Each member of my book group takes turns suggesting what we'll read next but there is an element of democracy. The proposer brings a list of three books and the group chooses one of them as next month's selection.
Last month was my turn. Of the three "Vancouver" books that I proposed, the group chose Property Values. (The other two options were Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor and JPOD by Douglas Coupland.)
Now that I've read it, I have to say that Property Values is the most "Vancouver" of the three. JPOD had as much or more to say about tech culture as it did about Vancouver, and Stanley Park was also about contemporary food culture. Property Values is squarely about Vancouver and only Vancouver.
Nominally, Property Values is a crime novel. The plot follows the adventures of our hapless hero as he gets caught up in a gang war between the "Underground Riders" and the Da Silvas. Along the way, we hang out with a multi-cultural cast of characters, experience the craziness of the local real estate market, and watch our characters touchily navigate every variety of political correctness.
Yes, the whole book is nothing but Vancouver tropes. Does that sound deadly? It's not. Every page is funny, and almost every laugh comes from playing with "true stereotypes" of the city and its people.
The Polis restaurant is "an authentic Hellenic experience" owned and operated by a Sikh family who've been in Canada longer than 90% of the white residents of the Lower Mainland. When our hero plans a drive-by shooting of his own house in an attempt to drive down its value, he considers several options for a getaway car -- including a Car2Go. At a "meet" with a biker, our pretend-gangster hero decides that he can't order his usual decaf London Fog because it's not a masculine-enough beverage. Not only do the hero's best friends come from Asian, Indian, and Egyptian backgrounds, his Asian friend is half Korean and half Chinese "meaning that whenever people guessed at Josiah's ethnicity -- as they invariably did -- they were always a little right and a little wrong".
Even the gang warfare featured in the novel is a Vancouver trope. The Asian Gangs era of the 90s was followed by the 00s era of the Bacon Brothers, the United Nations Gang, and the Independent Soldiers, who all operated alongside the ever-present Hell's Angels. Our current outbreak of shootings of people "known to police" hasn't been publicly attributed to any particular gang or gangs. But maybe that's because of the continuing decline of local reporting....which has also been a constant theme since the 90s. ("The glamour of the [news] office had been in decline for decades, but in the rearview mirror the Golden Age kept getting paradoxically closer. Five years ago, things had felt austere -- but today, five years ago seemed like Old Hollywood with unlimited budgets and bacchanalian Christmas parties, not to mention city council coverage and a theatre reviewer.")
Is Property Values high art? Well, it's an entertaining read that reflects Vancouver back to itself. It's fun and it feels true. That seems like more than enough.
