Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson

“People were like that, though. Basically good until they thought they could get away with shit without being caught.”

A one-sentence summary for Son of a Trickster could go something like this: slacker boy spends his days getting drunk, high, and/or puking.

“The world is hard, his mom liked to say. You have to be harder.”

Having loved Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (one of the most memorable coming of ages that i’ve read in the past few years) I was expecting Son of a Trickster to be just as good. In this novel, Robinson once again showcases her ear for language, and the dialogues and conversations peppered throughout the narrative certainly rang true to life (in spite of how bizarre things get towards the end). The dialogues have this very naturalistic quality that I really enjoyed. The story however wasn’t nearly as satisfying as the one from Monkey Beach. While Monkey Beach wasn’t necessarily plot-driven, its characters and setting were incredibly compelling. Son of a Trickster instead doesn’t quite deliver on those fronts. Our protagonist, Jared, is a Native teen who doesn’t seem all that engaged with the world. He bakes weed cookies, gets high or drunk, has bad trips, and gets into scraps with the local douchebags. His deadbeat dad is largely absent from his life, his mother has some serious anger issues & is wasted a lot of the time.
The kind of scenarios Jared finds himself in would not be out of place in an episode of Shameless. Except that here the humor takes the backseat. There are some genuinely funny scenes and lines, but for the most part reading time and again about these dysfunctional characters getting drunk, high, puking, farting, being horny, enabling one another…it wasn’t all that fun. The narrative retains this fuzzy quality that makes it difficult to wholly grasp wtf is going on most of the time. Jared has a few odd encounters or experiences that he chalks up to being ‘off his head’ but as we read on we will begin to suspect that that may not be the case after all. But, by the end, most, if not all, of the odd things that occur earlier on in Jared’s story are given zero explanations.
There were also a lot of scenes and dynamics that left me feeling kind of icky. This was likely intentional but I, for one, could have done without it.
Jared’s high school ‘friends’ were grating, and some of the teenage jargon seemed a bit too self-conscious. I appreciated how messy Robinson’s characters are, there truly are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ guys here. The ‘supernatural’ element only comes in towards the end of the novel and by then I was a wee bit bored by the random vignettes that seem to comprise the majority of this narrative. Still, I found the issues Robinson touches upon during the course of the novel to be thought-provoking (abuse, generational trauma, neglect, addiction, the horrific realities and impact of residential schools).
While I’m not sure whether I will be reading the sequel to this, I am still keen to read more by Robinson (hopefully not all of her work has this much puke in it).

my rating: ★★★☆☆

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