Perhaps all novels should have suggested soundtracks

By Ursula Pflug, Peterborough Examiner

(Copyright The Peterborough Examiner 2005)

In the acknowledgements to her first novel, A Girl Like Sugar, Emily Pohl-Weary suggests the reader listen to Courtney Love's Awful, from Hole's 1998 Celebrity Skin album about 50 times while reading the book, to supply the right musical ambience. Perhaps all novels should have suggested soundtracks, even if they aren't something the characters actually listen to. There could be marketing tie-ins; when Sugar goes into a second printing, say, Love could re-release Celebrity Skin, package it with the book.

Or the other way around. Pohl-Weary is editor of Kiss Machine, a Toronto magazine about pop culture, and Sugar is very much a pop culture book, at least in the first half, with constant references to bands, Buffy, and hair dye line Manic Panic.

Sugar Jones, the 24-year-old protagonist, is reeling from the death by overdose of her rock star boyfriend Marco, whom she's been dating since Grade 11. She lives in the tiny basement apartment they shared, never having gotten around to moving into better digs even when they could afford it.

The beautiful ghost Marco appears in his hospital gown, trailing IV tubes, and tells her he misses her. Sugar misses Marco too, and it's no surprise, since the last segment of her teens and all of her 20s thus far have been spent as perfect adoring girlfriend to tortured boy genius. Prodded to get a life by her best friend Marlene, a medical student, and her mother Marsha, a New Age activist type, Sugar gets a minimum wage job at a record store, and then an internship at a television station, allowing Pohl-Weary to make some pithy comments on today's youth labour market.

After a suitable period of time has passed, Sugar begins dating Thomas Kung, a young Korean activist/videographer.

Just as Marco was a hero in music circles, Kung is an idol to legions of young activists and filmmakers; and Sugar is leery of becoming a pretty shadow to brilliance all over again. She knows she needs to find an equal weight within herself, or this pattern will keep repeating itself. She's always been too sweet, she feels, and complains to Marsha she was given the wrong name.

With its vividly described alt.Toronto milieu, A Girl Named Sugar is a kind of alternative Bridget Jones, expressing the age old concerns of young women growing up in the West: the search for love, meaningful work, the right T-shirt to pair with one's oldest but most loved jeans, the hard to find first album by one's favourite band.

Sugar is a novel that fans of Jim Munroe's 1999 Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask should enjoy greatly. Both writers do sex, pop culture, activism and bad early jobs in a style that's refreshingly open and authentic, as well as LOL funny.

Pohl-Weary is editor of Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks, a 2004 Sumach Press anthology about changing media portrayals of young women; hence the easy yet serious discussion of pop culture that informs the book.

Yet, if the novel has a flaw, it's because at the outset, Sugar is almost a synthesis of the pop culture she inhales rather than a fully fledged human being, and later, as she becomes more and more involved in the world of political activism, she becomes a deeper, more capaciously drawn character.

Which is fine, because this shift in tone mirrors Sugar's own growth and self discovery, but there were moments I felt I'd been transported from a satire into a second, more serious book. But that's very small potatoes.

Pohl-Weary read from Sugar at the December Cooked And Eaten, at The Gordon Best. One of Peterborough's best kept cultural secrets, C and E is a reading series organized by Esther Vincent, former proprietor of Marginal Distribution, writer, and stage manager about town.

The Cooked and Eaten features readings by local writers and occasional touring authors from Toronto, Guelph or elsewhere. It takes place on bi-monthly Monday evenings. The next one is on Feb. 21, featuring Jan Thornhill, Leanna Brodie, Hal Niedzviecki and Nauni Parkinson. Incidentally, Vincent penned an excellent essay for Mutants, which is available at Speak Volumes on George Street.

Ursula Pflug is author of the novel Green Music. She is also an arts journalist, local playwright and internationally published short story writer.