Firth’s “gritty realism” follows in the company of his many influences: Bukowski, Selby, Burroughs, and Fante. He has been called the “Canadian Bukowski,” but such a title does little justice to the Buk or to Firth’s own unique voice and vision. The similarities they share mostly reflect the fact that both writers write graphically about booze, sex, shit jobs, and relationships that often end in violence. However, Bukowski romanticized the alcoholic (himself) in his fiction, and his humor and humanity is always apparent, even in his darkest prose. As well, Bukowski, despite his seeming hatred of other well-known writers (Pound, Creeley, Burroughs, Kerouac, etc.), was always comparing himself to them and saw himself as a Hemingway-like figure who would get his just recognition one day for his “genius,” as, thanks to his editor, Robert Martin of Black Sparrow Press, he eventually did. Firth, on the other hand, has no such pretensions, much to his credit. He is content to tell gritty stories, convention, editors, and the Canadian literary establishment be damned. As such, he is to be commended for his courage of conviction, and his publishers, Anvil Press, should be applauded for having the balls to publish his book.

Firth is a master of dialogue and gives an authentic voice to all of his characters. Though the stories are dark and often depressing, they also contain humor and at times great pathos. My favourite one was the first of the collection, ‘Sheila Crawford Sucks Cocks’ (if there were a Giller Prize for “Canadian Fiction that Features the Most Blowjobs,” Matt would surely win it). This story is told from the point of view of a young boy who witnesses some girls in his neighborhood servicing older high school boys in a back alley, fueling his own sexual fantasies. What lifts this story beyond horny adolescent longing is the way Firth skillfully hints at the boy’s innocence, despite his seeming macho bravado. We are drawn into his own embarrassment, longing, fear, and sense of sexual inadequacy. As he sees the two girls looking at him contemptuously, he feels himself “shrinking before their eyes.” Firth masterfully captures the feelings of all young males who are wrestling with desire. In this brief story, Firth’s depth of vision is most apparent, as we are made to empathize with the child’s plight.

This is less true of the other characters, with the exception of those in his story, ‘The Centre’. This is Firth the social critic at his best, painting a wide array of characters who are poor, lost, and hopeless, but courageous in their dignity to endure. This story blends love and tragedy masterfully, and he demands that the reader reach beyond his own complacent world to feel the one of destitution and despair. Gritty realism at its best. It is harder to feel a similar sympathy for the others characters in the stories, mainly because they display little or no redemptive qualities, though that may be Firth’s intent. After I finished this book and the title story, I thought long about why he had chosen this title for the entire collection.

And then it came to me: these stories were pornographic in the truest sense of the word because, like pornography, the viewer (in this case the reader) is left to be little more than a voyeur to the depravity of those lives that we all too often ignore, as they remind us of some vague discomfort about our own lives and society that we only sense, at best. Our discomfort with the poor, with our perverse desires, and with the hollowness of our relationships is what Firth wants the reader to acknowledge, and he does it devoid of sentiment or moralizing.

What makes ‘Suburban Pornography’ interesting (and essential) reading is Firth’s spare style, consistent voice, and the “truth” that his characters speak throughout these stories. It is a truth that we are uncomfortable hearing: the emptiness of sexual encounters, the hopelessness of workers doing dead end jobs, the vacuity and horror of lives lived behind the pretty curtains of staid suburbia. Matthew Firth, like the video camera that one of his characters trains on his neighbor’s sexual exploits, casts an unequivocating eye on the lives that we live and those that we dare only to dream about. His writer’s eye never loses focus and is unremitting in its gaze.

Read Matthew Firth’s ‘Suburban Pornography’. It will force you to feel uncomfortable, outraged, ashamed, and astounded. Above all, like all true literature, it will make you feel.

Zsolt Alapi was born in Budapest, Hungary and grew up in Europe, the U.S. and Canada, where he now lives. He is the former editor of the little magazine, Atropos, (winner of the Pushcart Prize) and has published poetry and fiction in various magazines in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, most recently in Front and Centre. He recently published a chapbook of stories, ‘Three Stories,’ (Mercutio Press, Montreal, Quebec, 2004). Zsolt teaches at Marianopolis College and Concordia University and has completed a Ph.D. at McGill University (Montreal) on Robert Creeley and Postmodern Poetics. He also edited a collection of poetry and short fiction, ‘Vistas’ and has written on the poetry of Pound, Williams, and Olson. To read a selection of Zsolt’s fiction on the showcase section of this site, click here.