Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

by Zsuzsi Gartner

From an emerging master of short fiction and one of Canada's most distinctive voices, a collection of stories as heartbreaking as those of Lorrie Moore and as hilariously off-kilter as something out of McSweeney's. In Better Living through Plastic Explosives, Zsuzsi Gartner delivers a powerful second dose of the lacerating satire that marked her acclaimed debut, All the Anxious Girls on Earth, but with even greater depth and darker humour. Whether she casts her eye on evolution and modern manhood when an upscale cul-de-sac is thrown into chaos after a redneck moves into the neighbourhood, international adoption, war photography, real estate, the movie industry, motivational speakers, or terrorism, Gartner filets the righteous and the ridiculous with dexterity in equal, glorious measure. These stories ruthlessly expose our most secret desires, and allow us to snort with laughter at the grotesque world we'd live in if we all got what we wanted.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Canada, Humor, Literary Fiction, Literature, Canadian Literature

216 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2011

About the author

Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the short fiction collections Better Living Through Plastic Explosives and All the Anxious Girls on Earth, the editor of Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow, and the creative director of Vancouver Review’s Blueprint BC Fiction Series. Her stories have been widely anthologized, and broadcast on CBC and NPR’s Selected Shorts. Better Living Through Plastic Explosives was shortlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize.

Zsuzsi is a long-time contributing reviewer for The Globe & Mail, and has appeared on CBC’s Canada Reads. A former senior editor at the now-defunct Saturday Night, she has received numerous nominations and awards for her magazine journalism, and a 2007 National Magazine Award for fiction. She has been on faculty for the Banff Centre’s Literary Arts Programs and has been an adjunct faculty member for UBC’s Optional Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Zsuzsi lives in Vancouver.

Author Representation: Westwood Creative Artists

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review has been revised and can now be found at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud.

Everything from 4.75* to 2* averages to 3.5*--but a whole book...?

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s difficult to say just how badly Nina is sweating inside her Olympic mascot costume, as even under ideal circumstances she is the Lance Armstrong of perspiration. If there were an Olympic medal for sweating, there she’d be, on the tier of the podium closest to heaven, her Athens-vintage Roots singlet plastered to her body, brandishing gold. She blames her Eastern European heritage, something hirsute and unfavourable embedded in her twist of DNA, combined with a childhood of pork fat, too many root vegetables, and polyester stretch pants. Yet there is something distinctly working class about excess sweat, which is why she’s never followed up on her mother’s suggestion (may she squirm in eternal unrest) that she have some of her eccrine glands removed. I secrete therefore I am, Nina liked to scoff. And really, is there anything more bourgeois than elective surgery?


***


Zsuzsi Gartner’s second collection of short fiction, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, is an intelligently worded piecemeal manifesto attacking faux artists and film industry wannabes; a diatribe against the dysfunction of IKEA-first family living and the pomposity of motivational speakers that prey on the weak-willed and ignorant; a cynical, ice cold fist to the heart of teachers that shouldn’t be, and angelic youths that never quite make it off the ground. It is also laced with a bitterness that betrays any sense of character or humour that might have been found within.

The ten stories in Better Living Through Plastic Explosives run the gamut from personal tales of hurt and disgruntlement, as exemplified in the mother’s rant of “Floating Like a Goat,” to esoteric examinations of humanity and the randomness of youth as seen through the detached eyes of angels in “We Come in Peace.” What’s clear from the first page is that Gartner is a deeply intelligent writer.

That, and she’s got quite an axe to grind.

Similar to the work of Douglas Coupland, Zsuzsi Gartner’s prose is disaffected, removed from all personal intervention. She writes not with heart, but with a scientist’s curious disdain for a problem with no clear solution. Instead of characters and motivations or arcs, the stories contained in Better Living Through Plastic Explosives are platforms, the individuals within mere mouthpieces for the author to point her finger at the Olympics, or the Vancouver film industry, and say “Ah, ah, ah, you’re wrong and I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong.” Which would be fine, if in fact she followed through on this threat. Again, similar to Coupland, a lot is vented at, complained about, and singled out for criticism, but no answers are given. These narratives lack individual tone or a sense of momentum, instead piling on top of one another like so many dead trees worth of anti-this-or-that propaganda.

The trick to this collection, however, is in Gartner’s ability to divert the reader’s attention from the book’s missteps through parenthetical asides, footnotes to footnotes, and a curiously large amount of unfortunate repetition—using similarly obscure terms and descriptors, or pulling from the same well of pop culture examples across the stories with no reason to think that they’re deliberately tied to one another. Gartner’s card tower of “look how fucked up we are” mini essays—because it’s difficult to call stories without character anything but—is a mess of misdirection and misanthropy, filtered through an intellectual’s thesaurus of adjectives and archetypes.

[Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

Greetings from Cleverville! Please enjoy these hipster rants on modern life.

[Maria Elena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zsuszi Gartner' s delivers a sharp collection of short-stories filled with dark humour and snark. At first I thought the stories were just bizarre but then I found myself chuckling at some of Gartner's outlandish metaphors or agreeing with the strange reasoning of her characters.I was sucked in and I decided to surrender to the wonderful weirdness of the stories.

A few of my favourites:

"Once, We Were Swedes" - a journalist who's now teaching at a college is drifting apart from her spouse. She reminisces about the early stages of their relationship when they used to talk IKEA to each other. Loved the glossary at the end of the story.

"Floating Like a Goat" - a young mother writes a letter to her daughter's grade one art teacher. A wonderful rant about stifled creativity and lost dreams.

"We Come In Peace" - angels are sent to inhabit the bodies of five teenagers to experience the earthly senses. Divinity is no match for teenage hormones and high school drama.

This collection is not filled with happy endings and we wouldn't all agree with the characters' thoughts and actions (at least not in public) but that's what makes these short-stories a must-read, the opportunity to explore different, not-so-traditional views in a fun, entertaining way. If you are looking for the unusual, pick-up this collection.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rufus and Alex used to speak IKEA with each other, a language redolent with umlauts and nursery-rhyme rhythms. Drömma. Blinka. Sultan Blunda! It was lingonberry of another tongue -- tart, sexy even, in a birch-veneer kind of way. Their private lingua franca.

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives is a collection of ten short stories by Zsuzsi Gartner, and as darkly humorous social satires, each examines some aspect of modern (primarily Vancouver-based) life, and with the use of strange metaphors and quirky observations, Gartner continuously suggests and then subverts a lingua franca with her readers. The stories here are a slightly uneven bunch -- which I more loved than not -- and I can understand that reading this collection will all come down to personal taste.

In the line-by-line writing, I found some images to be fresh and amusing: Rufus was looking at her too intently, his chopsticks noodling in the air as if painting a devil's Vandyke on her face. And some images made little sense to me: He smelled hairless, like peeled cantaloupe. I noticed early on that certain names, words, and phrases were repeated story to story, and I found myself seeking some significance in it. In addition to people riding Razors, wearing terry cloth shorts, reading Carlos Castaneda, and fondly remembering the nuns stealing the Nazis' distributor cap in The Sound of Music, there are multiple references to Annie Liebovitz, Pokémon, and The Simpsons. More specifically, in Once, We Were Swedes, Alex thinks of used vinyl shops as, "Places where middle-aged men in black concert T-shirts shot the shit with concave-chested kids who had rogue chin hairs and opinions about whether Muse frontman Matt Bellamy was really the late Jeff Buckley with plastic surgery", and in the next story, Floating Like a Goat, a woman writes that the great dilemma of her life was to decide, "to be an artist or be a muse?". In We Come in Peace, the pot-smoking angel says "The Dude abides with me", and in the next, the titular Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, Lucy thinks of her husband, "It's all hakuna matata with him, her own Bobby McFerren and Jeff Lebowski in one loving spoonful." (These examples might sound like I'm stretching to find connections, but they were everywhere.) Most stories have characters with mullets or faux-hawks, everyone seems to live on a cul-de-sac, and if there is deeper meaning at the end of this trail of breadcrumbs, it was beyond me (and slightly distracting to notice the repetitions).

Men, in particular, are judged harshly in this collection (and I think there's no coincidence in the fact that goodreads reviews have substantially lower ratings from male readers), and particularly in the first story, Summer of the Flesh Eater, which I happened to love. What woman wants these feminised men, as expressed through their cooking?

Patel made his Lapsang souchong-smoked duck breast with pomegranate sauce. Kim made dolmades using grape leaves from his own garden. Then there was Karlheinz’s oyster foam-filled agnolotti, Trevor’s quail stuffed with raisins and quinoa, and Stefan’s saffron risotto with truffle oil and mascarpone. Marcus’s silky black cod with Pernod mole sauce (70 percent pure, fair-trade cocoa) filled the role of dessert.

Or what woman would want a man who reverts to adolescence (Once, We Were Swedes)? Who wouldn't prefer this?

Forget bad-boy musicians or beautiful vampires. I'm talking about the kind of man who turns his dirty dishes over and, when both sides are used, throws them out in a way that is both ceremonial and completely nonchalant, and has you utterly, utterly convinced that this is a "philosophy". A man who adds not one but three umlauts to his name for a devastating Teutonic effect. I'm talking about a terrifying and destructive charisma.

This strangely off-kilter collection is justified by this quote from Floating Like a Goat:

The point of art, Miss Subramamium, is in not meeting expectations. Ha! Yes, that is the point! I surprise even myself with this revelation. So Georgia, in “not meeting expectations,” is, in fact, at the top of her class. Art, and here I include dance, music, film, and belle lettres, is perhaps the only human activity where not meeting expectations corresponds with success, not failure.

And by this matching quote from an interview with the author:

"If you meet expectations, you're doing the expected, right? You're toeing the line. If you meet expectations, you're doing what you're expected to do, or what success is considered. But shouldn't you be trying to do something else? I'd rather go down in flames, quite frankly, than have a nice little book. I'd rather go down screaming in flames. You can quote me on that."

Gartner certainly doesn't "go down screaming in flames" in this collection, but she does take risks and that can be…risky. It worked for me, might not for you (especially, it seems, if you are a BBQ- and pickup truck-fearing male), and I can only rate my own experience.

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

In her new short story collection, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, Zsuzsi Gartner cuts a satirical swath through the early years of the new millennium. Everyone and everything is fair game, with Gartner's laser sights set on those who smack of entitlement or hubris. Whatever we now call yuppies and their older demographic successors are and apparently always will be up for grabs, and Gartner takes no prisoners in terms of mocking their houses and lawns, their dietary, career and fashion choices, their family planning and rearing decisions and more. Gartner arranges to mock and reproach them from diverse angles, sources and perspectives. She is also quick to point out that anyone with economic or social pretensions can become them in a heartbeat, and can be brought down a sharp notch or two as quickly and calamitously.

Earthy and quirky comeuppances come to the proud and prissy from everyone from a lusty, barbecue-loving redneck, to another variant of tattooed white trash in a bass-thumping muscle car, to a disquietingly media savvy native elder destined for bespoke suits (with ambitions to become the First Nations Ivan Reitman, don't you know). The range of characters marching through Gartner's dizzying stories is breathtaking, not without their piquantly realistic and emotional moments, but ultimately verging on cartoonish, with a didactic, Coyote versus Road Runner sense of who will prevail and why.

So, fleeting jabs aside, if we're not really meant to wholly and realistically identify with any characters or situations in these stories, what is Gartner trying to achieve with this collection? Is it pre-apocalyptic magic realism, post-apocalyptic surrealism or some other variant of an otherworldly, off-kilter, something-is-not-quite-right-here rising tide of dread of apocalypse in progress, vaguely reminiscent of DeLillo's White Noise? If it's any of those, she often overshoots that effect, sometimes grievously. Are we just being lectured at in an over-the-top, albeit highly imaginative fashion?

But then again, something stirring happens when you breathe and digest each story, and set the entire collection down. Weeks later, images and scenarios that seem overwrought as you're reading them have distilled down from a headlight glare to a haunting, still potent glow after the fact: adopted Chinese daughters tiptoeing grotesquely across the starlit snow; a couple rapidly growing apart by heading in opposite Dorian Gray-esque directions; suburban housewives happily squatting like cavewomen around a fire pit; a bewildered but determined movie producer in sullied designer trousers struggling through the West Coast rainforest; most memorably of all, the final roar of a car approaching that will exact a harsh but symmetrical revenge.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barely controlled energy propels these short stories. Sharp, fast jabs then wild arcing swings.
The first story, "Summer of the Flesh Eater" was my favourite. The story is told from the perspective of one of the pretentious neighbours who really doesn't have any insight into their snotty-ness, as if their thinking and attitudes are the default position against which the others are measured. The suburban locals refer to one of their neighbours as ‘the Truck Guy’ or ‘Lucy’ (as in missing link). His passion is cars. He likes his meat, as evidenced by the slabs of steaks, ribs, chops at his bbq party, for which 'he eschewed terms like “well-marbled” in favour of “nice and fatty, smacking his pal down soundly on cuts he deemed particularly "bodacious" '. He speaks colourfully “in a dialect Patel, our own Henry Higgins, recalls as “Thunder Bay, 1977.” [that is so bang-on perfect] He moved in to the neighborhood on Canada Day, with a u-haul hitched to a silver Camaro. “He wore what’s commonly referred to as a muscle shirt but what some would call a wife beater.” They “hadn’t seen a grown man in cut-offs that tight since Expo ’86. (We later had a spirited debate about whether his was in fact a conventional mullet or ersatz hockey hair.)”
“Afterwards, he sat down on his new front steps and drank beer straight from the can, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, exaggeratedly rotating his shoulders as if attempting to recalibrate himself. “

This guy is so pegged! And so are his snotty pretentious neighbours who regard him as a specimen; they knew that such men existed but had never had a chance to observe one in such close proximity.
She writes of the nearby rendering plant “The congealed odour of pyrolyzed animal parts would enter the cul-de-sac and then just hang there, as if snagged on a hydro line.”

Zsuzsi Gartner's writing is witty, funny, angry, and sometimes ethereally weird. She smiles when she bites. She sees what is right in front of us, and then presents it to us in a way that is new and fresh.

[Leigh Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic collection! Gartner has an incredible imagination and a really interesting style. There are several themes and motifs running through the stories, including a sense of creeping urban decay and decrepitude, which is fascinating to behold given the Vancouver setting of the pieces.

If you live in Vancouver, you might find yourself looking a little differently at civic politics, architecture, development, and more.

This is a great collection, and one to which I'll return again and again, I'm sure!

[Luke · Rating 1 out of 5]

But here the victims are people of means, not the already downtrodden, so the notion that they're being either cosmically punished or held up as "a warning to us all?" (Vancouver Sun editorial, October 16, 2006) is debated in the mainstream media by pundits with straight faces.

Way back when in my GR career, I was part of a group called 'Bookish' that sadly disbanded some time ago. What I didn't realize then was how much the group focused on newly published Canadian lit, which is why I still have various 2011-2013 Canadian lit hanging around my shelves, evidence of a more receptive, albeit less self-aware taste, one of which is this. Much as I am wary of the phrase "hasn't aged well", I have to bring it out now because these stories all read like little more than various collated rants ripped from a blog posts and plumped up into wannabe satires that come off less scathing and more rebel without a cause. Having recently finished Everett's Erasure, I know that I'm still receptive to satire when done well. In contrast, what is collected here seems to operate on the base assumption that protesters and terrorists function purely out of bureaucratic frustration, which makes for characterization that can't make up for the shoddy satire, as the author seems to be bent on doing nothing more than offending absolutely everybody.

It was the year the enterprising homeless constructed ad hoc villages of tidy huts from purloined election signs. The colorful little houses lined the cut at both ends of the Terminal Street Bridge. The design world took notice, with the San Francisco-based architectural magazine Dwell running a photo essay with text by Toronto's latest public intellectual. "These intelligent spaces represent design that fully integrates the residents' ideals and values with their needs. Like the yurt and the Quonset hut, the 'signage-home' or 'Sigho' will no doubt evolve well beyond its origins, co-opted by those with a discerning eye for the frugality and transportality of the design." He supplied the requisite Walter Benjamin quote from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and ended with some McLuhanesque wordplay.

That quote up there represents the best of what I imagine Gartner was attempting to get at. The best satire is one that takes the existing absurdity of a situation with an underlying menace and extending it juuuust enough for people who don't already obsess over such diabolical implications sit up and stare. The short story that contained it, 'Once, We were Swedes' was probably the strongest for it, but honestly, I couldn't find any sort of concept, whether character or driving analysis of a socioeconomic construct, to attach myself to during all of the narratives, resulting in me being hurled through various early 21st century laden references with nary a culminating resolution in sight. I found myself thinking of After the Apocalypse and, to a lesser extent, I Am an Executioner: Love Stories, all of them weirdly confabulated short stories, yet 'Executioner' pulls off a je ne sais quois in enough to leave both sci fi wonderings and non-holistic parodyings in the dust. There are certain remarks I could make, but as they're all negative, I feel leaving it at that sufficient to my reviewing purposes.

I've become more comfortable with rewarding one stars of late, and with this work, I do have to agree for once with the low average rating. I have nothing against politically tinged proclamations; rather, when phrased elegantly and deeply founded on humanizing integrity at every juncture, they can be wonders of ideological construction. In contrast, when someone has so many points that contradict each other at every turn, it's very hard to understand, stand by, or care about the overarching work, especially when said work is a short story collection. Gartner may have been serviceable in the newspapers, but texts require something that drives a reader to completion, and honestly, all that was keeping me going after a while were my own completionist ideals and how the short this work was in comparison to everything else I've been imbibing of late. Not the best way to remind myself of my early GR days, but at least this is finally off my shelves. A few fancy turns of phrase can't save what amounted to little more than a collection of passive aggressive binge rants.

We found it both interesting and disturbing that people's attitudes towards women and their bodies had changed so little since the days of Nebuchadnezzar II.

[Aaron (Typographical Era) · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of people say that I waste far too much time finishing books that I’m obviously not enjoying. They’re quick to tell me to do things like only give a novel “X” number of pages, the “X” being a variable number ranging anywhere from twenty to sixty pages, and if I’m not into it by then, cut my losses and start something new because life is far too short to waste time on horrible fiction.

I get what they’re saying, but I’m just not wired that way. When I start something, regardless of how bad it may seem, I want to finish it (and it’s not because I like to punish or torture myself). Everything can’t be good. Without balance it becomes next to impossible to understand what I like and dislike and the underlying reasons why. Reading the bad helps me appreciate just how extraordinary the good stuff is. At least that’s the logic I use to rationalize my habit and I’m sticking to it.

READ MORE:
http://www.opinionless.com/book-revie...

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quirky doesn't even begin to cover it. I was seduced by the title (after all, I'm only human). I have to admit that this book was way about of my reading comfort zone. It's wild, it's weird, the humor in intellectual and cutting, the ideas are wildly creative. No subject is safe from Gartner's unique and penetrating observations. Fans of Douglas Coupland, George Saunders and David Foster Wallace will feel the most at home with this book. While I am not one of those people, I found the intellectual challenges of this book to be refreshing and strangely fun. Go on, give it a try!

[Cian Morey · Rating 1 out of 5]

The End.

Oh, this is going to be fun.

OK, so Better Living Through Plastic Explosives is... actually, I don't know what the hell it is, so let's skip that bit. (Apparently it's a book of short stories, but, well... figure that out for yourselves and let me know when you've got an answer.)

First, the positives - the writing is sometimes funny. It's dark humour and it's really twisted and a lot of the time the jokes don't hit home because they're so carefully buried in unintelligible Canadianisms, but yeah, sometimes I laughed.

Right, that's the positives done.

These stories are crazy. Truly insane. They are the strangest, most bizarre, most outrageously nuts pieces of... fiction?... that I've ever read. At first I appreciated what the author was going for here, and I can see why others might admire it - she wants to think outside the box. She wants to push some boundaries and be unique. And yes, that's all well and good, but then she shatters the boundaries with a sledgehammer and loses sight of the box completely. There is no damn box. It just went too far every single time for me, she was trying too hard. It was so stodgy and mired in blatant on-the-nose effort to be "different" or "out there", so bogged down in this fraudulent air of the avant-garde or the moderne or the "post-neo-realism" or whatever the hell it was trying to be, that I couldn't even understand what was going on. It was just ugly. These are ugly stories. Just... why? Why?

But there's more.

This author is from Canada. I read it in the little biography at the start, nice bit of trivia. Then I read it in all of the reviews on the back of the book. Then I read it in all of the awards that she had won. Then I read it in the first story. And the second. And the third. And so on, and so on, and so on. I'll just make it quite clear here that Canada itself is not what I have a problem with, it's a lovely place, lots of beavers. But what I do have a problem with is the fact that Mrs Gartner here insists on, for want of a better word, ramming it down our throats, constantly. It seems there is no longer a universe outside Vancouver suburbia. The jokes are loaded with Canadianisms, the plotlines stuffed with Canadian custom, each sentence strangled with Canadian colloquialisms that cannot be understood by anyone else, product placement, name-dropping, reference-referencing, CHRIST ON A BIKE. All of this nonsense immediately restricts the readership because of how utterly exclusive the context of everything is. This in turn infuriates the readership. I felt as though I was always being reminded of how stupid and ignorant it was of me not to know Shopping Mall X on Such-and-Such Street. And if there's one person who does not like being reminded of how stupid and ignorant he is, it's me.

But there's more.

This author should not have a pen, because she doesn't have the faintest idea what to do with it really, apart from making a few in-jokes that can never carry a paragraph, let alone a book, on their own. But then, as far as I can see, the point of this publication is to verbally assault the rest of the arts world. Several of the stories, if not all of them (one called "Floating Like A Goat" springs to mind), solely exist to critique to death everyone out there who actually knows what they're doing, who deserve to put their artwork into the world, who make valuable cultural contributions. But no, Zsuzsi Gartner sees through them all, she spots the problems in everything and everyone, and she's going to tell us all what they are. She's going to tell us all about the pointless verbosity of the world, through endless footnotes of arrogant adjectives. She's going to tell us all about how the pompous people deserve to be mocked and shamed, through pompous rambling essays that show everyone that she knows what's what and that her way is the right way. She's going to tell us all about the great social issues and the state of the nation, by using 15-page metaphors about a woman in a meerkat costume to represent all our flaws or something like that.

I talked about the excessive bombastic rhetoric before (maybe Zsuzsi Gartner just doesn't know what that means), but here's a word that she may not have heard: Hypocrisy. If a dictionary isn't too antiquated for her, I suggest she look it up.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The word that keeps coming to mind to describe this book is visceral. It is a collection of short stories taking place in British Columbia, Canada, and every one of them is of a deeply urban setting and mindset. The stories are visceral, gritty, challenging, and ultra-modern. Some deal with the conflict of our cave-man ancestry making itself known in a posh urban lifestyle, one even has a language based on Ikea. But they all reached to a place deep inside of me, and I felt a need to ponder each gem, before moving on to the next.

Highly recommended!

[Post Hypnotic Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, this is a great collection of postmodernist short stories. Gartner's humour is pleasingly black. Get a taste by listening to the lead story, "Summer of the Flesh Eaters," in audio. A most entertaining listen, we would love feedback on the narration. Download the MP3 file or listen online at http://www.posthypnoticpress.com/page...

[Margarita · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some wickedly funny and/or clever moments - i.e. Ikea speak, but there aren't enough of them to keep the reader focused. She is definitely a sharp writer full of ideas to share, but these ideas are often lost in her dense, adjective, double adjective driven prose. A simpler writing style would perhaps have been more effective.

[Steve Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the stories were hilarious and super creative. Others were not quite on the mark for me. I initially wanted to use this in the classroom with ages 14-15, but I think it is better suited to an older (18+) audience, partly due to sexual content and pop culture references from the 80s and 90s. She is a vividly descriptive writer.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of the charm of this collection for me was that fact that it is set in an geographical area I know well. The attitudes, places and social commentary are what I have grown up with and I found it highly amusing to read about it even though I'm not sure I "got" the points to all the stories.

[Erika Robin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this one, but couldn't get past the first few chapters

[Cassidy Menard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved "Floating Like a Goat," "The Adopted Chinese Daughters' Rebellion," and "We Come in Peace," and will likely refer back to them as fantastic and inventive short stories to emulate, but the others missed the mark for me. If I connected with the piece, I was all in. But most of the time, I felt only that resounding sense of meh. It's strange that my level of enjoyment could swing so dramatically from one end of the spectrum to the other, but I guess that's the nature of short story collections. I also think people who've lived in Vancouver would gain a lot more from some of these stories than I, a non-Vancouverite.

[Phil Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst books I have read in a long time. I read reviews saying this was cutting, clever satire. Maybe it was just better in a small moment in 2011 when people were loving Coupland? Each story tries to close with some clever line and fails — leaving you confused about the attempt. I must have missed something here because all these stories are incoherent.

[Zoë Danielle]

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives is the second collection of short stories by Zsuzsi Gartner, who previous published All the Anxious Girls on Earth over a decade ago. The dark satire present throughout the collection often reminded me of Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, a novel I unfortunately did not enjoy. For example in "Once We Were Swedes", Gartner writes:

"It was the year provincial health insurance had started covering Botox injections and teeth-whitening technology for the disenfranchised."

Offering the same kind of dystopian culture critique and later even describes the woman as having "pillowy Jolie LipsTM". It is the same story which centres around a woman who speaks to her husband in IKEA slang, complete with a glossary at the end, she says things such as "Slabang" which means funny (alarm clock)- but I just didn't find the concept slabang. That was the problem I had almost instantly with Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, I simply don't find this kind of writing funny, and because the dark humour is almost by definition, emotionally distant, I didn't find myself connecting with the characters either. That's not to say I didn't enjoy portions or find them specific parts interesting, but it never got to the point where I was excited about the writing.

My favourite story in the collection was probably the very strange, "Floating Like a Goat", which is a letter from a mother written to her daughter's first grade teacher when she learns her daughter did not meet expectations in art class, "What I would like to focus on is your insistence that a drawing is not complete until the child has filled in the background." she writes.

In "Someone Is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of Amerika", motivational speakers hide out in the woods for reasons I could never quite discern but I believe had something to do with bioenergetics though I am also not quite sure what that is or what the characters connection to it was. The characters themselves have a variety of interesting names, from Cinders to Pudding, although if those are their actual names or supposed to be nicknames I don't know. The story is full of mentions of current technology as being outdated, old Nintendo DS, nanos, and the new new Conan O'Brien show, but to me it felt mostly like meaningless name-dropping- it provided context but it didn't emotionally connect or even make me laugh.

One glitch that really bothered me happened in the final story, the title on in the collection, "Better Living Through Plastic Explosives" about a terrorist turned suburban mom. I was reading an advance copy, so hopefully this was fixed in the finished edition, but the main character's name switches back and worth from Victoria to Lucy which was very distracting. Unless somehow I was confused and they are actually two characters, in which case the story was even more over my head than I initially thought.

The collection as a whole comments on modern culture, twisting things to the extreme and then showing the reader what the distorted view looks like. At times this was interesting, but overall, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives was just not meant for me. I have already read plenty of positive reviews and there is nothing technically wrong with Gartner's writing, so I can honestly say this was a matter of preference. If you enjoy the kind of stories I have described in this review and Gartner's dark sense of satire, then you are likely to have a much better experience with Better Living Through Plastic Explosives than I did.

[Alex Gregory · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only thing I took away from this book was that it was a self-masturbatory wank on the part of the writer.

Zsuzsi Gartner's "Better Living Through Plastic Explosives" purports to be a collection of short stories, but ends up instead as a challenge to any reader. Not a page goes by when some pompous drivel is listed, ranging from loathsome characters with no redeeming qualities and anecdotes that are so layered with witty asides that it's a wonder the author pulled her head from her own backside long enough to write low-key sentences.

This is an ongoing problem with the Scotiabank Giller Prize in general - the finalists and winners often resort to highly narrow subject matter that wouldn't be palatable to 99% of the general audience, and is so wrapped up in Canadian trivia that's ridiculously esoteric and incomprehensible to anyone without a Masters in local history.

Not only that, but there are a number of asides where the author shows her age by trying to work in anecdotes about popular culture, only for it to make the reader feel like their mother was referencing pop culture trends in an attempt to be "edgy".

Couple that with the perception that she apparently just dropped a flowery adjective in front of every single person or place without variation, and you have a book that is of no interest to you, dear viewer.

The only reason I'm giving this two stars is because I was able to make it through the first two stories (the one with the suburban neighbourhood and the one critiquing art from a parent's perspective) before I put it down.

I'd rather read James Franco's "Palo Alto" than this.

[Rob Slaven · Rating 2 out of 5]

As usual I received this book from a GoodReads giveaway.

I really wanted to like this book but I just could never quite catch my stride with it. The stories contained here are brief and disjointed in a way that fails to capture one's attention. Viewed in isolation the author is obviously good at their craft but somehow taken as a whole it's hard not to just skim over the words and realize only later that you've been reading for 20 minutes but not consumed anything the author had to say. In fact, the text blows by like a summer breeze and it makes it difficult to even formulate a coherent review. Nothing is more ample evidence of that fact than this rather incoherent bit of feedback.

Perhaps the whole thing would be better consumed in small bits over several days rather than taken all at once. The text is exceptionally tangled and complex so that generally means that one story a day is more in order. Sadly, the bits of this I did manage to catch are not interesting enough to motivate me to pursue that line of evaluation.

[Kendra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zsuzsi Gartner's collection is full of satire and desert-dry wit. At first, I didn't quite catch on to what I was reading, but as the first story progressed, and then the rest of the collection, I began to appreciate how cleverly Gartner pokes fun at how we live our lives, especially families in urban or suburban lifestyles.

There was a lot of literary fibre, so I found myself requiring a mental 'rest' after reading each story. I find that's often the case with story collections -- you get so invested in the story and characters, then it ends, and you need a few moments to regroup before diving into another new narrative. But I think that is praise, because it means the writer has created a perfectly self-contained story that the reader becomes invested in personally.

The collection is longlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize -- I think it has strong potential to make the shortlist.

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first collection of short stories I've read in awhile. Possibly the only one not read for school. There were some stories I loved (Summer of the Flesh Eater, Once We Were Swedes, Floating Like a Goat, We Come in Peace), some I did not enjoy (Mister Kakami, What Are We Doing Here?), some I couldn't even get through (Someone is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of America) and the rest that were just okay. It was interesting and in the end I'm not sure what to think. As a whole, I didn't love it, but I don't regret reading it. I loved the references to Vancouver, and she wrote some good character-based stories. I wished there was more dialogue. Some of them seemed rushed, some of them seemed incredibly draggy. I would probably read more of her work though.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contemplations on Canadian modernity through extended metaphors cum magic realism done superbly and artfully. This book proves the written word is a legitimate and visceral art like any other and can do far, far more than just tell stories or convey facts. Vague but precise, creative and mystical yet with its finger on the pulse of 21st century human beings and the society in which they live. Profound and deeply provoking in ways I can't quite yet voice. A book to ruminate on.

"Summer of the Flesh Eater" and "The Adopted Chinese Daughters' Rebellion" were my favourites. Among the best short stories I have ever read.

[beentsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

That was fun. I've been reading one of these stories each day on the way to work and one on the way home from work while riding the bus. Sort of a weird short story daily vitamin.

Some very odd characters and some even odder story settings and concepts. Really enjoyed them though, in particular I thought Summer of the Flesh Eater was amazing. A truly bizarre level of every day normal and outlandishly weird. Great story.

[Jacob Andra · Rating 2 out of 5]

If David Foster Wallace and George Saunders had a literary baby and raised it on methamphetamines, it might read something like this tour-de-force of maximalism gone awry that occassionally glimmers with something like relevancy or dark humor satire or insight if you can get past the mutant verbal appendages to figure out what the heck a given story is going on about. Why can't "rats the size of Whiskas-fed house cats" just be "rats the size of cats"? Would anything have been lost?

[Niya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Given the reviews, I wanted to like Gartner's collection of short stories. Her writing is tight, and pithy. The dystopia is Atwood-eqsue. If you live on the west coast of Canada it will seem familiar and jarring, but if you don't, it will seem inaccessible. While some of the work seems to flirt with more universal themes (families as tribes, art and creativity requiring a deeper hunt for vision) those are so buried in the local context that they can be difficult to extricate.

[Rhett Gentile · Rating 1 out of 5]

Grim and sneering with no clear alternative point. Just paper dolls knockdown caricatures of… the neoliberal elite, I guess, scraped from a Fox News op-ed? It’s good to know I should kill myself if I have a college degree, have children, or don’t have children, but it’s unclear what else I’m supposed to do or want.

I guess the prose is good? Mostly this book made me want to read something else, or perhaps go outside instead.