“The Softest Trap Imaginable”: A Review of Craig Davidson’s Cataract City

 

Craig Davidson has his preoccupations—crime, violence, and what some might call hyper-masculinity. His writing is muscular, offering soft jabs and fierce punches at precisely the correct moments. If you’re familiar with his work, you’re aware of his affinity for bruises and busted eye-sockets—that he isn’t afraid to break a few bones. He unapologetically shatters all of them in his latest novel, Cataract City, and while it’s possible to praise the momentum and realism of his trademark scuffles—split knuckles, crumpled noses, gruesome limb-fracturing prize-fights between men and dogs alike—the brief illuminations of disappointment and self-awareness beneath his central characters’ bruised, frost-bitten skins prove most compelling.

Duncan “Dunk” Diggs and Owen “Owe” Stuckey reflect on their lasting friendship in Cataract City, a border town comprised mainly of felons and factory workers—those who get by on the misfortunes of others, and those just getting by. Somewhat overly familiar, it’s the community young people flee when attempting to reach for a life greater than their hometowns can provide. It’s the place they make their home when they’re unafraid to walk the paths of their parents—or when they have no other choice. Villains abound, and if Lemuel Drinkwater—the cheating, cross-border smuggling baddie of the novel—is any indication, few people win in Cataract City unless they’ve stacked the cards in their own favour. There are no stand-out heroes here, except those destined to be unmasked, like Bruiser Mahoney, a wrestler Dunk and Owe once admired: “I’m a drunk and a clown … Be like your fathers,” he tells them. “Work a solid job. Build a family. Smelling like a cookie’s a small price to pay for ordinary happiness.” This advice, from a man formerly described as “perfect,” is the first of many premonitions that these boys will not grow into the men either of them expect to be. The novel opens with Dunk’s release from prison and his return, with some ambivalence, to a hometown described as possessive: “Nothing that grows here is ever allowed to leave.” He rekindles his friendship with Owe, now a member of law enforcement who may or may not have been responsible for Dunk’s eight-year stint in Kingston Penitentiary.

"Even linguistically, Davidson’s characters are constantly negotiating their place in a fringe town that requires its inhabitants to also exist at the fringes of humanity."

If you learn nothing more about Davidson’s novel, you might mistakenly discount its premise as well-charted ground. However, below the surface of the typical “men on opposite sides of the law who rely on one another for survival” story, there are well-drawn, relatable, and atypical psyches, making it easy to forgive some of Davidson’s heavy-handedness. Human-canine comparisons accrue quickly and, though effective, they come so often that each time a dog ambles into the scene, you wonder which human frailty it’s meant to metaphorize. Whether Davidson intends it or not, the reader (that is, the Canadian reader) also groans a little (a lot, actually) when his characters are lost in the wilderness, not once, but twice. Together, these sequences account for nearly 100 beautifully written, yet drawn-out pages—somewhat excessive for a book of nearly 400. Since the whole of the novel is told retrospectively, the reader feels little suspense in these moments of waiting, not to find out if Davidson’s characters survive, but when and in what form their salvation will come. It’s obvious their foray into the wilderness will be of some thematic consequence later in the novel, but as the boys become less enamoured with the great outdoors on their third day of hunger, the reader too becomes less enthusiastic about the robust prose, hoping instead for a stark, declarative sentence to bring the scene to a climax—“they see a cabin,” or “they see a streetlamp,” full-stop. Even so, it’s irrefutable that the writing is masterful, if sometimes unlikely in the mouths of Davidson’s characters. Dunk’s narrative voice is sometimes uneven, alternating between articulate and colloquial, though Davidson does his best to justify his eloquence with “correspondence English classes.” At one point, Dunk describes how “my nose had never been broke, and my cheeks neither. My hands were another matter. We’re talking a pair of ugly bust-up mitts.” With conveniently superior language, he aspires to a life lived at “lower wattage,” joining the men in Cataract City whose “faces were wrecked from drink, or just the years piling up with brutal math.” Even linguistically, Davidson’s characters are constantly negotiating their place in a fringe town that requires its inhabitants to also exist at the fringes of humanity—making a living or stealing a living, saving a life or extinguishing it. With this belief in mind, Owe asks, “who are any of us really? … Sometimes what we are, or who, or—it’s just a question of circumstance you know? How far would you go? How much does it mean to you? How much do you need it?” If ever Davidson’s language shines too beautifully, he ramps up the brutality, though the violence is considerately written, always linked to an emotion or deep conviction:

The man brought one world-eating fist down into my face and everything exploded in starlight riots, hollowness threading down my jaw as if nothing anchored it anymore: my face was only a mask, the contents of my skull obliterated … His hands came up in search of blood or pity, I couldn’t tell. And I reached down inside, crushed that tiny voice in my chest pleading for mercy, cocked my fist and drove it into the guy’s face again.

Throughout the novel, as Owe and Dunk commiserate the acts of violence and misfortune which deprive them of their respective chances at happiness, they attempt to account for their life trajectories, those accumulations “of bad habits and bad luck”—how one man found himself in Cataract City, a figurative prison, and the other, inside a literal one. The novel is poignant, due largely to the scope of experience Davidson provides us; we are able to vacation in Dunk’s and Owe’s winding past as we so often do in our own, attempting to discover clearer pathways of understanding, hoping they will guide us to some semblance of self-discovery. On their own, the external obstacles Davidson erects are sufficient to explain the sort of men Owe and Dunk have become, yet he carefully balances the defeats which assault them from the outside with the self-defeat they harbour within.

"The prison that snares us best, according to Davidson, is the city of our birth."

Cataract City is analogized as a “knot of venomous rattlesnakes balled up under a rock. If one of us made a break for daylight the ball constricted, every one of us tightening, pulling that rogue snake back in.” But Davidson also gives some ownership to the limitations of Dunk’s, Owe’s—and by extension, the reader’s—psyches. He points out that, in many ways, we fall victim to our own choices; our lack of self-belief and, as is often the case, our refusal to act in our own best interests. The seemingly uneventful periods in Davidson’s novel, then, shape the outcome of his characters’ lives with as much influence as the more dramatic events. Dunk’s eight years in prison are spent marking the passing of time with “a goofy hat as Dick Clark announced the ball drop on TV. I awoke to each new day and let it carry me through a familiar routine. I sat at the same table for meals.” Owe loses just as many years:

I’d go home to the shoebox apartment, the unmade bed, empty bottles queued along the windowsill like giant bullets in want of a revolver, and the dripping faucet that I couldn’t quite rouse myself to fix. Every so often I’d pick a convenient start point—New Year’s Day was popular—and say: Time for a change, Stuckey … For eight years I drank too much, nursed a sullen emptiness and waited for something to change, all the while knowing this was the single biggest lie people told themselves: that change will eventually come on its own if you wait patiently enough for it.

Davidson points to the experience of “time wasted” with painful accuracy, unavoidable and real for both the criminal and the law-abiding citizen. Both men must hold themselves to account for the years they’ve lost while awaiting some upswing—financial stability, fulfilling employment, a more peaceful relationship with their spouse or parent, and the motivation to bring these and other wishes to fruition. Straddling crime and literary fiction, Cataract City successfully maintains its momentum without sacrificing the importance of this deep introspection. Davidson succeeds in making dog-racing, dog-fighting, bare-knuckling boxing, and contraband-smuggling accessible to the experience of the common reader, demonstrating that we are all at risk of the same prison: one designed from our own self-negating choices. As Drinkwater says, “A good dog only loses because his body can’t compete. That’s the difference between greyhounds and men—a man’s mind’ll fold, even if he’s got all the tools to win.” Perhaps most evocatively, Davidson writes, “Man takes on world, world wins, but you get to write it over the course of a lifetime.” Davidson’s novel succeeds in drawing our attention to the struggle each of us must confront as we enter adulthood—not man against man, or man against nature, but man against a multitude of selves: the child he can no longer be, the man who exists beyond his own reach, and the man he’s inexorably becoming; all three, haunting the place we once called home. The prison that snares us best, according to Davidson, is the city of our birth, “the softest trap imaginable.” The novel strikes a chord with those of us who, at one time, longed to outgrow the place that helped shape us. Inevitably, we find ourselves returning to the hometowns that released us into the world without ceremony or celebration, just as the prison releases Dunk, and just as childhood gives way to adulthood, unsure of what, if anything, we are meant to learn.