Laser Quit Smoking Massage by Cole Nowicki
Are “short essay collections” a thing? Flash essays? Micro essays? I don’t know that I’ve ever read a collection like this before: 25 essays in 144 pages for an average of under 6 pages each. A couple of them come off as a little underdone, but most of them feel full: of odd characters, familiar places, and moments of catharsis and recognition. And humour! I laughed out loud at a joke about Balzac, Alberta, which does indeed sound like “ballsack” – as my kids will note every time we pass it on the way to Calgary.
Speaking of Alberta, I thought Big Mall would be the most locally and personally relevant book I’d read this year, but another millennial Albertan who eventually moved to Vancouver has entered the chat. Cole Nowicki grew up in Lac La Biche, Alberta, a town familiar to me because it’s close to a friend’s lake lot, where I would go camping (under duress) when the kids were small. Going to the Timmies, or the oddly-punctuated “The Bargain! Store” was a highlight of those trips.
It doesn’t really matter if you’ve been to Lac La Biche, though, or if you understand why it is a big deal that they have a Boston Pizza there. These are the best kind of personal essays, where the very specific experiences and interests of one person reveal something universal. You probably didn’t have a conversation with your mom about Blink-182 lyrics as a child, but you will recognize (I hope) the comfort to be found in the commiseration of a parent. You probably didn’t watch a parent go through a mental health crisis (I hope) but you will recognize the pain of growing up and realizing that your parents can’t or won’t commiserate with you the same way anymore.
I also enjoyed the essays that were a little less personal and more about the absurdities of the places we live, IRL and online. “The Big Dog in the Sky is Dirty”, about a sculpture of a poodle in Vancouver, doesn’t take an obvious position for or against public art, but exposes the class implications and bureaucracy around who gets to experience it. There are no pictures in these essays, but Nowicki also maintains a blog where you can read an earlier version of this essay and see the poodle in question.
There were other essays that could have been enhanced with pictures (“The Dark Lord of Vancouver Karaoke”, just to verify that “Arcanabyss” is a real guy, which he is) and one where I was very glad there weren’t (“A Brief History of People Finding Weird Shit in Their Ears”, which was horrifying in exactly the way you think). Early adopters of the internet will appreciate the lore around gail.com and “pooptime”, a website that I thought must have existed in the early aughts era, between “bathroom books” and social media, but was somehow still publishing content in 2018.
The only essay that fell a bit flat to me was the skateboarding one. The “well-worn cliche” of how skateboarding mirrors the growth and upheaval of adolescence is acknowledged early on, and for me, the essay didn’t overcome that. This tracks for me, as I regularly read Nowicki’s blog, Simple Magic, but skim over the hardcore skateboarding stuff. I keep coming back because I find so many gems (which are usually at least skateboarding-adjacent.)
This is the first of my 20 Books of Summer challenge. I enjoyed it so much that I immediately started another essay collection, No Judgement by Lauren Oyler, which is much bigger – in length, in scope, and in public reaction. Laser Quit Smoking Massage is easily the better collection, in terms of choice of subject, use of humour, and respect for the reader’s time and attention (I’ll expand on the latter if I review No Judgement.) I don’t foresee any hit pieces in Bookforum for this one, I hope readers give it a chance anyway.
Reading in Bed 
I quite enjoy collections of brief essays – the sort of things that appear in literary periodicals or broadsheet review pages – especially if they’re witty, punchy, even opinionated but otherwise well informed. But from the quirky title I’m not sure if this would appeal to me, even though I did enjoy your review comments!
Well it’s a pretty Millennial perspective in this book but I think it was witty and punchy 🙂 The title is something he saw on a sign, apparently you can get some sort of laser treatment to help you quit smoking (and… a massage?) which must be new because I don’t remember my dad trying that, and tried everything!
laser quit smoking
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I do like collections of micro-essays, but the ones I’ve come across are purely autobiographical (Beth Ann Fennelly and Abigail Thomas) and/or nature-themed (Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil). Two I reviewed last year for Foreword are Without Saints by Christopher Locke and My Neglected Gods by Joanne Nelson.
Thank you, off to investigate! I’m reading Michael Ondaatje’s new poetry collection, and a couple of the prose poems could be called micro essays. And speaking of cats, as we were on your recent post, one of those prose poems is about losing a cat – I needed a trigger warning on that one! It’s called “November” and it’s online if you want to read it (but remember – trigger warning!)
Ah yes, prose poems are an interesting case. Kathleen Jamie’s new collection has both poems and micro-essays, which are almost poems in their own right.
There were a few dead-cat poems in the last Atwood collection I read.
This sounds like a collection I would like. I know flash nonfiction, so I guess, this would be something like that. I actually have the Oyler collection but read a few very negative reviews since getting it. Not so sure it will be for me.
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