Book #64

Stubby Amberchuk and the Holy Grail
by Anne Cameron

I picked this book up at a library book sale for a buck; I bought it, obviously, because of the title. But in retrospect, I'm not sure which part of the title interested me more: was it the idea that there could be a person named Stubby Amberchuk? Or the idea that said mellifluously appellated personage could seek out the cup of Christ? Having read the book, it has become a fairly significant question, because here's the thing: the parts of this book that could be put into a category labeled Stubby Amberchuk were quite good. The elements that left that category and entered into the realm of the Holy Grail were unadulterated hooey.

The story of Stubby is a nice little bad-childhood-rescued-by-love story; Stubby is the product of a shotgun wedding, and her parents divorce when Stubby is a few years old, at least in part because her lumberjack hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie-laden father, Dave, insists that his daughter be called Stubby and be allowed to wear the overalls and sneakers she prefers, and climb trees and wallow in mud puddles and play ball as she likes. Stubby's mother, Vinnie -- it is implied but never confirmed that her full name is Vivienne, and whether it is or not, the dramatic irony of a woman named Vinnie objecting to her daughter's nickname is, well, sort of sad in a train wreck/Jerry Springer show/barfly-in-a-tube-top kind of way -- prefers to use the name she gave Stubby: Sheilagh Amberchuk. Which sounds like the phonetic spelling of the action named by the final syllable of the family name. She wants Stubby to be dressed in little pinafores with lace and ruffles, and act like a little girl; she also expects her husband to act cold and aloof, as a husband should. When the lively Dave refuses to allow himself or his daughter to be treated coldly, Vinnie leaves and marries -- an assistant principal named Earl Blades. Perfect choice: he is aloof, cold, controlling, draconian; everything Vinnie thinks a husband and father should be. So despite the court order for shared custody -- or, more likely because of it and the pleasure Stubby gains from staying with her carefree father -- Vinnie and Earl kidnap Stubby and take her to a dusty, cold, empty hell on earth, many miles away from her hometown and father. She does manage to escape and get back to Dave, who takes her in and ensures that Earl and Vinnie will not be able to take her back to Vetchburg (Good name for hell, I think) but there is a problem: Dave was horribly injured in a logging accident, very nearly losing his leg. So he cannot go back to work, and he cannot live with the pain, so he becomes an unemployed alcoholic and eventually dies. Before he dies, however, Stubby becomes friends with the richest woman in town, Ada Richardson, and so when Dave dies, Ada takes Stubby in, encourages her love of softball and teaches her to play poker -- the wellspring of Ada's fortune. When Ada dies, Stubby is made her heir, and once she gets past some rough patches, the most satisfying of which is Earl and Vinnie's attempt to return to Stubby's life and take over both her and her money, satisfying because it is an attempt only, Stubby leaves to go seek her fortune, traveling as Ada did, playing poker professionally and being footloose and fancy free as Ada was.

That is where the trouble starts with this book, a little less than halfway through it. Because Stubby decides she is going to seek out the Holy Grail. No particular reason for it; she just feels she needs some direction in her life, and so she picks this one. She seeks it out by getting into a pickup truck and driving across Canada (where the book is set) looking in phone books for names similar to those of the Arthurian knights associated with the Grail. Why is she looking in Canada? Who knows? Why the Holy Grail in the first place, when there has been no strong religious feeling, nor the feeling that something in the world is amiss that was part of Arthur's search for the Grail. All that is amiss in Stubby's world is that she has lost her father and her best friend, and sadness seems a poor reason to seek out the Cup of Christ. But it's okay, because what are the chances she's going to find it through her Canadian phone book method?

Instead she finds a completely pointless and annoying fling with a would-be Tantric guru, and when she finally gives that up as a bad job and returns home, she finds a dragon. That's right, a dragon. No, there has been no hint that dragons might be a part of the story, no reason for there to be dragons, no reason for Stubby to be the one who finds dragons, no leadup to any of this other than a brief interlude when a whore who gave her dying father a last ride turns out to have been an archangel. Fine and good. The dragon grows incredibly fast, until it is able, after a day or two, to communicate with Stubby.

At which point it tells Stubby the history of the world, according to dragons. It is a history based on the idea that women are better than men and all civilization has been designed to oppress and control women so that the weak and useless men will be able to have an easy ride. It is heavy on male hatred and misanthropy in general, akin to the old saw about two people making a family, three people a country and four a war. Once it tells this sad tale, ending with how the more scientifically minded men managed to eliminate magic, mother-worship and therefore dragons from the earth, the dragon moves on to a tale of how a people go from freedom to enslavement through successive waves of conquest -- basically the story of the conquering and exploitation of the New World in the colonial era. And after the dragon tells that story, the book moves on to the tale of Royal Divine, a rather disgusting but charismatic and influential cult leader.

None of this has any place in this book. None of it, though it tries very hard, is clever enough or original enough to justify its invasion of Stubby's book or of the reader's mind. None of it is necessary to the story itself, since the remainder of the novel tells the tale of a girl who has a terrible childhood but breaks free of it through her own dedication and courage, and who returns to her hometown as a grown woman where she falls in love with Stubby Amberchuk. The ending of the book is actually quite nice, though the dragon's continued presence is still annoying, with its message that the magic has not gone out of the world, that it remains in all of the wonders around us like sugar and spice and everything nice. The second main character, Megan, is interesting enough to carry her weight in the tale, though the final connection to Stubby is both awkward and predictable, and, in the end, managed more by the reader's suspension of disbelief and familiarity with literary traditions than by any skill of the author; since I could figure out what was going to happen, I bought it. If it was less predictable, it would have been no less absurd than the emergence of the dragon from Stubby's woodpile. But it was predictable, and I bought it, so it worked, to a certain extent.

So what was with that part in the middle? Why is there a dragon in this book? The Holy Grail is never mentioned after Stubby gives up on her Tantric chauvinistic boyfriend, leading us to wonder: was he the Holy Grail? Was it sex, or the realization that sex does not mean love, that was the Holy Grail? Was it -- perish the thought -- the dragon? Is it Stubby herself, or Megan? We have no idea; it is never mentioned nor strongly implied. The history of the world, while clearly representing a satisfying axe-grinding for the author, has even less place in this book than the dragon or the grail; it does not give any final lesson about Stubby's life that we hadn't already learned, nor does it transition from Stubby to Megan -- the section about the cult of Royal Divine, even more pointless and unnecessary, serves as the awkward segue here.

It's like the author was making a movie at summer camp, and didn't know how to end the first part of the story -- so she just did the literary equivalent of a star-wipe and a big caption reading "Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch . . ." Actually, that would have worked better. If the book had merely jumped from one story to another, it would have been easier to handle. It seemed to me that the author had a story she wanted to tell, but it just wasn't working out; so one day she had this crazy idea -- the sort of thing that writing seminars teach you to do when you are blocked, the free association that gets you thinking outside the box, the brainstorm, the freewrite, the daydreaming. Which you are supposed to take out of the story once you get past your block. Anne Cameron kept them in, thereby wasting her good storytelling, and her readers' time.

So, if you are interested in reading a book about the Holy Grail, get one of those. If you are interested in reading about a child who survives a difficult youth and finds love, read any of a thousand books that do that well. If you are interested in seeing how badly an author can go wrong and still get published, read Stubby Amberchuk and the Holy Grail.