In Falling Hour, Geoffrey D. Morrison’s impressive first novel, a ruminative young man named Hugh Dalgarno takes an old picture frame to a public park where he has an appointment to sell it to a stranger. Like Godot, the stranger never arrives. The story spans about twelve hours in which Hugh ruminates, alone, on subjects as varied as the history of surveillance capitalism and Virginia Woolf’s elitism. Hugh is an inveterate reader, a reservoir of arcane facts. Lately, though, his manner of processing new information has grown increasingly erratic, causing him to fear that his brain is “broken.” “My thoughts no longer had the geometric neatness I was sure they used to,” he explains, “the reliable line of yellow dashes down the middle of the road: ‘and then, and then, and then.’”

Like other single-setting novels focused almost exclusively on what’s happening between the protagonist’s ears—a list that includes modern quasi-classics such as Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and recent debuts like Jordan Castro’s The Novelist—this one figures to frustrate readers who like narratives in which stuff, you know, happens. But if this is an occasionally frustrating book, it also happens to be uncommonly intelligent and stealthily funny, a digressive, duly angry work of fiction that speaks in a distinct idiom—that of the overeducated, underemployed working poor who came of age during the 2008 financial crisis saddled with crushing student debt and low-paying, no-benefits jobs.

“Broken-brained,” of course, is only a crude self-diagnosis. Late in the book, Hugh gets more specific, describing how he once managed his “paralytic despair” by writing poetry and tempered his psychic pain by immersing himself in history, narrative and “language itself, the truest and strangest mind-virus of them all.” From a reader’s perspective, Hugh’s cognition looks quite sound—extraordinary, even—as he forges what amounts to an idiosyncratic autobiography of a self-described “permanent member of the confused men of the earth.” 

Why “men” and not simply “people”? For a self-described “leftist” like Hugh, it’s an interesting choice. He harbors nothing but enmity for the men of European origin who persecuted indigenous people in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. Describing himself as one of the “confused men of the earth,” is he acknowledging a sense of guilty complicity with those who committed the genocidal crimes of the past? This might be a perfectly mistaken interpretation, but that’s the kind of novel Morrison has written—one that invites and rewards close reading.  

Hugh was born in Scotland in the late 1980s, and when his biological parents fell into heroin addiction, he was sent to Ontario, where his great-aunt and -uncle raised him. Though he adored his since-deceased “guardians”—endearingly, he’s kept many of their possessions, “which, so long as I live, I will never throw away”—Hugh has never recovered from “that old and original hurt, the loss of my birth parents.” He has advanced degrees, but there’s little demand for early-career academics in “the suffering inland post-industrial” area where he grew up and still lives, so he works for a “luxury streetwear” company. He assuages his guilt at propping up such a frivolous enterprise by donating to the local branch of the Party for Socialist Workers. He’s frustrated and lonely. His primary coping mechanism appears to be the acquisition of knowledge about books, wildlife, music, and the disgraceful treatment of poor and native people in his native country and his adopted one. He’s assimilated entire libraries, Hugh has.

For someone with a purportedly damaged brain, Hugh is notably skilled at fashioning nimble soliloquies; typically, these circle an intellectual idea or a societal development while simultaneously revealing glimpses of his own past and inner life. In one, he recalls how he and his great-aunt once spied on their neighbors; he suggests that he might be suffering from paranoid delusions, worrying, without evidence, that someone is watching him while he sits quietly in the park; and he reflects on the evolution of surveillance tools as depicted in pop culture, from the drab private investigator Gene Hackman plays in The Conversation to Amazon’s current CIA-glorifying series Jack Ryan.

Hugh thinks over another of his abiding concerns—the strictly enforced boundaries between the privileged and “working-class and lower-middle-class people, my people”—by considering Virginia Woolf’s writing and opinions. He’s deeply “affected” by the “tumult of asides, digressions, clarifications, distractions, (and) exclamations” in Woolf’s story, “The Mark on the Wall”; its vivid depiction of an unsettled mind makes him feel less alone. But Woolf’s contempt for James Joyce’s Ulysses—“the book,” she wrote in her diary, “of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating”—is an affront. “I too am a self-taught working man—everything that has been dearest to me has been won by a long and blundering process without knowing the direction or the rules,” Hugh says.

If Hugh is saddened by Woolf’s snobbery, he’s in a perpetual state of contained anger about the theft and murder Europeans committed when they arrived on these shores, a genocidal campaign that was “new in its terrible scale.” This is at once true and unenlightening, and for all his well-placed fury, Hugh fails to say anything particularly insightful about the myriad, still-shocking crimes that destroyed the lives of countless indigenous North Americans.

This misstep is related to the novel’s only obvious flaw—a strain of intellectual vanity. Though he doesn’t put it this way, Hugh is a person who takes pride in knowing more obscure facts than your average Jeopardy! contestant. He puts an erudite spin on the humblebrag, saying that he reads Scottish census data “obsessively, to the point of fact-sickness.” He can be off-puttingly arch, as when he spots scores of moths whirling around one light bulb: “I had never heard of this happening, and if there is one thing by now you may say about me with confidence it is that I have tried to be a man who has heard of things.” 

But Morrison can be funny, sneakily so, and it’s this quality that saves Falling Hour from pretentiousness. Midway through the book, Hugh returns to the picture frame with which the book begins and peers through its empty center at a singing bird. It’s a lovely image, which he quickly subverts. Waiting in the park for hours, he’s wandered through mud, ruining his jeans and maybe his shoes. “I felt like the stupidest man who had ever been alive,” Hugh says. Morrison’s readers and new fans—of which hopefully there are many—will surely disagree.

+++

Geoffrey D. Morrison is the author of the poetry chapbook Blood-Brain Barrier (Frog Hollow Press, 2019) and co-author, with Matthew Tomkinson, of the experimental short fiction collection Archaic Torso of Gumby (Gordon Hill Press, 2020). He lives on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh territory (Vancouver).

 +

Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City.