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WORK TITLE: Shot-Blue
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://jesseruddock.com/
CITY: Montreal
STATE: QC
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
https://chbooks.com/Contributors/R/Ruddock-Jesse * https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2017/02/26/jesse-ruddocks-shot-blue-piles-up-prose-at-expense-of-plot.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2017052569
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017052569
HEADING: Ruddock, Jesse, 1982-
000 01142nz a2200241n 450
001 10435587
005 20170426073524.0
008 170425n| azannaabn |a aaa c
010 __ |a no2017052569
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca10780420
040 __ |a NN |b eng |e rda |c NN
046 __ |f 1982 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Ruddock, Jesse, |d 1982-
370 __ |a Guelph (Ont.) |2 naf
370 __ |e New York
374 __ |a Novelists |a Photographers |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
400 1_ |a Ruddock, Jessica Tomasin Anne, |d 1982-
500 1_ |w r |i Alternate identity: |a Bonaparte, Koko, |d 1982-
663 __ |a For musical works of this author under her pseudonym, search also under: |b Bonaparte, Koko, 1982-
670 __ |a Ruddock, Jesse. Shot-blue, 2017: |b title page (Jesse Ruddock) about the author page (b. in Guelph, based in New York; left Canada on a hockey scholarship to Harvard; writer and photographer)
670 __ |a LAC in VIAF viewed, Apr. 25, 2017: |b (hdg: Ruddock, Jesse, 1982-, variant: Ruddock, Jessica Tomasin Anne, 1982-; for musical works by author under her pseudonym see also: Bonaparte, Koko, 1982-) |u http://viaf.org/processed/LAC%7C1026C1386
PERSONAL
Born in 1982 in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
EDUCATION:Harvard, B.A.; University of Toronto, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, photographer, and musician. Formerly worked as a carpenter’s apprentice.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including the New Yorker, BOMB, N+1, Music & Literature, and Vice.
SIDELIGHTS
Jesse Ruddock is a poet, writer, photographer, and musician. She was raised in Guelph in southern Ontario, Canada. Growing up, she played hockey and spent her summers from age thirteen to twenty-three working as a carpenter’s apprentice on a remote lake in northern Ontario, where she built cabins and docks. After high school, Ruddock played goal at Harvard University on a hockey scholarship. After receiving numerous concussions, she quit playing hockey and switched to studying modern poetry and medieval meditation. Ruddock received her masters degree from the University of Toronto. Following graduation, she returned to her home in Guelph to play music. Ruddock’s writing and photography have appeared in The New Yorker, BOMB, N+1, Music & Literature, and Vice. She lives in New York, New York.
Shot-Blue, her first novel, takes place in an unnamed location in northern Canada wilderness and centers around Tristan. Tristan, a child on the brink of maturity, is described as being nearly feral, a boy who rarely speaks and prefers to be alone rather than around other children his age. The book begins with a focus on Tristan’s mother, Rachel, and the world she has created for herself and her son. Rachel, perhaps even more closed off than Tristan, keeps their lives isolated, working the land to survive and sleeping with a local man for money. The books suggests that Rachel is indigenous, and the land she fights to survive on should rightfully be hers.
When Rachel falls ill, Tristan is hired to work on a summer resort on the land, and the focus moves to his life and his interactions with those around him. Tristan does not seek out the friendship of the other boys and girls that work on the resort, maintaining the isolationist attitude he learned from his mother. This introduces a theme that recurs throughout the novel; is it necessary for those on the outskirts of society to integrate themselves into the larger population?
One of the girls working at the resort, Tomasin, takes a strong interest in Tristan. It is less that she is interested in befriending him and more that she is fascinated by his quietness and solitary demeanor. Once she has Tristan’s attention, she herself loses interest. As Tomasin fetishizes Tristan until he opens up to her advances, their relationship is a reminder of the reasons why Rachel and Tristan choose to exist outside of normal human interactions.
Terra Arnone in National Post described the book as “a serious and demanding book, contemplating widely in wandering prose.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote: “The novel
is a fine corrective to fiction that assumes that people are rational actors and that motive is straightforward or even discernible.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Shot-Blue “A moving, lyrical novel that explores the emotional pain of hardship on children.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2017, review of Shot-Blue.
Publishers Weekly, January 2, 2017, review of Shot-Blue, p. 33.
This Magazine, January-February, 2017, Jemicah Colleen Marasigan, review of Shot-Blue, p. 40.
ONLINE
Culture Trip, https://theculturetrip.com (May 17, 2017), Grant Gerald Miller, review of Shot-Blue.
Globe and Mail, https://beta.theglobeandmail.com (May 5, 2017), David Berry, review of Shot-Blue.
Hamilton Review of Books, http://hamiltonreviewofbooks.com (October 16, 2017), Rhonda Dynes, review of Shot-Blue.
National Post, http://nationalpost.com (February 24, 2017), Terra Arnone, review of Shot-Blue.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com (March 31, 2017), Emily Ruskovich, review of Shot-Blue.
Winnipeg Review, http://winnipegreview.com (March 13, 2017), Ben Wood, review of Shot-Blue.
BY JESSE RUDDOCK
shot-blue
book events
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articles
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about
Photo by Kristen Blow
Photo by Kristen Blow
Based in Guelph and Montreal
Author of the novel, Shot-Blue (Coach House 2017).
I grew up playing boys' hockey across southern Ontario and went to Harvard on scholarship to play goal. After racking up concussions, had to quit the ice, took to studying poetry, did a Master's at U of T, then returned home to play in some bands and make albums. From thirteen to twenty-three, I apprenticed in summer with a carpenter on a remote lake in northern Ontario. We built cabins and docks. At night I fished for pickerel.
My writing and photographs have appeared in the NewYorker.com, BOMB, N+1, Music & Literature, and Vice, among other places.
Represented by Martha Webb at the McDermid Literary Agency, Toronto.
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Jesse Ruddock
Jesse Ruddock author photo
Jesse Ruddock is author of the novel Shot-Blue. Born and raised in Guelph and based in Montreal, Jesse attended Harvard on a hockey scholarship, playing starting goal. After a series of concussions, she turned to studying modern poetry and medieval meditation, next completing a Master’s at the University of Toronto. From age thirteen to twenty-three, Jesse worked in the summer as a carpenter’s apprentice on a remote lake in northern Ontario.
The New York Times says, ‘Ruddock writes moments of startling intimacy.’ The National Post says, ‘Ruddock is a poet (among other things) and we can call her debut a novel or we can call it what it is: poetry.’ Her writing and photographs have appeared in the New Yorker.com, N+1, BOMB, Music & Literature, and VICE, among other places.
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‘Shot-Blue’ reviewed in the New York Times.
‘Shot-Blue’ reviewed in the National Post.
‘Shot-Blue’ reviewed in Publishers Weekly.
‘Shot-Blue’ reviewed in Kirkus.
‘Shot-Blue’ reviewed in Music & Literature.
‘Shot-Blue’ reviewed in Culture Trip.
‘Shot-Blue’ excerpted in N+1.
‘Shot-Blue’ reviewed in the Globe and Mail.
‘Shot-Blue’ excerpted in LitHub.
‘Shot-Blue’ excerpt in BOMB Magazine.
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Jesse Ruddock interviewed
by Brad de Roo
A native of Guelph, Ontario, New York-based Jesse Ruddock initially left Canada on a hockey scholarship to Harvard. Shot-Blue, her first novel (Coach House Books) takes a lyric approach to the story of an 11-year-old boy, Tristan, who’s forced to fend for himself in a harsh, unforgiving northern landscape after his mother suddenly dies.
Jesse Ruddock
Brad de Roo: Though Shot-Blue is your first work of fiction, you’ve published a number of articles for various American journals and literary websites. How does the process of writing in each field compare?
Jesse Ruddock: Writing fiction is something I do pretty much alone. It’s like dancing in your kitchen or room, you know? Working on some steps. It’s up to you. No one’s watching or waiting. It has to feel wild, a little out of hand, or I’m not interested. That’s fiction, but articles have rules. Each piece is a collaboration with an editor. There’s a word count and probably a contract.So there’s less improvising and little subconscious at play, but I still try to keep that stuff in there.
Shot-Blue,
by Jesse Ruddock
Coach House Books,
240 pages.
BdR: Do you note salient concerns between the topics and styles of these different works?
JR: The people I interview or write about may seem very different – a novelist like Eka Kurniawan or jazz musician like Avishai Cohen – but they share a rebel spirit. They resist lazy narratives and do things no one has heard or imagined before. That is, while keeping it soulful.
BdR: A rebel spirit also seems to inform many of your characters. Rachel and Tristan definitely embody rebellion, albeit in different ways…
JR: Yes, that’s true. Most of my characters are not interested in doing what they’re told. Not to say it’s easy – it’s not – but at least they know more is possible. The rebel spirit is also the creative spirit, and I love that.
BdR: Shot-Blue is published by Coach House Books in Toronto. Have you noticed any differences between the CanLit and American Lit worlds you’ve moved through?
I admit I went to a lot of literary parties in New York, but they were not very fun. No one would disagree.
JR: About five years ago, my heart got broken and I ran away from home. I had been living in Guelph, where I was part of the music scene. I played in bands, I owned a sound system, I threw shows. It was a huge party – we danced and danced. There was a lot of collaboration and very little bullshit. That’s Guelph. I don’t actually know anything about the Canadian literary scene. I do know something about New York, because I landed there, crying in my cereal, and I needed work to pay rent. I did copyediting and other scrap jobs. Eventually I ended up apprenticing after some of my favourite editors – of all time! – and I thank god for that. They were strict and generous. But that scene is hardgoing. The bookstores, like Brazenhead, Left Bank when it existed, and Word Up offer shelter. But outside those walls, nerves are high, I think, because the reassuring rhythms of a quieter life are nowhere. I admit I went to a lot of literary parties in New York, but they were not very fun. No one would disagree.
BdR: Was writing a novel always the end-goal of your immersion in literature?
JR: No, I just loved to read. As a kid I read mostly poetry, listening to its music with little understanding. I didn’t get it, but I didn’t care, because it was beautiful. I decided to study poetry at Harvard to follow through on this blunt passion. I soon realized I had no idea how poetry worked, and I had to call my sister Nora for help. I immersed myself with no goals, and to this day try to avoid them.
BdR: Your book dramatizes the lives of characters in a fictional North. Why did you choose to set your book there instead of a real place?
JR: Any lake or town, any city, has its history and ghosts. I wanted to make it all up. I also wanted the reader to feel free to imagine that Prioleau Lake was the lake they grew up on, visited a couple times, or dreamed of once.
BdR: Nature is almost a character in Shot-Blue. Characters must always interact with the extremes and limitations it imposes on their lives via seasonal employment, inclement weather, travel by lake, geographical isolation etc. Was it difficult to avoid making the characters overdetermined by the circumstantial strictures of such an environment? How does individuality persist in such a place, both fictionally and actually?
JR: You’re right, the lake and its weather push the characters around. But I like that. In any place in the world, people respond differently to extremes – it could be extreme weather or extreme boredom: both are real dangers. Our reflexes reveal who we are or want to be. Individuality might not exist – I think people are tied up in each other, especially family and old friends – but if it does, there is nothing like a rough day out on the water to bring your character out. It’s not just the north, either. Like I said, I lived in New York, and that city is pushy. If you are not rich, there are daily tests to get around, to get your meals, to take care. The way New York redundantly tests your nerves, that can define you there.
BdR: In you book, people are regularly tested, but women are often pushed to more limiting extremes. Were you seeking to confirm or dispel a particular take on gender or femininity?
Women are pushed to more extremes every day, everywhere. We are still fighting for the rights over our own bodies. That should be in my fiction.
JR: Not by design, not consciously, but that’s right: Women are pushed to more extremes every day, everywhere. We are still fighting for the rights over our own bodies. That should be in my fiction.
BdR: You sometimes employ animistic language to describe the objects making up your story. Boats, the water, the sky are painted as mysteriously alive. Are there any precursors – aesthetic or conceptual – in your use of such enlivening description? What appeals to you about describing the natural and human world in such similar terms?
JR: I see things that way! I have a serious relationship, for example, with my boat and motor. I love them and take care of them, and they take care of me. The water, the sky – they’re not things I see, take notes on, and use in my story. They never lull or repeat. I think they are alive. I don’t know them very well, but I want to.
BdR: Is there a sense in which this deep attention to and appreciation of objects is at the root of your creativity?
JR: Yes, but I have a lot of passion for people too. I think I’m all in.
—CNQ Web Exclusive, February 2017
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Ruddock, Jesse: SHOT-BLUE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ruddock, Jesse SHOT-BLUE Coach House Books (Adult Fiction) $16.95 3, 14 ISBN: 978-1-55245-340-7
Poverty, youth, and longing collide on an isolated Canadian island in Ruddock's searing debut novel.Rachel and her 11-
year-old son, Tristan, are alone in Canada's rugged north, working odd jobs when they can but most often isolating
themselves on a small, wild island where Rachel's father kept a hunting cabin. Trying to provide for her son, Rachel
begins sleeping with local boatman Keb in exchange for money. After winter drives them to a town on a neighboring
island, Rachel wanders too far from their small cabin and perishes in the cold, only being found when the ice on which
she died thaws and she is washed to shore. This leaves Tristan alone in a harsh world that doesn't show much
compassion to the boy beyond getting him a job at a resort being built on the island he and his mother once called
home. There, Tristan becomes just another nameless worker, all the while harboring a sense of loss for the place that
was once his refuge. When a young girl named Tomasin arrives for the summer, she picks Tristan out and develops a
crush that pushes both of them beyond their emotional limits. In haunting prose, the author has created a moving and
tense look at what becomes of children when they aren't or can't be cared for and must fend for themselves. It explores
the depths of human emotion and the limits we struggle to overcome. A moving, lyrical novel that explores the
emotional pain of hardship on children.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Ruddock, Jesse: SHOT-BLUE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357436&it=r&asid=2633c6bb4df67fd2d61eecf1d0f332f2.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357436
---
10/3/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507063023177 2/3
Shot-Blue
Publishers Weekly.
264.1 (Jan. 2, 2017): p33.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Shot-Blue Jesse Ruddock. Coach House (Consortium, U.S. dist.; PGC, Canadian dist.), $16.95 trade paper (224p)
ISBN 978-1-55245-340-7
Ruddock's complex debut novel set in Canada's north is a story of a tough but character-forming hardscrabble life and
of the deep bonds and rivalries created among people who live together far away from urban civilization. In the first
section, Rachel and her teenage son, Tristan, live out in the wilderness, determined to survive without help from
anyone else. When Rachel doesn't come home one day, Tristan continues to live alone for a time. In the second section,
the land has been sold and Tristan has ended up back at his former home, now turned into a holiday lodge. He lives
among strangers and works as a backwoods guide. He becomes closest to Tomasin, who also works there, and the
relationship between them is tender, tragic, and perplexing. This poetically written book is full of riddles, of characters
talking past each other and misunderstanding one another in the vein of a Shakespearean love tangle. Loneliness, the
very human inability to communicate with one another in a way that reveals our deepest selves, is the point. The novel
is a fine corrective to fiction that assumes that people are rational actors and that motive is straightforward or even
discernible. (Mar.)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Shot-Blue." Publishers Weekly, 2 Jan. 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478696463&it=r&asid=c082285c2d53007df4d570d0c867785f.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A478696463
---
10/3/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1507063023177 3/3
Shot-Blue
Jemicah Colleen Marasigan
This Magazine.
50.4 (January-February 2017): p40.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Red Maple Foundation
http://www.thismagazine.ca/
Full Text:
SHOT-BLUE
by Jesse Ruddock
Coach House Books, $19.95
Set against the backdrop of a remote lake, Jesse Ruddock's debut novel Shot-Blue follows a boy who learns to survive
in a land that was once his home, but is now changed by strangers.
Packed with characters who are at times intertwined and disconnected--as evidenced by the novel's alternating points
of view-Shot-Blue sheds light on the reality of love, loss, and loneliness.
While the book is difficult to follow at times, Ruddock exquisitely breathes life into feelings we all know too well.
Feelings that are felt so powerfully, even when conveyed through very few words.
--JEMICAH COLLEEN MARASIGAN
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Marasigan, Jemicah Colleen. "Shot-Blue." This Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480992495&it=r&asid=899280be85e2216e1d3bf212272506ef.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480992495
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BOOK REVIEW | FICTION
A Debut Novel Explores Intimacies on a Remote Northern Island
By EMILY RUSKOVICHMARCH 31, 2017
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Jesse Ruddock Credit Drea Scotland
SHOT-BLUE
By Jesse Ruddock
216 pp. Coach House Books. Paper, $17.95.
Jesse Ruddock’s debut novel offers many poetic and intimate moments. One of these occurs when a young girl named Marie, who lives on a remote northern island, finds a dead hummingbird wrapped in cloth on another girl’s doorstep. Marie knows that the hummingbird has been left there by Tristan, an orphan boy she secretly loves. So she hides the hummingbird in her underwear drawer, and “for the rest of her life,” she will “associate the smell of fresh laundry with a little bit of death.”
This mixture of love and death is everywhere in “Shot-Blue.” Though there are several main characters, Tristan’s story is at the novel’s heart. He and his mother, Rachel, had been squatting in a small cabin, where Rachel was sleeping with Marie’s father for money. This cabin was soon burned down, and after Rachel dies of exposure, Tristan works for room and board at the lodge that has replaced his home. He is standoffish and strange and terribly alone, and the other children are intrigued by him and often cruel. Slowly, he forms an intense relationship with a 16-year-old girl who also works at the lodge. Meanwhile, Marie, another employee, yearns for Tristan’s attention, which he never gives.
There are many shining depictions in “Shot-Blue,” as when the memory of Rachel’s eyes makes part of Marie go “gently unconscious.” Rachel’s face had been beautiful but scarred, and so, for Marie, “something amiss would from then on be a requisite for beauty.” A quiet and spreading sadness in these pages is conveyed in its softest details, as when a blue door reminds Rachel of forget-me-nots, “those timid flowers that spread like loneliness and took over everything.”
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Despite these memorable lines, much of Ruddock’s prose lacks discipline. Her figurative language often verges on excessive and can get distracting. Her more brilliant comparisons are drowned out by others that are obscure and overextended. In one instance, a woman’s thoughts are “biting into her shoulder more sharply than any strap.” This metaphor just doesn’t resonate: Why would a thought bite into a shoulder? And, in a single passage, paint peeling from houses is first “shed in chunks like receipts”; then it “fell like snow when the wind had fingernails”; and in the sentence after that, “it floated down like leaves and melted on the ground, forming pools of warm blue-silver.” These images, though lyrical, don’t seem real; Ruddock appears to be straining for literary effect, which is entirely unnecessary, because her more straightforward descriptions of the natural world are simply breathtaking.
Ruddock’s handling of her third-person narrative voice is also confusing. The perspective often shifts multiple times on a single page, without section breaks, from main character to minor character; instead of bringing us closer to each person, the narration has the effect of distancing us from all parties involved. Any emotional suspense is undone the moment the perspective changes. This narrative style left me unable to discern whose story “Shot-Blue” is supposed to be.
But when Ruddock does allow herself to linger in a character’s perspective for a while, she shows what she is capable of. Especially from Marie’s point of view, Ruddock writes moments of startling intimacy, evoking the pain of adolescent longing: “Her love for Tristan stood in front of her like another person she had to shout over and climb around.”
Emily Ruskovich’s first novel, “Idaho,” was published in January.
A version of this review appears in print on April 2, 2017, on Page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Adolescent Rites. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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REVIEW
Review: Shot-Blue by Jesse Ruddock is a tough, hardscrabble novel
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Author Jesse Ruddock’s debut novel features a cast of engrossing characters struggling to find a way of articulating whatever it is that’s roiling inside them.
DAVID BERRY
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
MAY 5, 2017
MAY 5, 2017
TITLE Shot-Blue AUTHOR Jesse Ruddock GENRE Fiction PUBLISHER Coach House Books PAGES 240 PRICE $19.95
It's the last day of summer, and two of the better-heeled guests at a rustic northern-lake retreat sit regarding Tristan, the mildly feral boy who serves as the linchpin of Jesse Ruddock's debut novel, Shot-Blue. Powerful and knowledgeable, but withdrawn to the point of muteness – preferring to run away from most people, including his own mother, than talk to them – Tristan is an object of fascination for almost everyone who populates the novel at one time or another, somewhere between a piteous child and an elemental force in their imagination.
"That kid," one of them notes, "he's not a boy or a man. We don't have a word for him."
"Maybe we should," the other interjects.
"Why?"
"Because saying it would feel good."
There is neither a surplus of words nor good feelings in Shot-Blue, a tough, hardscrabble book that finds most of its characters struggling, particularly to find the right way to name whatever it is that's roiling inside them. Ruddock here is grasping at a poetry of the inexpressible; her people, Tristan chief among them, are roundly unable to surface anything important from their internal lives.
It's hardly a coincidence that notions of drowning run through the novel, the idea that people may be forever trapped in their own unfathomable depths, forever in darkness to the people around them. By the end of the book – or, well, technically, two books – the title metaphor emerges as a kind of beautiful hope, but probably an impossible one: one character, a young girl, refers to a certain kind of summer day as "shot-blue," as if the sun were a bullet hole that the bright, all-encompassing sky was pouring out of. This novel's characters are never going to see that much light, because they'll never manage to puncture their own barriers.
The book inherits this tendency from Tristan's mother, Rachel, the one person here who seems to cherish her inability to connect her deepest self to anyone else. She guards herself from everyone: our first image is of her fleeing with Tristan to her father's remote cabin on Prioleau Lake, an edge-of-the-world body of water of the type that dot the Canadian Shield, and she never properly stops withdrawing from the world. Ken, a local who she begins sleeping with for money, is driven to distraction by her unwillingness to engage; even Tristan is kept in the dark about his family, Rachel's youth there, anything other than the basic skills of their existence – mainly canoe-paddling and keeping their heads down.
This head-space infects Ruddock's style. The detail here, especially in the first half of the book, is weighted by Rachel's active mind trying to numb itself into passivity – cold water snaps like smelling salts, forget-me-nots spread like loneliness – and it tends to stay sensual and immediate: Rachel is described as a person "who couldn't begin a story when there was no way of drawing any kind of conclusion," and does her best throughout to resist conclusions, including running off across the frozen lake when Keb comes to warn her that a developer is planning on turning her father's island into a wilderness resort.
It's here the second half of the book takes place, and though there are more people around and they are harder to avoid, for the most part everyone remains ships in the night, futilely using faulty lanterns to signal each other. Tristan, abandoned to the place, is a guide and maintenance worker on the land that should have been his birthright, the faux rustic cabins and generators the most obvious symbol of what happens when we fail to claim ourselves to others. He gets plenty of non-metaphorical punishment for his ineffable interior, too: he ends up at the point of a love triangle and the centre of a bullying circle, in both cases exactly because he remains so mysterious to others, sure in his actions, but entirely unable to tell anyone why.
His struggle to understand the gulf between doing and explaining are some of the book's most poignant moments, buttressed by Ruddock's horrible knack for immediacy. She captures the confusion and struggle of the crowd that begins to surround Tristan, as well, each one emerging as another shadow, something that can show other people their shape, but never fill it in with any meaningful detail. If there is a flaw here, it's that Ruddock perhaps expands the circle a little too wide: with their emotional interiors already so impressionistic, the consistent addition of people tends to successively dull the impact.
Still, there is some hard and uncomfortable truth to be found in all of them, and Tristan and his mother remain some kind of special – complex, vivid humans who completely lack the ability to name themselves as such. They might feel better if they could, sure, but it would rob Shot-Blue of its moments of magic.
David Berry is a writer and editor based in Toronto.
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FINANCIAL POST
Jesse Ruddock's demanding debut novel is sparse in both language and landscape
Terra Arnone: Ruddock is a poet (among other things) and we can call this her debut novel or we can call it what it is: poetry
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Shot-Blue
By Jesse Ruddock
Coach House Books
224 pp; $19.95
Last night I dreamed of persimmons. I’ve never eaten a persimmon, but happened to catch a cable TV rerun of Chopped Canada as I nodded off on my couch – just long enough to learn Susur Lee likes them ripe and that ice cream is rarely a good idea in the studio’s kitchen. Have at it, Sigmund.
What did you dream about, Jesse Ruddock? I bet it was something profound, astute, hyper-vivid in LSD technicolour. Reading Ruddock’s first novel, Shot-Blue, it’s clear the Guelph native’s imagination paints only in her palette’s sharpest hues – smearing broad swaths, dark and moody and dense on the page.
Shot-Blue’s small cast of characters is built to linger and they do, their portraits fortified with Ruddock’s rich setting: a constellation of islands floating somewhere that might be Canada’s oft-forgotten coast, gnarly and northern and not really the place for newly orphaned Tristan to orienteer his adolescent wilderness alone. Rachel, Tristan’s mother, isn’t long for Ruddock’s canvas, but manages in that time to slash through it stunningly – giving the novel its only definitive measure of clean tempo or closure.
Chapter-less and drifting, Shot-Blue shadows Tristan through his home’s harshest seasons into a summer heated by the arrival of Tomasin, who comes in from out of town for a few months’ work. Their age says puppy love but Ruddock says no: kids are dangerous enough alone; together, in something like lust, they’re fearsome. Shot-Blue picks through Tomasin’s curious infatuation with Tristan, a boy blistered by grief but callousing quickly at the simple matter of staying alive. Cut the cast with Gary Paulsen’s hatchet, sprinkle some Susanna Moodie c/o Carol Shields, and sow Iain Lawrence’s Skeleton Tree for backdrop – this is a story out of Canada’s survivalist canon but told mostly through illusion, allusion and emotion instead.
All big dreams and knitted brows, Shot-Blue is a serious and demanding book, contemplating widely in wandering prose. Ruddock is a poet (among other things) and we can call this her debut novel or we can call it what it is: poetry. She taps skills honed across medium – Ruddock a songwriter and photographer besides – to paint vividly a savage, inhospitable northern winter and the human collateral it claims.
Beautifully drawn and lyrical, Shot-Blue moves fluidly, a beat past the norm of something so literary. Dialogue is sparse, and that is both a good and a bad thing for Ruddock’s debut: her characters speak not with but at one another, solitary lines so few that each begs the reader to weigh them carefully on delivery. There’s been no promise of anything light in Ruddock’s first go, but her style asks a lot and risks leaving you behind. Tristan, sketched gradually to great interest, is a character study himself: Ruddock offers a generosity to children most authors reserve for their post-pubescent set, a whole and dynamic personhood that’s no more or less interesting for its age, only governed by the circumstances it knows and encounters with time.
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Whatever comatose fantasies consume Ruddock at night, the author’s writing demonstrates she can sift through them deftly for meaning and present that subconscious contemplation on a page. Not always lucid, though consistently rich, Shot-Blue’s examination of loneliness skitters beyond easy digest but is braced in a story that makes its challenge worthwhile. Whatever Ruddock requests in presenting readers her riddled prose, it’s evident she’s done that work doubly herself in their clever crafting.
In January, I counted Shot-Blue among 2017’s most notable forthcoming debuts; I was excited to read Jesse Ruddock’s first book, and facing lofty expectations, it didn’t wholly disappoint. But I’m jonesing harder now for Ruddock’s sophomore round: her art doesn’t need refinement so much as tethering, skills strong but wanting ground experience will sow, something Shot-Blue makes clear she can muster.
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Jesse Ruddock. Shot-Blue. Coach House Books. $19.95, 240 pp., ISBN: 9781552453407
Jesse Ruddock. Shot-Blue. Coach House Books. $19.95, 240 pp., ISBN: 9781552453407
A Review of Jesse Ruddock's Shot-Blue
Review by Rhonda Dynes
Trigger warning: sexual violence, child abuse, and other sensitive issues are discussed in this review.
Shot-Blue, the debut novel from Guelph-born turned New Yorker Jesse Ruddock, is a novel about young adults that isn’t a YA novel. The story appears to be rather modest: a young boy called Tristan, tries—and eventually has no choice but—to grow up. This story, though, set on the mythical, dreamlike, and ultimately dangerous Treble Island in an uncertain era, sits precariously perched, as half parable and half could-have-been-true Canadian historical fiction. The island, set on the also mythical Prioleau Lake, is populated by various groups of labourers and fishers and its happenings necessitate the Canadian reader to consider a variety of difficult questions around issues of otherness, indigenous culture, and territory.
Tristan begins the novel under the thumb of his ethereally beautiful and scarred mother Rachel, whose “scar was a wave stuck in breaking. It looked awful, like the skin was ground dug up by a dog.” It is unclear at the outset whether Tristan is somehow disabled or merely held back from the world by Rachel, but she spends a lot of her time early in the novel keeping Tristan inside and not allowing him to do manual work while she slogs, at times choosing prostitution to keep them fed and housed. The two are penniless outsiders in Prioleau, even though Rachel’s lineage appears indigenous to the lake region they inhabit. Theirs is a world controlled by the elements—work appears in the spring and summer but dries up to nothing in fall and winter. Storms and wind come at random and turn calm to calamity at will.
Discussing the novel’s point of view is a complicated endeavour because the early novel focuses so closely on Rachel’s vivid perceptions of the world and then, in one of the novel’s most heart-breaking moments, takes us right out of her vision and into her son’s. Early in the novel, Rachel gets so sick her illness lasts for months, and she lives mostly in a dreamlike stupor, unable to move. When she is visited by Keb, a local man who pays her for sex, a switch in narrative point of view reveals his decision to tell himself that she is fine as he consciously decides to rape her. When Tristan, who is forced outside of the hut as this traumatic event happens, damages the unwelcome man’s boat oars, perhaps out of anger for what is happening, Keb runs into the hut and takes back his money, leaving Rachel and Tristan there to suffer and struggle on. The event itself is jarring, and the sudden move to multiple points of view seems to also mark a narrative shift in the novel as a whole.
As Tristan copes with his mother’s choices and her rather anti-Blanche DuBois tendency to never accept the help of anyone at any cost, Tristan is hired on to work at a sort of summer resort that just seems to magically spring up around and over the hut he grew up in, even though Rachel apparently had documents claiming the land was her birthright. There Tristan works alongside (but never with) a group of boys and girls who don’t know what to make of him and whom he, in turn, never really even tries to reach out to. And should he? This seems to be one of Ruddock’s central questions in the novel: is it necessary for those who are on the outskirts of society to eventually reach out or integrate themselves with others? Are self-individuation and self-governance sacrosanct, even in the face of starvation or severe deprivation?
Shot-Blue is a difficult novel. Tristan is described as having extremely long blue-black hair and dark lips. Other than offering these minor details, Ruddick recalcitrantly refuses to discuss the possibility that Tristan is indigenous or of mixed race, only that he is othered from the rest of his peers. The only character able to reach Tristan is Tomasin, a girl who is on the island for the summer, whose sole desire seems to be owning and exoticizing Tristan. When she thinks of what he is to her, she decides he is “religious,” and “[r]eligious meant she couldn’t understand and it wasn’t her fault.” Once Tomasin feels she has Tristan, though, she ignores him for the rest of the story.
Prioleau Lake is fictional, but sounds so much like one of Canada’s lake regions as it was taken away from indigenous peoples and populated by tourists, that it is difficult to keep its fictionality in mind. Clearly the dis-connection is intentional, but at times I wondered at what cost? There are both benefits and challenges to writing a parable as opposed to creating a piece of historical fiction.
There is no doubt in the novel that Rachel and Tristan get kicked around brutally by life, their home stripped from them and their ability to make their own way constantly questioned, but their brusque stubbornness in response at times complicated my own ability to really hear their story, never mind to empathize with or feel for them. But Ruddock’s ability to craft a complicated story into a haunting and vivid set of ideas of otherness and connection is clear. This story is a tough one to read, and perhaps it is meant to be that way.
©2017 Hamilton Review of Books | All rights reserved.
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Jesse Ruddock's 'Shot-Blue' Is a Stirring and Solemn Lyrical Debut Novel
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Grant Gerald Miller
Updated: 17 May 2017
A lone boy learns to navigate between social isolation and human connection in this Canadian bildungsroman.
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Cover courtesy of Coach House Books
Shot Blue, the debut novel by Canadian writer Jesse Ruddock, is set in an isolated fishing village in rural Canada. Other than the presence of motor boats and rolled cigarettes, there are few signs of life. Ruddock’s setting is a “north-country” visited by tourists two months out of the year and inhabited for the other ten by a grizzly bunch of stoic and laconic characters who are subject to the cruel and indifferent winters, isolated and scraping by without WiFi or phone signals.
This sparseness sketches the town of Prioleau Lake, a place so seemingly inhospitable that I first took Shot-Blue to be a post-apocalyptic work, or at least a reflection of a climate-ravaged world. Ruddock prefers to keep her setting bare-boned to enhance the central themes of her richly written novel, which focuses on the survival of an awkward, introverted boy named Tristan. When the book opens, his mother Rachel is slogging down a slushy half-thawed road, carrying what little she owns toward a boarding house in town. Tristan slags along while Rachel broods over her alienation from him:
“Tristan wasn’t allowed to help because he made her think. She didn’t need to think but to walk the mile. Yet back and forth to town, thoughts of him persisted, distracting her and biting into her shoulder more sharply than any strap. She thought of how he didn’t run for the sake of running like other boys. She couldn’t even picture what it looked like when he ran. And he didn’t try to lift things just to see if he could. He was ten years old and had never tried to lift her.”
This self-imposed alienation, despite its detriments to survival , is a central theme of the novel. Rachel’s distance from Tristan isn’t absent of love but, rather, complicatedly sober and sentimental. She’s constantly watching out for the boy—after trading the boarding home for an abandoned cabin on an island just outside of town, Rachel knocks on a nearby neighbor’s door seeking donations for kid’s clothes:
“They don’t need to fit,” she says. “Clothes should fit,” the young woman replies and then retrieves an outfit for Tristan, dressing him herself. “He stood still, held his arms up, lifted his feet one at a time. He watched the woman’s unfamiliar thick hands button his shirt and meet her face at the top. She smiled easily and kindly, but also efficiently: soon her smile was done…Rachel watched with her wax hands stuck at her sides, feeling she would never lift them again. There were no clothes for her.”
In the book’s second section, which occurs some time after Rachel has disappeared and is presumed dead, Tristin is taken to live with and work for a man named Keb. He remains a lone wolf, even as other teenagers annoy, and harass him.His lack of hope for human connection, however, invokes tenderness in two young girls—Marie and Tomasin—who vie for his affections. When his nose gets broken in a fist-fight, Tristan parries Tomasin’s tenderness:
“‘If you take a spoon, you could use it, you know’ Tomasin said, reaching out to touch his face, ‘to fix this,’ but he flinched and pulled back so she missed him. But Tomasin kept reaching and took a loose piece of his hair instead. ‘There,’ she said, tucking it over his ear, ‘much better.'”
Jesse Ruddock © Coach House Books
While these events are poetically observed, Ruddock’s quick shifting changes in perspective don’t always make it clear who is making them. We are whimsically whisked through the heads of many different characters, sometimes jarringly so. But it’s ultimately Tristan’s story that Ruddock is concerned with navigating, helping him to flip what Rachel taught him, to place individual survival over human connection. “One stone at a time,” Ruddock writes in an aching passage of Tristan’s loneliness, “he was throwing the island into the lake, and it was no consolation but it was true he was doing it. The island was disappearing, imperceptibly to everyone but him.”
Ruddock’s masterful conceptual subtlety is not just found in the introverted and powerless Tristan, a boy who has never tried to lift his mother and tosses rocks into lakes to make his circumstances disappear, but also in her alluringly cinematic narrative. Similes and metaphors like Rachel’s “wax hands” or how a road “peels” under footsteps “like skin off rotten fruit” shine throughout. Ruddock’s prose style is often this painterly, a talent she is unafraid to wield with bravado:
“The sky was encouraging her, Marie thought, looking out the back window filled with light like a swimming pool. The sky couldn’t be more blue. It wasn’t the blue of clothes and bedspreads, not the blue of a pen, and not even the blue of painted things, like the handles of her father’s tools, which he painted blue so that everyone knew they were his. Marie slowly grew infuriated that she could draw no comparison between this blue and something that she could put her hands on. It was infuriatingly blue. The idea of blue. Not her idea…someone else’s idea.”
Even as we follow Ruddock lyrical storytelling through Shot-Blue‘s indifferent landscape and rugged characters, she is ultimately guiding us toward Tristin’s dawning realization of human connection and love. She ends her book as poetically as she began it, foregoing straightforward answers for something bordering on intuition, leaving the reader to float face up in the sea of vibrant language, bobbing in her shifting, ambiguous, and graceful waves.
SHOT-BLUE
by Jesse Ruddock
Coach House Books | 240 pp. | 17.95
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The Bodice Ripper by Byron Rempel
ARTICLES . BOOK REVIEWS . COLUMNS . NEW WORK . INTERVIEWS . EXCERPTS
‘Shot-Blue’ by Jesse Ruddock
Posted: MARCH 13, 2017
Book Reviews
41eEt1ObKPL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_Reviewed by Ben Wood
A lot of young Canadian writers are loath to include in their stories themes that are (rightly or wrongly) associated with CanLit. They have been brandished for so long that we recoil when we see them, plastered on course syllabi and jacket covers like a marquee announcing a title fight: Urban vs. Rural. Humans vs. Nature. Jesse Ruddock’s debut novel, Shot-Blue, stands out because on the face of it she seems to be doing the opposite and unabashedly embracing Canadiana par excellence: the North.
The North has been an inspiration for many Canadian writers and artists, but what is often depicted or dreamed of is land that is remote, uncharted and uninhabited. Yes, a majority of the country’s population lives within a short drive of the United States border, but what is often ignored is the history of indigenous peoples in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut—real places that constitute the real North. Of course, North doesn’t always refer to these places and it can mean different things to different people. It can be a direction or a destination. It can refer to Iqaluit or Churchill just as it can to Barrie or, to some, Eglinton. It is this ambiguity which lends itself so easily to the idea of a North that is synonymous with the mythology conveyed by a Lawren Harris painting. The musician Glenn Gould was fascinated by the mythology of the North. In his documentary “The Idea of North,” he says:
“I’ve long been intrigued by the incredible tapestry of tundra and taiga which constitutes the Arctic and sub-Arctic of our country. I’ve read about it, written about it, and even pulled up my parka once and gone there. Yet like all but a very few Canadians I’ve had no real experience of the North. I’ve remained, of necessity, an outsider. And the North has remained for me a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and, in the end, avoid.”
It’s sort of a “sorry not sorry” in only the way Gould as the consummate Torontonian could deliver: admitting he knows little of the North but refusing to relinquish the power of its mythology in favour of its reality.
Although Ruddock sets her story (and here I’m quoting from the back cover) “on a lake that borders the unchannelled North—remote, nearly inhospitable,” she isn’t guilelessly falling prey to any sort of mythologized North. (Even though the same can’t be said of the image of dancing Northern Lights on the book’s cover.) Nor is she relying on the reader’s unconscious associations of the North to convey the isolation, desperation and brutality of her characters. They would be just as alone in downtown Toronto as they would in northern Manitoba.
Shot-Blue is a story of a young single mother, Rachel, who cares for her son on a set of islands in a remote land and whose determined self-reliance has her avoiding the few people with whom she comes into contact. When her son, Tristan, is left to care for himself, he is forced to confront the people his mother avoided, while working at a resort for vacationing southerners, a complex that stands on the ground where he once lived in a cabin with his mother. Here he works, fights and possibly loves. He becomes the object of affection for Tomasin, who works with Tristan on the island. She tells her friend that she wants to know him, that there must be more to him than she’s able to observe, but her attempts are frustrated by her inability to fully break through Tristan’s closed-off exterior. He’s surely affected by the separation from his mother, but he can also seem dim or obtuse. This is not to say he’s entirely imperceptive or unaware. He’s enigmatic and, for the reader, unforgettable, the kind of character you continue thinking of long after you finish the book.
The story begins with a move from Rachel and Tristan’s trailer to a boarding house in town, where a friend offers Rachel a cabin on Treble Island where she can raise her son. They board a boat carrying passengers between the islands, presumably to take up the offer, but when the boat docks at Treble Island and the other passengers get off, Rachel tells the man driving the water taxi to head to a different island, where she and Tristan take up residence in the abandoned cabin that once belonged to her father.
Ruddock’s skill is in not leaning too heavily on the ambiguous northern setting to convey the isolation and loneliness of her characters. Rachel, who tries so hard to be alone, is somehow never satisfied with her isolation and finds that even “dreaming is exhausting.” If she seems insatiable it may be because her loneliness requires other people, if only to mark the distance between her and them. It feels good to find company when you want it and spurn advances when you don’t. For this reason, she’s become grateful for the nights she works, work she’s been doing since she was fifteen and which she doesn’t think of as selling sex. “At fifteen, she had no other way to get money.” And presumably not much has changed.
Her son, Tristan, equally prefers to be alone, staring at the flame of an oil lamp or sitting on the dock watching the water, but he is ultimately dependent on his mother to tell him where to go or what to do. When near the end of Book One an illness forces them back to Treble Island, the story shifts away from Rachel and it becomes clear that this is a story about Tristan and his crushingly sad attempts to find some anchor without his mother. His dependence on her has left him unwilling or possibly unable to make any decisions without someone else making them for him.
Through nothing of his own doing, Tristan eventually returns to the island where he and his mother once lived, to work at a newly constructed resort. Here he finds other boys who are brazen, full of testosterone and eager to fight each other in their spare time. When Tristan is roped into fighting, he’s completely submissive. Ruddock shows restraint in these passages that is, unfortunately, not employed elsewhere in the novel. The reader is just as confused as the other boys as to why Tristan won’t fight back. The only thing both he and the readers feel are the bruises and cuts on his lip, the hard fall on the packed earth. It’s not clear whether he’s reluctant to act or simply unable. Not knowing only strengthens these scenes and his character as a whole. Too often, Ruddock is guilty of over-explaining her characters’ motives or thoughts, as though she lacks confidence in her own writing to convey these things without directly describing them.
This tendency leads to another problem. Late in Book Two, the story shifts focus again, this time to Tomasin, who has grown close to Tristan. But this shift doesn’t feel as natural as the one from Rachel to her son in Part One. Much of Tristan’s character depends on others around him, and so when a rift comes between him and Tomasin, he’s left without anyone to draw him into the plot. Sometimes a character’s story finds its natural end, and this seems to be it for Tristan. But Ruddock doesn’t end the book here. Instead, Tristan is pushed aside and Tomasin (along with other, newly introduced characters) assumes a stronger focal point in the book’s final section. It could be that by continuing the story with Tristan at the edges, Ruddock is saying that he lacks his mother’s social dimension in isolation and that he can be more alone than her.
When the book finally concludes, it’s a relief to find it’s an ending that belongs to Tristan. And though it could have had the same resonance without some of the intervening plotlines, it is faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of his character without trying to solve any of it.
Coach House | 240 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN 9781552453407
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Contributor
Ben WoodBen Wood is a writer from Winnipeg and is an associate editor for The Winnipeg Review.
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