Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good
Page 29
And then, hm. Mariko? Matt. Listen, I’ll be back, but I have no idea when. It’ll likely be a while, and I’ll likely be a wreck. You said go towards the trouble, right? Tell Toto she’s a good girl …
Later. There are messages enough in this moment. The Shaolin daddy finding Hollywood rugrats. Matt cracks another Coke—live a little. The lights should come up again soon, things’ll get started.
Now? Now? Now?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for financial support during the period of this project.
Thanks to everyone at The Cooke Agency, especially to my agent, Suzanne Brandreth, who offered keen insights into early drafts of the book and found it a good home. Thanks to everyone at HarperCollins Canada, especially to my editor, Jennifer Lambert, for her brilliance and conviction, and to Alex Schultz, for backing us up with such aplomb. Thanks to Bill Gaston and Terence Young, who read an early draft of the manuscript and gently shared their fine observations. Various people offered me the benefit of their expertise concerning film and other matters: Robert Moyes, Alanna Wood and many others. Thanks to you all.
My wife, Sandy Mayzell, was, as always, a sharp and tender reader, unstinting in her faith and encouragement—it’s her companionship that makes this solitary kind of work feasible for me. Jonathan and Amanda Chesley, my stepkids, read drafts and smartened me up as best they could; my niece and nephew, Elizabeth and Jon Sarjeant, were a loving inspiration. My sister, Anne Louise Gould, was a cherished ally throughout the creation of this book, as she has been throughout my life as a writer. As ever, I’m grateful to my parents, George and Joan Anne Gould, for their unshakable support.
Many things that crop up in fiction crop up elsewhere first. Shortly after I’d completed the first draft of this novel, I became aware of two real-life stories that mirror Zane’s. The first is an AIDS video diary, akin to the one upon which Zane has embarked, called Silverlake Life: The View from Here. The film is by and about Tom Joslin and Mark Massi, and is co-directed by Peter Friedman. It’s a heroic piece of work. The second concerns a politically motivated drug strike, again reminiscent of Zane’s. Zackie Achmat is an HIV-positive filmmaker and activist who refused antiretrovirals in an effort to pressure the South African government into making such treatments publicly available. Coincidentally, he started therapy in August of 2003—the period of this novel—just shortly before the government undertook to reach that goal.
I am indebted to John Donnelly for his 2004 Boston Globe article on Kuramo Beach in Lagos, Nigeria, which provided much of the detail for Shanumi’s story. Inaccuracies and failures of imagination are, of course, entirely my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN GOULD is the author of two books of very short stories, most recently Kilter, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize and a Globe and Mail Best Book. His fiction has appeared in literary periodicals across the country and has been adapted for short films. Gould has written freelance non-fiction and has worked as an environmental researcher, tree planter, carpenter and arts administrator. He teaches in the department of writing at the University of Victoria and serves on the editorial board of The Malahat Review.
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A NOTE ON THE TYPE
This book is set in Janson, named for Dutch punch-cutter and printer Anton Janson. Research in the 1970s and early 1980s, however, concluded that the typeface was in fact the work of a Transylvanian punch-cutter named Miklós Tótfalusi Kis. Kis traveled to Amsterdam in 1680 to apprentice under Dirk Voskens and produced a roman text face there. Based upon this original, Linotype Janson was cut in 1954 under the supervision of Hermann Zapf. Linotype’s modern digital version was prepared in 1985 by Adrian Frutiger based again on Kis’s originals and Zapf’s machine version. Janson shows strong influence of the Dutch Baroque typefaces.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 2010 by John Gould.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40038-1
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
First edition
The Quest for Unity by Étienne Klein and Marc Lachièze-Rey; translated by Axel Reisinger; 52w from pp. 101–102.
By permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
www.harpercollins.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Gould, John, 1959–
Seven good reasons not to be good / John Gould.
ISBN 978-1-55468-632-2
I. Title.
PS8563.O8446S48 2010 C813’.54 C2010-900716-6
RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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