Much like the year 1999 and the impending Y2K crisis, we stand on the precipice of a monumental change in world history, filled with doubt as to our place in the certain shift of events. Contextualizing individual problems within the greater scheme of things is not often possible in medias res, but as Rob Benvie examines in his novel Maintenance, large-scale occurrences have an effect on the micro level, and ultimately, all our lives and emotions are interlinked by an increasingly global environment.
In its classic plot, an examination of a suburban family’s life on the eve of the twenty-first century, Benvie seeks to address a fundamental truth of human existence: that not only death is unavoidable, but it carries with it an awareness of our coming end. In Maintenance, the Swelham family is unable to continue going through the motions when confronted by vague and varied existential crises. They lead their lives in separate narrative threads that intersect without really connecting, though supposedly in an environment that should foster greater communication, before technology and constant communication overran human connection. With his richly detailed and almost hypnotic prose, Benvie ultimately makes the point that despite the advances in technology in the year 2012, interpersonal communication is just as difficult as it was in the pre-cell phone era. By giving a familiar landscape a fatalistic tint, Benvie’s Maintenance, a title that ironies the mechanical gestures people make to maintain their sanities and their selves in North American culture, is an absorbing effort to penetrate beyond commonly accepted thematic and vernacular banalities.
Rob Benvie was born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has since split his time between Montreal and Toronto, where he graduated from Trinity College, University of Toronto with a degree in English and Political Science. His writing has appeared in many print and online journals including McSweeney’s, Joyland, Matrix and Broken Pencil. In his musical life he has recorded and toured internationally with such endeavours as Thrush Hermit, The Dears, Camouflage Nights and Tigre Benvie. His is the author of Safety of War, also with Coach House Books.