The Dominion of Wyley McFadden - Hardcover

The Dominion of Wyley McFadden, Scott Gardiner's funny and ambitious debut, is a road novel driven by the sort of garrulous, obsessive voice that propels the novels of tragicomic masters like Stanley Elkin, Robert Kroetsch, and Charles Portis. McFadden rants (he's a fed-up federalist), he digresses (he knows more than you want to about, say, the Game and Fish Act), he self-justifies (he had perfectly good reasons for doing the things that got him barred from the practice of medicine), all with a charming mix of the fastidious and the impulsive. His hitchhiking passenger, knowing her quarry, fends off his questions about her past (and her name) by slowly drawing his story out as they drive west. It's not an entirely smooth ride (some of Wyley's longer lectures test a reader's patience, and toward the novel's end Gardiner attempts to burden Wyley's story with a moral weight it can't bear, and doesn't really deserve), but it's an enjoyable, rambling treat. --Tom Nissley

"Gardiner, a first-time Toronto novelist, writes of the road with confidence and clarity. His wry descriptions of motels, diners, truckstops and the eccentrics who inhabit them evoke Steinbeck in his hard-travelling days" - Globe and Mail

"An interesting premise to be sure - and, I might add, a rich, dark and highly accomplished debut" - Ottawa Citizen

"For the fictional trip, Gardiner (like many first time novelists) brings together many desperate subjects, including the legal entrapment of rats (Gardiner took a trapping course in Toronto, but did not trap), the human fertility industry (which he researched and calls a nightmare, completely unregulated, unlike most aspects of medicine'), sexual victims, what it is to be Canadian, Quebec separatism and Alberta's idiosyncratic politics." - Toronto Star