Gently Down The Stream
by Ray Robertson

Question and Answer with Ray Robertson

1. The title GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM comes from the children’s song, Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Can you tell us why you chose this as your title?

I found myself humming it one day while out walking my dog, caught up in some seemingly important day-to-day ephemerality. Then I began to sing the words, mantra-like, and found it oddly, compellingly comforting.

Not long after, it seemed the embodiment of the new novel I was working on.

Titles are like that, they tend to sneak up on a writer.

2. Hank, the lead character in GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM seems to have a lot in common with Ray Robertson, how autobiographical is the book?

Not any more than any of my other novels.

True, GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM is set in the same west-end Toronto neighbourhood that I live in and I also have an aging Black Labrador Retriever like the narrator, Hank, but the real truth of any good book exists in the concerns, motives, and meanings of the characters, and there’s as much of me in Bill Hansen in MOODY FOOD, which was set in 1960s Yorkville, as there is in Hank Roberts who happens to be about my age and who lives in present day Toronto.

All genuine autobiography is metaphysical.

3. Music always plays a large part in your novels, your descriptions of the auditory experience of music are unique. Do you think there are similarities between music and the way you write?

I like to think so, and hope readers do, too.

Speaking as a reader of other people’s work, what attracts me foremost is the way someone writes, their style—i.e., the rhythm, tone, and energy of their prose. Too much literature sounds like Muzak to me. Who wants to read a book that sounds like every other book?

The best writers don’t sound quite like anyone else.

4. Karaoke plays an interesting role in the book. Can you describe for us the first time you did karaoke? What song did you sing? What does karaoke symbolize in the book – if anything?

Probably at the Gladstone Hotel about six years ago, before its recent renovations and gradual slide toward a more upscale (i.e., wealthy) clientele. It must have been something country—Merle Haggard, probably—because the crowds back then tended to be fairly small, poor, and inclined toward country music.

The entire karaoke experience was revelatory to me: I had no idea that so many people found so much joy and deep, personal meaning in it. This wasn’t karaoke done as kitsch or ironically or performed for cheap laughs. This was about hardworking people whose whole week was built toward Friday night when they’d have a few drinks and be the stars on stage that they were never going to be in their lives. It was Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame crammed inside a three-minute karaoke song.

5. You have described GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM as your mid-life novel. Most people think of mid-life as age 50 and you are much younger than that. Can you explain what you mean by mid-life novel?

Leaving aside the fact that fifty is only mid-life if you expect to live to be a hundred, I think one’s late-thirties, which I’m in, are the time when most people tend to take stock of where they are, where they’ve been, and where they’re going—or not going.

If you’re in your late-thirties, like Hank, chances are you’re too old to radically change, yet too young to be resigned to who you are. It’s what I like to call an “itchy age.” It’s also great material for a novel, because it’s when people tend to do desperate things.

6. Many people expected you to write a sequel to your very popular last book MOODY FOOD. Why were you so determined to write GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM now?

No one wanted me to write a sequel more than my previous publisher and ex-agent.

I needed to write GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM—and not MOODY FOOD: PART TWO— because the things that obsess its characters, and Hank especially, were what were obsessing me. I write to explore what interests me, and I wouldn’t know how to write otherwise.

MOODY FOOD is about the single-minded, oftentimes self-destructive pursuit of the ecstatic; GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM is about staying alive and growing old, not just gracefully, but with a little bit of honest glory.

To me, the one is just the flipside of the other. No one understood Dionysus better than Apollo.

7. GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM is set specifically in West End Toronto. Many people who live in the area will enjoy reading about places they are familiar with. Why do you think people who live elsewhere, say in Vancouver, should read your book?

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT isn’t about Russia, it’s about the possibility of moral affirmation in a seemingly Godless universe. The history lesson is just a bonus.
People who read novels to explore the world rather than themselves—the real goal of any real art form—aren’t really interested in the literary experience.

Besides, what Hank is confronted with in his Toronto neighbourhood—increasing gentrification, condos sprouting up everywhere he looks, his old haunts slowly dying off and disappearing—is endemic to every urban dweller’s experience, whether they live in Toronto, Vancouver, or Halifax.

8. You are known for being perhaps a harsh critic of the Canadian literary establishment. In what direction do you see Canadian literature going?

Am I? I like to think I’m just honest, not only about the Canadian literary establishment but also about the rising cost of beer, who really runs the world, and why dogs are better than cats.

If there is a direction, I just hope I’m not following it.

9. You have said that in the simplest terms GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM is about “dogs, monogamy and karaoke.” Can you tell us what you wanted to get across by writing this book?

Regarding questions of a novel’s ultimate thematic meaning, always refer back to its title.

In the case of GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM, gather three friends together and sing aloud in alternating verses the song its title is taken from.

10. Who and/or what influences Ray Robertson?

The writers who made me want to be a writer are, thankfully, still there for me: Barry Hannah, Thomas McGuane, Jack Kerouac, Mordecai Richler.

Otherwise: loud music, cold beer, well-written prose, the mystery of human existence, dogs, long naps, the sports page with my breakfast cereal, love.

11. What are you working on now?

A novel entitled WHAT HAPPENED LATER.

Originally, Jack Kerouac wanted to write a sequel to ON THE ROAD, which he planned to call WHAT HAPPENED LATER.

My WHAT HAPPENED LATER is about what happened to Kerouac after his rise to fame and his equally dramatic fall from sobriety and sanity.

Find out more about Gently Down The Stream.