I thought Steve Hely’s previous novel How I Became a Famous Novelist was one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, bar none, and I’m a huge fan of his work on The Office, so I was really excited to read his travel memoir The Wonder Trail. In this book, he heads south from Los Angeles, and just keeps heading south until he hits Patagonia.

The book is structured as a series of anecdotes about his travels. The tone is one of irreverent but ultimately gentle humour, somewhat akin to a dorky but loveable uncle making side comments with a wicked grin and you laugh partly because his comments are amusing but also partly because he seems like he’s having such a good time doing it. Whether Hely is relating an amusing anecdote or sharing a bit of history, his enthusiasm shines through, and it’s easy to be caught up in that.

The key highlight for me are the people he meets: Guatemala Pam, Kelly Slater (not his real name, but he looks like a “Kelly Slater” would look), and the Australian “A-team,” among others. Hely meets up with quite a cast of characters throughout the trip, all colourful and interesting in their own way, but also quite ordinary, by which I mean you can easily imagine bumping into such characters yourself on a trip, without having to go on a major grand adventure. At one point, he comments that travellers tend to find each other and tend to want to share their stories. He then follows it up with a warning not to exaggerate your adventures too much lest the person you’re speaking with can top you, and it’s amusing to imagine seasoned travellers trying to one-up each other, but on a more serious note, I really like this idea of a community of travellers who somehow fall in together and manage to connect.

One of my personal favourites among the people Hely encounters is Alan Tang, who always travels in style. As a taste of Hely’s humour in this book, a footnote says Alan Tang is a fake name, so the real person can deny the stories are about them, and that his real name is actually Alan Yang. As a taste of Healy’s humour and Alan Tang’s style, in a chapter about getting to Machu Picchu, Hely notes that hard core travellers can walk the “something like 25,000 miles of remnant Inca roads and trails,” and agrees that Machu Picchu is “like the epic goal of a quest, like a place of pilgrimage.” But because he was with Alan Tang, they instead rode a train and a bus to the edge of the cliff and saw the amazing view without having to walk for days. All respect to hard core adventurers, but I think I’d like travelling the Alan Tang way myself.

My favourite passage in the book comes from Hely’s friend Professor McHugh, who compares some travellers’ behaviour to “Oompa Loompa hunting.” He’s referring to the hipster type of traveller, the ones who want nothing short of the “authentic” experience, and when that experience feels too familiar, it isn’t “authentic” enough. Professor McHugh compares it to looking for Oompa Loompas (characters from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) because they’re looking for something “exotic” and out of the ordinary. Professor McHugh says:

People say they hate Bangkok because it looks like LA. “Get out of Bangkok,” they tell each other. Well, sure, on the surface, Bangkok looks like on LA. But then in some strip mall you can find a temple where people worship the embalmed corpse of a middle-aged woman who died in, like, 1998. Why do you have you go out to the jungle looking for people in funny costumes? [p. 244]

Wonder Trail is nowhere near as gut-splittingly hilarious as I remember Famous Novelist to be, but, like both Famous Novelist and The Office, it works because it has heart. Because the people Hely met were so interesting, part of me wishes we could have spent a bit more time with each of them and learned more of their stories, but on the other hand, I like how each new place brought a new encounter, and so meeting new people became as core of a feature of his trip as his geographical movement was. Wonder Trail is an entertaining travelogue, a bit uneven in terms of pace and humour, but overall, the stories of the people he meets and the insights on connecting with fellow travellers and on looking beyond the immediate familiarity make it worth a read.

And if you were an English major or are otherwise embroiled in the publishing industry, particularly around “literary” fiction, I highly recommend How I Became A Famous Novelist. It was published in 2009 (i.e. pre-social media, during the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code era) so some of the humour may seem dated, but its skewering of the literary ivory tower is still worth checking out.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

In Three Years with the Rat, an unnamed narrator moves into Toronto to meet up with his older sister Grace and her boyfriend John. Both Grace and John are scientists, and when the book begins, it’s been about a year since John disappeared and a bit longer than that since Grace disappeared. The narrator goes into their apartment to take their stuff and finds a mysterious, mirror-filled box, a lab rat named Buddy, and John’s notebook written in code. He sets off to investigate their disappearances and save his sister and friend, and what follows is a pretty trippy story about science and philosophy and time travel / alternate dimensions/realities. I don’t completely understand what happened, and I suspect that’s the author’s intention. The narrator’s girlfriend Nicole quotes Albert Camus, “I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world,” and that seems to be the point of this story.

Structured by the months of each particular year, the story flips us between the narrator’s early days in Toronto when he first learns of his sister’s work to Grace’s seemingly sudden decline into bouts of irrational anger to John’s own mood swings that appear to mirror Grace’s and finally to the present day when the narrator tries to piece it all together and must decide how far he is willing to go to save them. The Camus quote is a warning about the limitations of human intelligence, and in an early chapter, we see just how grand in scale Grace’s work aspires to be.

At one point, the narrator jokingly asks Grace to make the dumbed-down version of her work even dumber, and I admit I wanted to ask the same. So, per my understanding of the dumber version of the dumbed-down version of Grace’s work: she is interested in isolating pure subjectivity. Things and places around us are objective realities, in that an apple is red no matter who’s looking at it. But even though there are objective measures of time, our experience of time is very subjective, as it seems to speed up or slow down in relation to our needs. So how can we distil whatever it is that makes time different from everything else?

It’s a helluva project, and I feel like there are all these philosophical and metaphorical threads that Hoskings invites us to tease out and that I don’t quite grasp, but it also gives you an idea of how someone can lose themselves so thoroughly into that question that they, literally, disappear.Reading this is an unsettling experience, and deliberately so, I think. What starts out as a fairly straightforward missing person mystery somehow turns into a disquieting tale of things that aren’t quite right turns into a bit of a fantasy with a philosophical bent.

The end of the book left me with some lingering questions, and it’ll be easy to slip into an endless loop of questioning, possibly about things that are completely insignificant. (e.g. Does it mean anything that John’s lab passcode is the same as the ID badge number of the officer investigating Grace’s disappearance?) However, unlike Grace whose never ending thirst for knowledge consumes her, I think I’ll remain comfortable in the limitations of my own knowledge, and just remain glad that I read and enjoyed this twisty trippy tale.

As an aside, the author of this book is a neuroscientist who researches decision-making and the human brain, which I think is a pretty nerdy-awesome job for an author to have.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

When Michael sees his wife Nancy chatting with a stranger at a party, his intuition tells him this is the man she should have married. What follows is a rather melancholy glimpse into the breakdown of a family, as Michael befriends the man, John, and schemes to have his wife fall in love and marry him. A concurrent storyline involves Michael and Nancy’s daughter Ryan who senses the marital tension and distances herself from her family, whilst, as the book blurb puts it, she “goes through a period of sexual awakening.”

It’s an interesting premise — how tragic is it to feel that you just met the man you know your wife should have married? Yet on the flip side, how fucked up is it to try to manipulate her into falling in love with this man enough to leave you, instead of just talking to her straight out? I’d expected Michael to be a bit of a tragic figure and to an extent he is, but he is also really messed up, like a reverse Tom Ripley who is determined to ensure himself a miserable life.

I mostly felt bad for Nancy. At one point, she says that while other women fantasize about sex with handsome strangers, her fantasy is for her husband to make love to her. How sad is that? She does deserve a more loving, affectionate spouse, and so to that end, kudos to Michael, I guess, for trying to make it happen?

Despite the story being told in Michael’s voice, it’s really hard to get into his head because all I could think of was how he was messing up the lives of people around him. At one point, he lets John believe he wants to leave Nancy because he has a serious, likely fatal, illness. I’m just imagining how scary and horrific it feels to learn that a loved one, whether a spouse or a friend, is fatally ill, and I’m actually angry at him for putting them through that. He later writes Nancy that he’s “sick in more ways than you know” and while he may have some medical conditions, I think he’s referring to something else which has a long, unfortunate history of being pathologized, and so that just made me like him even less.

It took me a while to get into this story and I almost didn’t finish it, but I’m glad I did because the story comes together in the end. Some of the things that really annoyed me came at the end as well, but overall, the ending made sense. There’s a quiet intensity to Larsen’s writing that I think will draw some readers in and at least propelled me enough to finish the book. It’s the kind of book that I think readers will either love and praise for its “mesmerizing, unsparing quality” (back cover blurb from author Karen Russell), or dislike and possibly hate for probably the same reason, its intensely claustrophobic focus on a man who self-destructs and takes his family down with him.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.