Chemical Valley
David Huebert
Biblioasis, 2021
Review by Peter Szuban
“What you might find, if you were handling a dead pigeon, is something unexpected in the glassy cosmos of its eye: a dark beauty, a molten alchemy.”
The characters in David Huebert’s new short story collection Chemical Valley live in a world that has been molded and shaped by neoliberalism and the oil industry—where the vulnerability of their bodies is constantly being subjected to a vague calculus that includes economic precarity, shifting personal relationships, and a natural environment lurching towards catastrophe. It’s a situation that could easily elicit nihilism, doom, and mourning—a kind of eco-grief—and yet, the various stories in this collection strive and yearn towards a sublime toxicity that finds beauty amidst the debris, and accordingly, in the lives of its inhabitants.
Take the opening story, which also lends its title to the collection. Set in gritty Sarnia and the shadow of its sixty-two petrochemical refineries, the protagonist, nicknamed Jerr, juggles his commitments to family and coworkers while tending to a secret in his basement. He lives with a fatalism and a perverse sense of community that reinterprets the harshness of the environment’s conditioning of the human body as proof of solidarity and courage. The mood is one of a grim determination subsidized by oil, or put another way:
The strange pride among people who work the plants: spending-your-oil-salary-on-Hummers-and-motorcycles-and-vacations-to-Cuban-beaches-with-plastic-cups kind of pride. A live-rich, live-hard kind of pride. The yippee ki yay of knowing that Sarnia is the leukemia capital of Canada and the brain cancer capital of Canada and air pollution capital of Canada but also knowing that oil is what you know and what your parents know and all your family’s in Lambton County so what else are you going to do but stay.
All those hyphens highlight the totality of the worldview at the plant by linking all these disparate words together to the oil salary that each person makes. It’s a pride that suggests a heroic struggle against nature and circumstance, that equates wealth with virtue, disadvantage with resilience, and pain with self-worth. It’s the “yippee ki yay” of individualist frontiersmen like John McClane from Die Hard, action heroes who put their bodies through extreme physical suffering for the benefit of themselves and their communities. It’s a shared experience of oil production and all of its hardships that strongly binds the otherwise atomized individuals into a community. And it’s overwhelmingly transactional; the suffering inflicted on the body converts into a benefit for the community, which in Jerr’s case centres on providing economic resources for his family.
It’s this binding of individuals into a community through suffering that constitutes the sublime toxicity of the stories in this collection. To break sublime toxicity down into its two components in the opening story, toxicity is the suffering inflicted by the oil refinery plants on everyone in the vicinity, while the sublime is the community that forms around the oil refinery plants, thanks in part to economic remunerations, but also to the shared experience of oil being the only thing that you—and everyone else in your life—know. In a way, the intersection between suffering and the forging of social bonds keeps Jerr returning to the basement where he keeps the corpse of his mother: the life and death of his mum, as well as his relationship with her, are inexorably linked to his firsthand knowledge of oil and all it produces. There is doom in both the shortened lifespans of the characters on account of health complications, and in the impact that the oil refinery plants have on the natural environment, creating a planet that is becoming increasingly inhospitable to humans through pollution, if not entirely to other lifeforms. Consequently, oil produces the conditions for Jerr’s relationship with his mum as well as its material destruction.
Which is a bit of a bummer, all things considered.
Even stories that don’t ostensibly share the oil refinery plant milieu, like “Six Six Two Fifty,” feature this dynamic of suffering and community building. In “Six Six Two Fifty,” the unnamed protagonist fills the role of enforcer for his hockey team, visiting violence upon opposing players and exposing his own body to violence in return through fighting. The story is narrated with a style that emphasizes the violence of this life. He is “a giant fist with skates on,” whose “only real skill is knuckling jaw,” and his membership to the team, along with his paycheck to support his daughter, is conditional upon his mastery of force and his willingness to put his body on the line.
Although the unnamed narrator aspires to play more minutes on the ice and actually handle the puck, his coach restricts him to his perennial role as a goon, suggesting the narrator’s lack of agency over his situation. This is a characteristic shared by many of the other characters in these stories, and I was often confronted with a certain fatalism myself about their conditions. After all, the hockey player’s relationship with his girlfriend Stacey is undermined by the violence on the ice, and he risks permanent injury every time he plays. Though dangerous, it’s this way of life that sustains his daughter and himself.
But this doesn’t make his life, or any of the other characters’ lives, devoid of beauty. There are moments throughout the stories when characters achieve either understanding or an impression that gestures towards something beyond their material conditions. I don’t mean something religious, but more an unexpected beauty through connection to a broader community that dovetails into the sublime. This version of the sublime is dependent on toxicity as it exists in the stories, but it is not the direct consequence of it, and may even exist outside of it if the conditions were different.
For instance, another unnamed narrator, this one of “Dream Haven,” works at a long term care home during the COVID-19 pandemic. She reflects on what care means to her as she watches a long term care patient named Jane get driven away by Jane’s grandson Adam:
I stand there on the edge of the hill, traffic whipping by and all the grass cut short, prim, perfectly contained. Watching Jane’s window roll up, the hatchback’s signal light blinking on, masks trembling in the grass. I would like to tell her about all the things we take in, take on, about all the taking in this care.
Although the “would like to” suggests that the narrator doesn’t tell Jane these things, I think the takeaway here is that the narrator feels a connection to Jane that isn’t predicated on the economic extractions of medical care. Unlike Dr. Spencer and Elizabeth Wettlaufer, whose ends are more about power and domination, the narrator feels that she can’t live without Jane, and the sublimity she feels in this connection finds its expression in the open-ended asyndetic prose. For the story finds value in this relationship independent of its material reality, and the asymmetric relationship between nurse and patient does not undermine or subvert this connection.
Huebert avoids the lurid or garish, instead opting for understatement and elision. This gives the stories a certain mysterious quality, and I think lends its characters a privacy that prevents the stories from becoming a spectacle for consumers. Huebert treats his characters with decency rather than transform their lives into a kind of misery porn. This too, I think, is the purpose of the many cultural references that enrich these stories—from Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills to the Octomom to Langston Hughes to Tupac: they suggest a rich inner life for the characters that connects them to broader cultural ideals and institutions. And this too is a kind of community—one that does not require the prerequisite of suffering to achieve solidarity.
Peter Szuban is a writer and occasional librarian living in Toronto, Ontario– a city built on Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat, and Mississaugas of New Credit land. He has an MA degree in English from Western University and an MI degree with a concentration in Library and Information Science from the University of Toronto. His work has previously appeared in the /Temz/ review.