There’s a sushi place in Toronto’s Kensington Market that Stuart McLean has been known to frequent, when he’s not on the road performing his popular Vinyl Cafe live show to sold-out crowds across Canada. It’s not a fancy place at all, just one of the city’s many hole-in-the-wall sushi spots offering cheap, satisfying fare, although the chef is celebrated by regulars for making a mean spicy roll. One night earlier this year, McLean was sitting there by himself, munching away and reading The New Yorker, when his meal was interrupted by a dishevelled older man at the bar who was giving the owner a hard time. “How do I eat this stuff?” the Troublesome Customer grumbled loudly. “Do I dip this in here? I don’t understand this food!”
With his natural neighbourly instincts, McLean stepped into the ruckus and started to explicate, in a relaxed, non-technical way, the mysteries of maki and the subtleties of sushi. “That’s soup,” he said. “You dip the sushi in the soy sauce. And if you want it hot, mix in this green stuff” — “green stuff” rather than “wasabi,” just so the fellow wouldn’t be further intimidated.
The Troublesome Customer attended to McLean’s advice and, after a bite, murmured, “Hmm. Not bad.” But before McLean could bask too long in the success of his off-the-cuff cultural diplomacy, the Troublesome Customer added, “You know Western civilization is in decline when the barbarians have better food than us.” Without another word, McLean returned to his seat and the solitary comforts of The New Yorker.
Stuart McLean is the great bard of Canadian niceness, a man for whom kindness is not, as it is for many, simply a tepid default mode, a way of getting along in the world with the least difficulty, or a set of conventional rules to discard when we can get away with it. Rather, in his moral universe, niceness is a living force, a Tao, a way of being — a constant, energetic striving to repay the unearned good fortune of our existence by treating all those around us with respect. It’s not always easy being nice, and many of McLean’s Vinyl Cafe stories revolve around the dilemma of a character — usually the hapless family man, Dave — struggling to be decent, even when it might be more satisfying to be selfish or surly.
In his encounter with the Troublesome Customer, McLean displayed some of his most striking virtues: his kindness, his forbearance, his expansiveness and openness to the world, his willingness to engage on an equal footing with anyone he meets. But we can also discern the limits of niceness in this story: when confronted by malice and perversity, niceness is easily flummoxed, as McLean finally was by the Troublesome Customer. There are barriers in this world — hurdles of culture, economics, ideology, and language — that niceness can’t always triumphantly jump over. Which is why, despite its anecdotal pleasures, the tale of the Troublesome Customer wouldn’t quite work as a Vinyl Cafe vignette. Goodness isn’t always victorious in the world of Vinyl Cafe, but it has a far better batting average in McLean’s stories than in real life.
However, dismissing his work for being excessively agreeable perhaps does a disservice to the man, who has a strong claim to being Canada’s most beloved storyteller. To curtly write him off is almost like rejecting Canada itself, a nation sometimes caricatured for its over-the-top politeness. There is a kind of glib, reflexive cynicism in assuming that anyone who speaks on behalf of modesty and family values must inherently be naive or phony.
As McLean notes in his new essay collection, The Vinyl Cafe Notebooks, his mentor Peter Gzowski “decided it was his mission to uncover the best of Canada, the people and places, to seek them out and introduce them to the rest of us.” McLean’s stories are a way of keeping the Gzowski mission alive; in our changing culture, the program might be the only living incarnation of the Gzowski spirit.
There are depths to Vinyl Cafe stories that many listeners appreciate but no literary analyst has ever explored. It’s pleasant to skate over the surface of McLean’s stories, but we should not forget that the smoothness we are gliding on covers a deeply felt but rarely examined philosophy of life.
Since 1994, Stuart McLean has been telling stories about warm-hearted people on his Vinyl Cafe radio show, which airs every weekend on CBC. Originally, the characters in his yarns were varied, but within a year or two Vinyl Cafe’s storytelling segment transformed into a radio sitcom focused on the adventures of a Toronto nuclear family, parents Dave and Morley and kids Sam and Stephanie. The family is not given a surname, although Dave’s mother is Margaret MacNeal — a near-anagram of “McLean.”
The Dave and Morley stories are told in a variety of tones, but the dominant modes are the farcical and the lyrical. Farce often arises from the antics of Dave, a well-meaning paterfamilias but also a bit of a doofus, full of impractical schemes and a stubborn unwillingness to listen to reason. You can get a quick chortle from Vinyl Cafe fans by reminding them of Dave’s various misadventures: the time he rented a hotel room to cook a Christmas turkey, or his run-in with a duck, or his experiments in toilet-training the cat. These episodes are highly stylized in their ridiculousness, reminiscent not just of sitcoms, but also of cartoons such as The Simpsons. Not surprisingly, there was talk in 2004 of adapting an animated show from the Vinyl Cafe stories.
But farce is only one of the notes McLean hits: he often varies the pitch with unexpected outbursts of lyrical reverie, effusive meditations on love, family, and the goodness of life. Like all families, his fictional clan has its share of problems. Dave’s easygoing slothfulness sometimes rubs against Morley’s need to impose order (older women in McLean’s stories almost always exhibit an overactive maternal superego). When she was a teenager, Stephanie could sometimes be snitty, and she had her share of fights with her younger brother, Sam, whose boyish enthusiasm and fresh-faced naïveté often lead to misadventures that parallel his father’s. But whatever quarrels and misunderstandings the family might have, they always come together to realize how much they need each other. Many of the Dave and Morley stories can be described as fables of reconciliation, with the farcical disruption serving as the comic pretext for the eventual lyrical reunion.
In “Tree Planting,” from the book Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe (2006), the pampered, city-bred Stephanie has a tough time roughing it in the bush, but eventually acquires the necessary hardiness to work in the Canadian wilderness. The story ends like this: “She came over a hill and saw the water sparkling in the sun. She couldn’t believe it. She took off her clothes and jumped in, naked. Miles from nowhere. Alone in the great boreal forest. Amazed at herself. But most of all, amazed at life.” Stephanie is reconciled here not with her family but with nature, indeed with creation itself.
