Reviewed by
Kerry J. Schooley

The Sixties were such a marvelous time to step out into the world, as any first-rank Boomer (like me) will be only too happy to tell you. Entire summers were filled with love, at least theoretically, and not just any old love, but free love. "If it feels good, do it," because The Pill had detached the entertainment of sex from ensuing responsibilities. Sex was declared a revolutionary act, good for The Revolution perhaps, but an unfortunate politicization of personal behaviour. Even as Pierre Trudeau declared that the state had no business in the bedrooms of the nation, legions of interest groups from feminists to gay liberationists to social conservatives lined up at the microphones of public debate to declare that whichever way sex is being practiced, it's bound to be wrong.

As a revolution in societal attitudes, sex suffered a still birth. The relations in Matthew Firth's Suburban Pornography & other stories are furtive, exploitative and judgmental. After all, most sixties' revolutionaries had been raised in the fifties, and it's as hard to toss out old, deeply ingrained inhibitions as it is to resist temptation. Mommy smacked your hand when you touched yourself. You kept touching yourself of course, but you felt so lousy after, which was sort of redeeming in itself. If guilt and hypocrisy weren’t so useful, why would we ever have bothered to invent them?

Nobody writing in Canada today catches this disastrous, hilarious fucked up approach to street-level sexuality better than Matthew Firth. In the opening yarn, "Sheila Crawford Sucks Cocks", Firth's pubescent, post-revolutionary protagonist still learns about sex the traditional way, in the back alley from other over-excited kids. In "Missed Bus" the narrator stumbles upon sex and corruption in the public transportation industry. He's indignant. The trains aren't running on time and sex is at fault.

In the title story, "Suburban Pornography", Firth depicts a self-loathing tom peeping into his exhibitionist neighbours' desperate displays. Even as he uses them to satisfy his own obsessions, the narrator articulates his disgust in a judgmental commentary that is one of Firth’s more distinctive techniques. It's irritating, but nobody escapes this hell, Firth seems to say, least of all the reader.

We may all be cream pies, but there are layers to Firth's hell. The final story, "A Serious Deterrent" reveals an inner circle where the author's disappointed and disappointing hypocrites act on their judgements. The results are funny and ugly at the same time. Rather like sex itself.

Firth touches on other issues. "Giants" is a surreally compassionate story about the enduring emptiness resulting from a sibling’s death, though even here there is bizarre sexual imagery. So many of the book's stories imply a need for simple human companionship. If we cannot accept our own sexuality, Firth laughs then cries, how can we expect others to accept us for who we are?

Suburban Pornography & other stories is firmly anchored in Ontario, but, making a nice change, entirely outside the urban media centre of Toronto. Stories take place in Hamilton, where Firth grew up, Ottawa where he lives now and the smaller, roadside communities that connect the two by a northerly circuit. There is no provincial suburb more in need of a new Kama Sutra espousing a 65th Art: the apolitical position.

Reviewer Kerry J. Schooley is a poet, a mystery writer, a cynic, a nag and a pedant in Hamilton, Ontario.

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