Point Form Book Reviews are my way of catching up on book reviews where maybe too much time has passed or I don’t have a whole lot to say about a book but still want to share some thoughts.
- I actually don’t have a lot of thoughts about this book.
- It wont the Giller Prize and I can see how it says something about Canada and our history but it isn’t a book that’s stuck hugely in my memory after a month or so.
- Baxter is a porter on a sleeping car that travels back and forth across Canada. (He is, in fact, The Sleeping Car Porter.) He is a Black man and the passengers are white.
- He is also a gay man, something that must be kept hidden in 1929.
- The exhaustion and the absolutely insane intensity of the job has stuck with me. Baxter cannot sleep if a passenger needs him. He is on call at all times. If he receives too many demerits (primarily from a passenger complaining about him), he will lose his job. His livelihood is not protected at all.
- But Baxter himself has not stuck in my memory. He’s Black. He’s gay. He wants to be a dentist. I know a few facts about him but he as a person doesn’t feel fully fleshed in my memory.
- The setting is fascinating – and a reminder of how important trains are to our existence as a country – and well-drawn by Mayr but the story in the end felt incomplete.
- What happens to Baxter next? Who is when he isn’t sleep-deprived and in fear of his job? Who was he before this story began?
- Overall, a pretty simple read. Didn’t take long to finish but hasn’t proven very memorable.
Karissa Reads Books 
There’s so much that can be done in literature with sleep deprivation (Celia Fremlin’s The Hours Before Dawn, an early example of the exhausted-young-mother-who-might-be-losing-her-sanity-or-there-might-really-be-something-sinister-afoot genre, springs to mind); it’s a shame Mayr’s treatment of it didn’t really stick.
It felt like a lot more could have been done here. At various points Baxter hallucinates due to sleep-deprivation but it wasn’t clear to me how we were supposed to take those scenes. His hallucinations are clearly meaningful to him but because we don’t really know him, I didn’t know what they meant and never figured it out.
Oh man, this is such a disappointment to hear – I had such high hopes for this book! I am still debating if I should read it. Like, go out and purchase the book myself because I never review for Coach House. Your review is making me think it could probably be skipped, I just hate feeling left out of ‘those’ books, ya know?
I’d hate to fully turn you off reading it! It’s obviously well-lauded so you may like it more than I did. It’s not a long read – you could probably knock it out in a couple of days.
haha don’t worry, I won’t blame you if I avoid it. It’s helpful to know these different reactions though, when some books win awards, it’s so easy for everyone to just agree it’s great, so I really appreciate your point of view on this
I know that in his autobiography Malcolm X talks about how he worked on a train. He would sell sandwiches. He would use the train to ride back and forth from Detroit to New York. Or, he may have started in Chicago, now I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure it’s Detroit. Anyway, he had a great time traveling across the country, but he also wasn’t worried about losing his job like this person sounds like he was.
My great-grandfather worked for the railway around this time and in all the stories I’ve ever heard it was only presented as a positive thing. He had steady work throughout the Depression, he got to see various parts of the country and even travelled internationally, his family travelled frequently by train. The key difference of course is that he was a white man.
Now I’m wondering if they had dramamine back then.
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