Going Backwards and Laughing Out Loud; A Brief Overview of Larry Mathews, or, Rather, an Insistence You Read Him, and Agree with my New Burning Rock Parallel.

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On Larry and his latest novel

Larry Mathews is credited as the founding member of the Burning Rock Fiction Collective. A writer’s group that includes names like Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, and Jessica Grant. Credited perhaps because in his inaugural year of teaching creative writing at Memorial University, him, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, and some others, didn’t want to stop meeting and swapping writing once the class had finished, and from there began Canada’s most legendary writer’s group.

Mathews is, as described by Mark Anthony Jarman, “A Searing and silver-tongued wit.” His latest novel came out a few months ago, The Artificial Newfoundlander, and Salty Ink made it May’s Book of the Month. Read that article here. It’s a gut-busting, fast-paced, pleasure-to-read story, in which an amusingly introspective and disgruntled professor is surrounded by absurd characters as far-fetched as life itself, as his role as  a father, lover, and academic is put to the test.

On his pleasure-to-read The Sandblasting Hall of Fame.

The Artificial Newfoundlander left me needing a little more Larry Mathews. For years now, I’ve been wanting to read his debut collection of shorts, The Sandblasting Hall of Fame, but we all know how that goes: 20 new books hit the shelves each month, burying the old ones deeper down in the to-read pile. Bookstores are frustratingly quick to send anything a year or two old out the door, so you have to order online, etc.

Don’t be lazy like me about this book. GO. Get it.

Few books have the abundance out laugh-out-loud moments, the sheer, glistening wit of it. The sheer “joy of reading.” Oh, and from a writer’s viewpoint: the clever narrative construction and the lack of throwaway sentences: his style is punchy and gripping: a great combo when you throw his wit in the mix. Mathews plain has fun with language here, in the way Jessica Grant does in her heralded (exquisite!) writing. If people are going to be consistently comparing Burning Rockers Michael Winter and Lisa Moore’s attention to detail, they ought also to be comparing Grant and Mathews’ clever wordsmithery and pleasure-to-readedness.

What he does with his endearing misfit characters acts as a way to do with fiction all the things I like seeing done with fiction. A distinctive voice, engaging from start to finish, that hauls you into a story, keeps you there, clipping along at a good pace, and you hit the ending like a brick wall. (Because that’s how accidents happen: you forget about your surroundings, absorbed in something else, like, say a Larry Mathews’ story.)

His characters might be oddballs or they might not be. They’re certainly great to spend time with. Larry is masterful, yes, masterful, at what the old books call character development. In an opening paragraph: you know the characters, right away, just like that. They’re off-kilter, yet fully realized and convincing, and plain fun. They’re also unabashedly human.

Mathews, on his characters, “My guys are clowns in the sense that they see the Fall of Man whenever they slip on a banana peel. Then they take you backstage and you can see that, without makeup and costume props, they’re not much different from you and me.”

The Sandblasting Hall of Fame was longlisted for the 2003 ReLit Award, and features stories that have appeared in various esteemed literary journals, including Prairie Fire, Grain, and Fiddlehead. “Hanrahan Agnoistes” was anthologized in Coming Attractions 02′.