BORED IS AS BORED DOESN'T; or, BOREDOM ISN'T AS BOREDOM DOES

an aunt of mine, the sister of my mother's that, per family lore, sailed fast and loose away from her parents on the first yacht out of the holy see, once cautioned me against the pitfalls of too much itinerancy. at the time, i was visiting her on a psychological convalescence away from my own parents at a cabin she owned in the woods in tennessee. it was the summer after my college graduation, and we spent the better part of our weekend together talking past and future plans over roasts and whiskey. addressing my proclivity for sporadic and impulsive relocation, my aunt gave me a piece of advice of the sort that an early twenty-something can only take from his mother's sister when he's shared with her most of a bottle of drank: "christopher," she told me, "there's no geographical cure."

that aunt no longer lives in tennessee, and i moved from the midwest to the west coast not long after that visit. but her advice was surely still sage, at least inasmuch as i remember it half a decade later. novelty and dynamic environs can be grand for self discovery, but don't expect to discover someone else.

and that's a sentiment very much akin to the wisdom that the mother of the unnamed protagonist in lee rourke's the canal imparts (in recollection) to him after a childhood attempt at running away. the son can't remember exactly what made him leave home in the first place, or most of what his mother said after he came home later that day, but one thing did stick: "there's no point in running away. never run away, all you find is yourself. there's nothing else to find." and it would seem from his actions throughout the rest of the canal that our protagonist has taken that to heart.

the canal is about boredom. more specifically, it's about embracing boredom -- or at least not being distracted by the things that we regularly use to distract ourselves from boredom. when not in memory, the protagonist spends the book sitting at a bench along the titular canal. he sometimes shares the bench with a woman. (at times he seems to want to share the bench with the woman more than she does.) they talk. and that's the 'looking good in pants' plot summary. you'll find plenty of analyses of those two's relationship elsewhere. to be honest, the boredom statement already felt too marketing tagline clichéd. i'd like not to wonder how many other reviews have opened their plot explanations with that salvo. it's generic and mundane, and, well, that's just boring.

the other critics can treat rourke's language, too. i haven't read rourke's collection of stories, so can't speculate on the idiosyncrasies of his voice in the canal. or i won't, at any rate. and anyway, the canal doesn't particularly present anything syntactically striking. not to say that the writing is poor, anything but. the prose of boredom, however, isn't as dry or as sparing as we should expect...but the jacket copy can tell you that.

more important is what presumes the boredom of the canal. in other words, what's exciting about lee rourke's boredom (everyone writing about the canal should get to wallow in the cleverness of that juxtaposition) is the contemporary significance of what got him there. rourke's protagonist sits at his bench and, literally, watches the world go by. and as the world goes by, he has time to wonder, a luxury that the passing world hasn't afforded itself among its many luxuries. we are the new urbanites. the gentrifiers. the designer vanguard of post-industrial lifestyle capitalism. and yet something is wanting. a good deal of something. it always is and has been, of course; and so that something is analogous to the dissatisfaction and ennui of every other generation of literary discontent, but not exactly the same; and significant because our crisis isn't for our want of purpose but for the impossibility of its realization. the promise of our creative uniqueness was sadly hollow. we are, verily, "nothing but here. endless here."

in that sense, rourke would seem to be nothing but a contemporary mouthpiece for an all too familiar trope of existentialism. and granted, the canal doesn't fail to evoke camus, genet, sartre in its discussion of violence and the isolated individual -- a theme set off by a dialogue between the couple at the bench on the motivations behind international terrorism (an element that felt uncomfortably too topical at first but finds its place in the whole). that dialogue then contrasts with the acts (active or recounted) of the characters themselves. but rourke's individuals are not dispassionate, or even detached. in fact, it's the desire to impart significance to their actions (or their disappointment at the loose motivations of others') that allow the man and woman at the canal to turn the familiar trope on its head.

one section of the canal is titled "weight," which can't but encourage comparisons with the similarly titled sections of the unbearable lightness of being, whose author, milan kundera, owes an undeniable debt to the (especially french) existentialists. but unlike in kundera, rourke's characters struggle not with an essential futility or the insignificance of "lightness," but with the gravity of an amorphous weight. in the canal, the march of society isn't the insurmountable monolith that it is for kundera. for rourke, existence is innately weighted, and boredom is embraced as a vantage from which to discover and confront real life. we're here and that's it. you might even get the best perspective on yourself when you stay put and actually have a look. just to chase a shiny new future isn't actually going to get us there. "never run away, all you find is yourself." and, sitting by the canal while a new london rages to build itself around them, rourke's characters struggle with the understanding that, indeed, there's nothing else to find. so why is everyone running?

the coots and swans on the canal are generally unmoved by other than their day to days, only occasionally occasionally disturbed by dredgers or a flying motor scooter. the rest of them, though, look to the tv. they dress smartly and conduct affairs. they expect great things out of steel and plate glass. and in that fragile high tower they know that they're special, and they fill their time so as never to be bored.

rourke's greatest success in the canal is, perhaps, in his elucidation of that phenomenon, his subtle confrontation of our modern obsession with fame. ironically, it's the same twenty-first century development that's promised us recognition for our store bought identities that also affords rourke's protagonist the leisure to sit by the canal and be bored by it all. there's a kind of love story, too, raised voices at times, and even some nearly melodramatic gallantry. but we've all read love stories, had quarrels. how boring. farcically almost, and for worse or for better, that's all there is. at one point, in another recollected anecdote, our man at the canal recounts: "it was at that moment, there on the cold pavement, that i realised i was ordinary and not destined for great things." not so the canal.