Book Review: G.A. Grisenthwaite • by André Narbonne • 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters     Home Waltz by G.A. Grisenthwaite Palimpsest Press, 2020, 304 pages, CDN $18.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1989287644b Home Waltz by G.A. Grisenthwaite is about the trouble with transcendence. The novel is the first-person narrative of a fifteen-year-old living in an unnamed town resembling Grisenthwaite’s hometown of Lytton, British Columbia, who belongs to a variety of grafted and inherited identities. He is called Mosquito, Squito, Sky Bob, Mr. Bob, Qwóqwésk’ i, as well as a variety of pejorative, sometimes racist, epithets including “that.” The novel’s timeline is two days in November, 1973 during which Squito – the narrator’s preferred name – and his four friends, fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds, seek transcendence through music and sex. Music has the power to change their identities. “People only like us when we sing together,” Squito says early in the story. “When we sing they see us as a group, not a gang, but we always see ourselves as a group, not a gang.” In contrast, the transcendence of sex is individual – from boy to man. On the novel’s first night, their singing proves popular to an audience of high school girls from the nearby town of Ashcroft, but their cohesion does not outlast the performance. The group’s lives are essentially disharmonious, spurring the central conflict of the story. The second night puts them in close proximity of their dreams as they attend a concert by a band on the cusp of greatness. The success of Fast Freddie and the Frivolous Footnotes can be admired, perhaps worshipped, but it cannot be shared.    [  >>>>>   FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + André Narbonne {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]