Book review: Once You Break A Knuckle, by DW Wilson

GRRR! If DW Wilson’s prose was any more masculine it would start scratching its ass and growing its own stubble. The short stories in this collection are all set in and around the small town of Invermere, British Columbia – a tough, manly place, no doubt, but at times they are so testosterone-charged it’s almost comical.

One character is described as “the kind of guy who’d either kill you in an alley or drag you from the pits of Hell”; another as having “the kind of hard cheekbones that could absorb their share of blows”; a winter’s morning smells like “brick and pale sunlight”.

This is a world where frothy coffees are referred to as “faggacinos” and a guy called Winston wishes he could have a tougher name “like Dick or Tom… a name that could torque a crescent wrench.” Poor Winston rails at the fact that he can’t shorten his name to something more manly. “Win, Winny, Winsy… A Man called Winsy would shave his armpits and watch foreign movies.” Eventually he ends up as Winch and life can move on.

And then there are the descriptions of hands. There’s a PhD thesis just waiting to be written on Wilson’s fixation with hands. Knuckles are broken, obviously, as per the title of the collection, which is itself taken from the title of one of the more red-blooded stories here, but hands often tell us more about characters than anything else. When an electrician called Ray is reunited with his friend Mudflap (both names of which Winch would approve) after several years out of town, almost the first thing he does is cop a look at his buddy’s digits. “They were the hands of a guy who no longer worked like he used to – not nicked and burred from splinters and construction yards, but still callused. A man never loses his calluses.”

In case you haven’t got the point already, Wilson’s world is almost exclusively inhabited by square-jawed labourers struggling to make ends meet and their “hick” offspring, who delight in beating each other “pulpy”. Occasionally a smart kid might get ideas about moving to the coast and starting a new life with the “hippies” in Vancouver or Victoria, but mostly they get sucked back into the intrigues of small town existence.

It’s telling, perhaps, that the most interesting character in the collection is a schoolteacher who doesn’t fit in. He introduces himself by saying, “I’ve never been good with my hands” (of course), and his lack of masculinity is felt particularly keenly because a) his father was a man’s man, “a heavy-duty mechanic who got his thumb jammed in the door of a Peterbilt Class 8”; and b) because his wife is more man than he is. She builds fences while he builds a heliotrope – a surveyor’s instrument – for his son and waxes lyrical about his hero, the 19th century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. Naturally, his wife walks out on him. What use is a man who can’t build a fence?

In small doses, Wilson’s pungent prose can be very powerful – indeed, his story The Dead Roads won the 2011 BBC Short Story Award. Reading 12 stories back-to-back, though, the musk is a little overpowering.

And then there’s the vexed question of authenticity. Invermere is a popular lakeside holiday destination. It boasts ten golf courses and is handy for the Panorama ski resort. A three-bedroom family home there can cost C$1.1 million (£695,000). If the people in Wilson’s stories find life such a struggle, you have to wonder why they don’t just sell up and move to the tropics.

• Bloomsbury, £14.99