On a recent Vancouver Sunday afternoon, a young man stumbles upon a secret sport invented more than a century before, at the birth of his city. Thus begins The Man Game, Lee Henderson’s epic tale of loved requited and not, that crosses the contemporary and historical in an extravagant, anarchistic retelling of the early days of a pioneer town on the edge of the known world.

In 1886, out of the smouldering ashes of the great fire that destroyed much of the city,Molly Erwagen—former vaudeville performer—arrives from Toronto with her beloved husband, Samuel, to start a new life. Meanwhile, Litz and Pisk, two lumberjacks exiled after the fire, and blamed for having started it, are trying to clear their names. Before long, they’ve teamed up with Molly to invent a new sport that will change the course of that fledgling city’s history.

"Inventively visual, high-flying prose, which uses historical diction but is also thoroughly contemporary, suggests Thomas Pynchon."
—Georgia Straight

"The Man Game is an absolute triumph."
—Globe and Mail

"The Man Game is one of the most entertaining, rollicking and original Canadian novels I've ever read."
—Michel Basilières, Toronto Star

"If Vancouverite Lee Henderson's debut novel The Man Game doesn't get at least some nominations for big prizes this fall, we'll eat [Richard] Wagamese's cowboy hat. More than meeting the expectations spurred by a debut story collection, The Broken Record Technique, Henderson has created a loose, baggy monster of a novel, raw and rough in all the right ways. Supposedly a historical tale of wild 1887 Vancouver, the title refers to a public entertainment that is part dance, part wrestling and part modern video game moves."
—Dan Smith, The Toronto Star

"In its ambition, iconoclasm, and accomplishment The Man Game is reminiscent of Mordecai Richler's great, ribald epic Solomon Gursky Was Here. Lee Henderson invents a history of Vancouver, Canada, and frontier life that satisfies and defies expectations as only the best fiction can. The Man Game is an extraordinary book written by a young writer who possesses remarkable powers of observation, description, and empathy."
—David Bezmozgis

“The Man Game is as brilliant and twisted as a funhouse mirror, and Henderson is a wildly seductive ringmaster.”
—Quill & Quire

AN INTERVIEW WITH LEE HENDERSON

Q: What kind of research went into creating your rough-and-tumble take on the Vancouver of 1886?

Yeah, I did years and years of research. I read a lot of first-hand accounts of what life was like for people circa 1886 in Vancouver, and I read the old newspapers and some history books. I studied old maps and read old novels from that time, and I extrapolated from that.

Q: Were there any literary or cinematic inspirations for The Man Game?

Old vaudeville was the main inspiration, and from vaudeville came all the best early gags and characters in early silent film. Charlie Chaplin’s films, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, and Buster Keaton all play an essential role in how I thought about this book. Cormac McCarthy was a great literary inspiration; without him I don’t know if I’d have seen a way to experiment with the historical voice. I found the liberty to create a different, modern version of the Wild West template thanks to McCarthy’s pioneering. McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the film by Robert Altman, was a great reference for me, too. It was filmed in B.C., for one, and it’s about this world. There’s a scene in the movie about a guy contemplating growing a beard that I found especially inspiring. Elephant Man by David Lynch was on my mind a lot while I wrote. I watched a couple episodes of Deadwood and was really happy to see that show on TV; I think there are some real affinities to that show’s premise, and it came out during the dark middle years of writing The Man Game and helped inspire me not to feel too insane working on this idea. Another literary inspiration was Ben Marcus. His first book, The Age of Wire and String, was an important early influence—I read it years before I started this, but I kept thinking about the language he employed. Beckett and Coetzee are influences as well, but my book has much more vaudeville than either of them, even Beckett.

Q: Where do you feel the novel fits within the context of Canadian literature?

I wasn’t thinking about this question while I wrote the book, so it’s difficult to answer, as I feel a bit like I’m using the wide end of a wedge to fit my novel into a narrow space in CanLit. I did see Canadian literary precedents to my weirdness, though. I was reading books like Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billie the Kid, Robert Kroetsch’s Studhorse Man, George Bowering’s experimental cowboy novels, Jack Hodgins’s magic realism, Daphne Marlatt’s poetic approach to history, Sky Lee’s mapping of the immigrant story, Michael Turner’s interest in sexuality, cityscape, and structure in his poems and novel …

Q: The novel cuts back and forth between a modern and a historical setting, touching on similar themes. What similarities do you see between twenty-first century and pioneer Vancouver?

There’s more glass and fibre optics, but other than things like that I don’t think much has changed in Vancouver. The personality of the city hasn’t changed, and the same issues surrounding immigration and labour, combined with racial prejudice, exist today as they did back then. I’d say, for the most part, that’s my point.

Q: What inspired your decision to include illustrations of the man-game moves?

I love to draw, and usually my big ideas come from drawings I’ve done. I did my first drawings of the man game in creative writing classes. I drew them instead of writing comments on other students’ stories.

Q: Your previous book, The Broken Record Technique, is a collection of short stories while The Man Game weighs in at five hundred pages. How did your writing craft change for a project of such length? Did you set out with the intention of writing an epic or did the story itself dictate it?

Yeah, I wanted to write something epic. I wanted to do something that would remind me of music by Kevin Drumm or Sunn O))) or Satanstornade, something really dark, funny, loud, and strange.

Q: A little internet research regarding Calabi & Yau reveals some rather interesting references to superstring theory and extra-dimensional mathematics. How did the obscure concept of the Calabi-Yau manifold find its way into The Man Game as an addictive pastry treat?

Impossibility is a theme.

Q: Facial hair is mandatory for the men of The Man Game. Did you do any in-depth research into the moustache or beard styling of the time? Do you think the success of the novel will contribute to a renaissance in facial hair for the young men of today?

Beards are a signature style in B.C.’s history of facial hair. There’s a ton of beardo weirdos in Vancouver. Cute Vancouver girls accidentally get crushes on homeless men thinking they’re members of Black Mountain. When it comes to beards, Vancouver is the place to be. I can’t grow one, though, because I get creepy dry skin from it.

Q: Which Canadian authors, living or dead, do you think would fare the best in the man game?

LOL. All matches must take place in Vancouver: Robert Kroetsch vs. Farley Mowat. Patrick Lane vs. George Bowering. Derek McCormack vs. Michael Turner. George Woodcock vs. Pierre Berton. Al Neil vs. Steve McCaffery. Michael Winter vs. Michael Crummey. Steven Heighton vs. Kevin Chong. Rawi Hage vs. Bill Gaston. Guest choreography by Sheila Heti, Annabel Lyon, Emily Carr, and Ethel Wilson.