Gary Fincke’s The Canals of Mars: A Review By Salvatore Pane

To call Gary Fincke prolific would be an understatement. He is the author of sixteen books of fiction, poetry and nonfiction (one of which won the 2003 Flannery O’ Connor Award). His latest, the memoir The Canals of Mars (published by Michigan State University Press), is vintage Fincke. It possesses all his trademarks: laser-accurate observations, a keen sense of rhythm and metaphor, and a shaping of the everyday trials and tribulations of the working class into humane depictions that peel back the layers of who we really are. The Canals of Mars focuses on Fincke’s childhood in a dying factory town just outside Pittsburgh, but its real subjects are weakness, impossible standards and human failure.

The Canals of Mars is mostly rooted in Fincke’s childhood and college years, but its loose essay structure allows it to often flash forward in time, painting us a fuller picture of Fincke’s setting. Etna, Pennsylvania is a completely recognizable and regrettable example of American decline. At the start of the book, we see 1950s Etna through Fincke’s child eyes: a strong, working class haven where men drink heavily, labor in mines and factories, and eat bread “with holes in it” from his father’s bakery. But by book’s end, we see the deterioration of the town thanks to a highway that signals the end of most through traffic in Etna. All the storefronts Fincke remembers from his youth are missing when he returns in the 1990s, the population dwindled down next to nothing. His father–the central figure of the book–remains.

Fincke’s family is deeply affected by his grandfather, a man nicknamed the Prince, famous for surviving a tumble off a silo, infamous for the alcoholism which nearly destroyed his family. No one lives more in the Prince’s shadow than Fincke’s father; a man who believes in home remedies and the saving powers of Jesus Christ, a man who does not believe in alcohol (not even a drop) or signs of weakness of any kind (including a much-needed pair of glasses for his son). The Canals of Mars follows Fincke as he wrestles with childhood, the existence of God, his own bouts with heavy drinking in college and his days in the Heinz Ketchup factory, but always lurking in the background is his father, the engine of much of the book’s tension, always demanding so much of himself and everyone around him. One of the best, and most illustrative, essays in the book is ‘The Handmade Court’ in which Fincke Sr. convinces his young son to help him build a tennis court out of what essentially is rubble. When they clear the top layer of wreckage and discover rocks as large as “continental shelves” beneath, Fincke assumes his father will give up. That is not the case. Fincke writes:

Each time my father yanked at the chain, the stone heaved and slid a few inches– It took my father five minutes to stop and start his way thirty feet to where the stones stretched across the lane– and I grew certain that I wouldn’t be able to shift one of those stones more than the length of my body, that my father was going to be forced to remove every one of them unless he expected me to kneel and push each boulder from behind while he was dragging it with the chain.

Fincke Sr. holds himself and his son to impossible standards that no one could possibly live up to. And because of all his declarations and bizarre rules, it’s even more moving when Fincke skips ahead in time and shows his father as a dying old man who has outlived his wife, hitting golf balls at her grave because that’s the ritual, another rule he has to upkeep.

The Canals of Mars is not a flashy book; there are no literary pyrotechnics. But the patient reader will discover something far more substantial within Fincke’s prose: a desire to stare unflinchingly at our human flaws, to examine lineage and how we evolve into the people we become.