Every City is Every Other City by John McFetridge

 

I've been waiting for a new John McFetridge novel to come out for awhile now, and this one was definitely worth the wait. Just for starters, the main character Gord Stewart is a location scout for the booming Toronto movie industry (this is not set during the pandemic), who also happens to do a little unglamorous P.I. work on the side, both of which convincingly open doors into a couple of different worlds. A coworker, knowing that he has a private detective license, asks him to help figure out what happened to her missing uncle. Reluctantly, Gord takes on the challenge, knowing that he probably won't get anywhere. As is often the case with his more self-deprecating assumptions, he is wrong.

There is a sad statistic underlying the case of the missing uncle, which Gord learns early on. Single, middle-aged, white men without a college degree have the highest suicide rate of any group, followed by married middle-aged white men without a college degree. As this very much looks to be the case with the missing Kevin, Gord thinks he's on a wild goose chase, but little things aren't adding up.

In order to get some help from a big investigation firm with a lot of heft, especially with the police, Gord gets talked into doing a favor for them, a pretty sordid one. But Ethel, an actress who quickly becomes the new woman in his life, pushes him ethically on what he's doing and makes him rethink the gig.

Gord sees the whole world in terms of likely locations. This, along with a running refrain that things aren't really like how they are in the movies (except that sometimes they actually are, which McFetridge exploits to comic effect) and of course the title itself sets up a world where everything is also pretending to be something else. You can see how these middle-aged guys, who seem to have lost a certain sense of purpose and identity, could end up being suicidal. And suicide as a force in society comes up several times in the course of the story, including a litany of all the people in the entertainment industry who have taken their own lives.

Despite this, this isn't a bleak book. McFetridge's dry, understated humor counters that and Ethel, the love interest, is vibrant enough to inject whatever vitality is needed into Gord's life. And his dad, who he lives with out of inertia, is especially good at puncturing one-liners, often just as he's walking out of the room.

One of McFetridge's great gifts is just to notice things that other people haven't, often on a sociological level. As the rest of us hurry along and get caught up in things, it's nice to have his reflective voice reminding us that the world may not be exactly as we think it is.

I hope he's hard at work on the next one.