Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 7:30pm
Hart House Library
(7 Hart House Circle)
FREE

In collaboration with the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, Thomas Allen & Sons Ltd., and Publishers Group Canada.

Join us for an evening of the fiction of Ray Robertson’s new book What Happened Later and Jeff Parker’s Ovenman.

Jeff Parker’s uproariously funny debut novel follows When Thinfinger—skateboarder, pizza-slinger extraordinaire, and general ne’er-do-well with a slightly tarnished heart of gold—through his travails in a small town in Central Florida. He is a singer in a local band, but his band-mates only let him sing their name, “Wormdevil.” He has a girlfriend who dreams that he murders her and decorates their apartment with the skulls of small animals. His mother and stepfather haven’t spoken to him since he covered his arms in bad tattoos, and his newly surfaced Bio-dad sends mysterious letters full of lies. But after being fired as a cook at the local barbecue and landing a job at the hippest pizza joint in town, When becomes the leader of a disheveled crew and seeks a new nirvana in mopping floors, tossing dough, cleaning ovens, drinking too much beer, and stealing just enough from the Man. When’s philosophy is that anything worth saying should fit on a Post-It note and, following his beer-soaked nights, he learns to rely on nightly notes to himself to serve as memory. It doesn’t take long before things really heat up for Ovenman.

Poetic, poignant and clever, What Happened Later is a unique and engaging story of two lives that were forever changed by one book.

In 1967, only ten years after the sensational success of On The Road, Jack Kerouac was a physically broken, spiritually lost man. Late that summer, accompanied by his friend, Joe Chaput, Kerouac set out for Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, on a spiritual quest to connect with his French-Canadian roots. Predictably, the trip was a drunken, chaotic disaster, and a little more than two years afterward, Kerouac was dead.

Fifteen years later, after falling under the spell of the larger-than-life myth of Jack Kerouac, a working-class, small-town Ontario teenager named Ray Robertson embarks upon his own quest – to own a copy of On the Road. Rebuffed at every turn in his attempt to possess the elusive novel, Robertson nonetheless slowly begins to recognize the existence of a world beyond the factories, hockey rinks and suburbs of his hometown, while also beginning to comprehend his own French-Canadian heritage.

Taking its title from Kerouac himself – What Happened Later was the title of his proposed sequel to On the Road – this novel tells the story of what happened after the fame generated by Kerouac’s celebrated book and what happened next in the life of a young man infatuated with the legendary author.

Interweaving the story of one man’s slow decline with one boy’s coming of age, What Happened Later explores the ever-shifting dualities of myth and reality, loss and hope, innocence and experience, endings and beginnings.

Jeff Parker’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Best American Non-required Reading, Hobart, Ploughshares, Tin House, and other journals. He teaches at the University of Toronto and is the program director of Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Ray Robertson is the author of the novels Home Movies, Heroes, Moody Food and Gently Down the Stream, and a collection of non-fiction, Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing. He is a contributing book reviewer at The Globe and Mail.