small chapters, some are pages long, some are random story-enhancing bits no longer than this: “The things I hate most are: 1.) middle-east violence 2.) hospital food 3.) Microsoft Word 6 4.) My father.”

Still Life with June pairs heavy subject matter with a comedic tone in a way that makes both the story and comedy more poignant. Greer masks the sadder aspects of this story with a comedic tone, so that the starker side of the story feels all the more potent in those moments when he chooses to haul off  that mask of comedy. In other words, this is dark subject matter outweighed by levity, except for the moments that matter. This is very effective. This novel is outright funny and downright grave: not something most writers could pull of so flawlessly.

In Cameron Dodds’ take on the world there are two types of people: “losers who know they are losers, and losers who don’t know they are losers.” Cameron, a small-time writer, considers himself a loser who knows he is a loser. He works at a Sally Ann drug and alcohol treatment centre, where he steals the file of Darryl Green, a recent suicide case, and gets so engrossed in the file he translates it into fictitious short stories and befriends the deceased’s sister: a Down Syndrome patient named June, who he regularly visits.

We get a hilarious dose of humour-infused, self-deprecation upfront to get to know the character. “I’m losing my hair. Each morning I stand in front of the bathroom mirror with a wooden ruler and measure from the bridge of my nose to my hairline. It recedes about a quarter of an inch every six months.” He gets into how he loves dried apricots, and although he’s allergic to them, he eats them anyway, despite the welts he gets: “If you didn’t know any better you’d probably think I was heavily into S & M.” And the next chapter is only two words: “I’m not.” By page six he is naked and unwillingly handcuffed to a bed by a man who, he explains, fits the profile of a serial killer.

More than anything, this is a novel about identity. Every single character is in denial about something, about who they are, and they are outright lying about who they are, to themselves and others, and in many cases, literally assuming other people’s identities. Cameron, the story’s main character, is a writer pretending to be anything it takes to collect material for stories — including befriending “losers who don’t know they are losers” in gay bars on Christmas day to get their sad stories for his writing. Another main character is a girl pretending to be a writer by outright faking her entire identity. No one is who they seem, or, no one really knows who they are, or, no one is satisfied with who they are. Except for his cat, Juxtaposition, or more affectionately, Juxta. Cameron is jealous of Juxta, wishing he could be his cat for a day and “glory in my sloth, without having to wonder who I am or what my life is about.” Juxtaposition, one of the coolest cats in CanLit history, acts as Greer’s muse for reflections on identity, and why we’re all so self-loathing these days. “My cat doesn’t hate herself. If you hate yourself you don’t spend two hours each day grooming with no chance of ever getting laid. And she doesn’t even know her parents [to blame everything on them.]” Without giving too much away about his brilliant, page-turner of an ending, Cameron quite literally gets lost looking for himself.

Very innovative and edgy, but not in that edgy-for-the-sake-of- it way, Still Life with June definitely deserved a 2009 re-issue and a new wave of appreciation so that people like me, who missed it the first time, can enjoy it this time. And, since it truly is one of those rare gems that begs a second read, people who enjoyed it last time can enjoy it again.  It is a Cormorant bestseller for very obvious reasons: it is an unforgettable and infectious novel. Few writers give us a book this memorable, re-readable, and original. It is screaming film adaptation, and has been optioned.