Confidence: Stories by Russell Smith

by Russell Smith

"A poisonously funny portrait of the so-hip-it-hurts fashion, food, and bar scene."—Maclean's

In the stories of Confidence, there are ecstasy-taking PhD students, financial traders desperate for husbands, owners of failing sex stores, violent and unremovable tenants, aggressive raccoons, seedy massage parlors, experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day, and wives who blog insults directed at their husbands. There are cheating husbands. There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, psychiatric wards. There is one magic cinema and everyone has a secret of some kind.

Russell Smith is the author of Girl Crazy and How Insensitive. Confidence, recently longlisted for the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, is his US debut.

Genres: Short Stories, Canada, Fiction, Canadian Literature

Paperback

First published May 5, 2015

About the author

Russell Claude Smith is a Canadian writer and newspaper columnist. Smith's novels and short stories are mostly set in Toronto, where he lives.

Smith grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He attended the Halifax Grammar School and Queen Elizabeth High School, and studied French literature at Queen's University, the University of Poitiers, and the University of Paris III. He has an MA in French from Queen's.

Russell Smith is one of Canada’s funniest and nastiest writers. His previous novels, including How Insensitive and Girl Crazy, are records of urban frenzy and exciting underworlds. He writes a provocative weekly column on the arts in the national Globe and Mail, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Guelph. He hates folk music.

Reviews

[Sameer Vasta · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first, I thought that I didn’t enjoy Russell Smith’s Confidence because all the characters are the kinds of people I abhor: well-off, young, hip, upper-middle class Torontonians that don’t do anything productive with their time or money but still find it in them to complain about how life is so hard and how nobody can ever understand their existential anguish. None of them acknowledge any of their privilege, and instead use that privilege to abuse—mentally, emotionally, financially, to varying levels—those that are less fortunate than them. In between their wanton drug use and insatiable sex drives and borderline alcoholism, they whine about not being able to get everything they want, without realizing that they get so much more than the rest of the world around them.

That’s when I realized that while I didn’t enjoy Russell Smith’s Confidence, I certainly respected and admired his collection of short stories. Mr. Smith’s portrayal of Toronto’s upwardly-mobile, overly-hip, and aggressively-image-conscious class is scathing in its ridiculousness; none of the characters can be taken seriously, and because of that, the stories act as an incisive satire on our city’s urban culture. His prose is effectively curt: he does not want to elicit any sympathies for the cheating husbands or drug-addled adult students, and isn’t afraid to craft a narrative that is disdainful of their lives and actions.

The Toronto that Mr. Smith captures in his collection isn’t squalid—he does not focus on what would be typically considered the seedy underbelly of the urban environment—but is instead more the scratch marks on an overly-glossy surface: everything seems shiny and new, but is marked by flaws and blemishes. (These flaws are the failings of his characters, all manipulative and mostly-reprehensible despite their outward appearances.) It is a Toronto that makes me shudder, full of lying, cheating, and misogyny—a Toronto that I know exists but choose to hide myself from during my day-to-day life.

Despite the recoil I experienced reading about these characters, I have to recommend this short yet impactful collection of stories; Mr. Smith is a talented chronicler of the human condition, even when he is chronicling the most abhorrent among us. We should all read Russell Smith’s Confidence not just because his prose is terse and his tales are despicably captivating; we should all read Confidence to remind us of the kinds of people we should endeavour never to become.

(Full review on I Tell Stories.)

[Peter Darbyshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smith’s always been known as a satirist, but the stories in Confidence are darker than anything he's written in the past -- darker and more desperate. Perhaps it's the fact his characters are moving into middle age now, just like Smith is. While his other books featured characters caught up in the cool factories of Toronto, Confidence is mainly about men and women caught up in the sticky webs of long-term relationships, trapped by children and debt and just enough love/longing. These stories are equal parts despair, acceptance and empathy. Forget satire -- this is life.

[Alison Baxter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two or three years ago I saw Russell Smith at an art show, wearing trendy clothes, carrying a toddler and accompanied by an equally trendy, extremely thin and unhappy looking woman. He looked as if he were just exhausted to be still playing the hipster after so many years. For that reason, I am completely unsurprised at the cold, hard and jaded look at downtown urban society he has painted. Extremely funny and talented writer, and I would guess the dark stories are highly personal in nature.

[Ian Coutts · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thing I like about Russell Smith is that the stories in this book contain no snow. Nor do they contain a bleak landscape that is a metaphor for the protagonist's soul. Instead his not always terribly nice people live in big cities and do big city things. You could read one hundred Canadian novels and never know that this country contained a single restaurant or a club people were dying to get into. I just finished these stories in the week after Canada Reads was running on the CBC, so I had had my fill of literature as medicine. Confidence was a nice antidote.

[Corinne Wasilewski · Rating 2 out of 5]

So Maclean's calls this collection "poisonously funny"? I call it deeply depressing. It makes me want to live out the rest of my years alone by myself in some barren outpost accessible only by small boat or helicopter. It's the characters in these stories. They are bleak -- all driven by a desire for power, money and the material trappings of success while lacking any genuine warmth or compassion. They reduce life to a game of winners and losers and then use drugs/alcohol to dull their feelings of inadequacy and failure. They are the kind of people who give humans a bad name. Nothing wrong with Smith's writing, however. He writes like a winner ;)

[Margarita · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished reading this series of short stories by Russell Smith within the span of two days. I couldn’t put it down. Unlike other readers who were turned off by the morally bereft characters, I was drawn to them. Smith has a fearless narrative voice. He dabbles in dark subject matter – materialism, selfishness, vices, ennui – mostly as they pertain to some thirty to forty-year-old yuppie. What other readers have labelled as depressing or cynical, I have appreciated as punchy and satirical. While I understand Smith’s style might not appeal to everyone, there’s no denying the distinctiveness and talent behind his writing.

[Ron S · Rating 4 out of 5]

The urban environment Smith details in his short stories is every bit as fully realized as the small town and rural milieu of Alice Munro.

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

What he needed was some kind of confidence. He had confidence in his writing, and that was it. That's where he'd show them. He'd show them confidence. He'd come back tomorrow night, and the night after that, and write down everything he saw.

I don't live in Toronto, but I am technically in the exurbs, and after reading Confidence, I don't think I'd like to live any closer. The eight short stories in this collection are mostly about a certain type of urban male: those who want to be in relationships yet still remain free to take recreational drugs, hang out with their buddies, and if the opportunity arises, have guilt-free hookups with other women. Everyone in these pages has some sort of secret – whether it's a man planning to turn a basement apartment into a porn studio or a woman looking forward to an evening of dressing comfortably, drinking Pepsi straight from the bottle, and knitting (all activities that she, somewhy, must hide from her husband's censure) – and for the most part, this is a pretty unlikable cast of characters. Maybe you need to live in the city to see them.

The restaurants are all painfully hip (you know they're cool by their ironic names and lack of signage) and serve the kind of nonsensical meals that barely rate as food:

Rabbit dumplings in miso vanilla froth. And this is the mache mousse with wasabi beet crackers. And those are your seared whiting on lemon zabaglione. The quail broth is coming.

In these establishments, you'll probably see some hipster types, like:

A bearded guy, who couldn't have been older than twenty-three, sitting with his legs stretched out into the waiter's path, a guy with a heavy wool sweater, and tweed trousers and a tweed cap and knee-length Wellington boots.

As a fellow patron notes, “He has to sit that way so everyone sees the boots. Without the boots it's just casual wear.” Don't you just want to trip over his feet and sorry, not sorry spill your Lingonberry Smokedrop down his cableknit front? In more exclusive clubs, thirty-five-year-old female hedge fund managers are trying to lock down rich husbands – no time to date an actual nice/sensitive-type while the clock is ticking – while a Mirvish-wannabe and a washed-up novelist figure out how best to use each other. Those husbands who seem faithful just haven't been caught yet, and if men really want to know what their women are thinking, they just need to read their blogs.

After one date in TXTS, a man discovers himself on a blog subtitled “Adventures in Urban Dating”, and there's a certain ironic pathos to her being turned off by his mid-date texting with someone else when he doesn't even have a qwerty keyboard:

He just used the old fashioned alpha spelling, press seven twice for r, three times for s, get it wrong, back up, try again, do it in the wrong case, back up, try again.

Do they still sell phones like that? In Raccoons, an unfaithful husband-type can only know what his wife is really thinking from her “40YearOldMom” blog and her frequent Facebook and Twitter updates: When husbands move around a couple of boxes in the garage, do they expect the rest of the day off? #mommytime #entitlement

These stories are mostly about men, but I did like that sexy lady bartenders consistently brushed off the advances of guys who thought they were probably slumming by flirting with them; liked when one of the eponymous Fun Girls dropped her partygirl facade to explain to a man that, as she's a TA, she's not interested in him trying to teach her anything. As satire, there was much that I found funny in this collection, but curiously, what I found slightly annoying were any attempts to reveal a bit of soul inside the unlikable shells of these characters. Raccoons and Sleeping With an Elf were both shaping up to be favourites of mine until their final scenes rendered the stories a bit sappy and overdone. Confidence is an interesting time capsule of a very particular time and place (and like I said, I'm happy it's not actually like this where I live), and I'd rate it at 3.5 stars if I could, rounding down to rank it against similar collections.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories in Russell Smith's collection, Confidence, continue mining the vein he has carved out for himself through four novels and an earlier collection of stories, skewering the social and artistic pretensions of a mostly abhorrent class of upwardly mobile, conceited, self-absorbed young professional. Moreover, they do so with a degree of exuberance that suggests the author remains enthusiastically engaged in this particular brand of social satire more than two decades into his writing career.

Smith’s characters are envious and dissatisfied, morally compromised or living through some sort of relationship or emotional turmoil, usually self-inflicted. Life has brought them to a point where it seems that a big opportunity is just around the corner. But when they gaze at the darkened streets through an alcohol- or drug-induced haze from the back seat of a taxi, or survey the view from their bar stool or their seat in a restaurant, what they see are others who have more money, nicer possessions, cuter girlfriends (or boyfriends) and better prospects. In Smith’s fiction, social encounters do not take place innocently. Conversations between men and women carry more than a hint of sexual calculation. When two men talk, you can be sure a negotiation is taking place. The stories are fluent in the language of casual drug use. People getting high is the rule rather than the exception. The laughs are frequent, because Smith’s characters are self-medicating in order to dull the sting of failure. When forced to make an impression they can puff themselves up and appear cool. But reality lands with a thud in the morning light. What they want and what they get are often two very different things. Paradoxically, nobody is very sure of themselves. Confidence, it turns out, is a scarce commodity in the world depicted here.

These stories bristle with dramatic energy. We may not like Russell Smith's characters. We may not hope that they succeed, and in fact might actively root for them to fail. But there's no denying that Smith is a master when it comes to writing dialogue and setting a scene. Highly entertaining.

[Michael Bryson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think of Smith as a short story writer, but I admired his first collection, and this one might be the best he's ever written. A darker book than he's done before, too. Comic, but unsettling.

Too many copy editing or printer errors to go unremarked, unfortunately.

[Debbie Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, a tough book to rate! As one of the characters situated in a bar scene asked, "So why come here? What do these people have to talk about? That would interest you?" (p. 120)

Storyteller Russell Smith is a gifted writer who manages to poke fun at what I would described are unlikeable "urban" characters: cheating husbands, mentally-ill wives, prostitutes, drug and alcohol addicts and consumers, abusive lesbians, porno video sellers, bar hoppers, black mailers, and those contemplating open marriages.

Did I really want to read about "Fun Girls" like Katrina who "lifted her leg, as long as a hockey stick, flashing a sliver of gusset, and stuck it out the cab window."? (p. 33) I'm sure there are those who would pull out their binoculars and cheer.

If you are looking for intelligence or an intellectual read, you won't find it here. Smith is catering to a different audience and that is fair.

While I initially thought the front cover depicted an alien skull with dark penetrating eyes, I later discovered upon closer viewing that the image was the curved back of a nude woman which foreshadowed the themes of the eight short stories featured.

While most of the subject matter didn't appeal to me, Smith's strengths could be found in his dialogue and vivid descriptions. I found several gems including these two lines: "The sky was the colour of a recycling bin." (p. 62) and "Mother's Day hung over the house like an appointment for surgery." (p. 125) Lines like those made reading this book interesting for me.

[Roz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished this today. A series of stories about Toronto, hipsters who are too old to be them, people who are pretending to be cool when they’re no longer, relationships that are falling apart.

Is it funny? Yeah I guess. It reminds me of when I was a little younger and a little meaner and used to roll my eyes at people with beards who went to Fleet Foxes concerts, but I also kind of wanted to be one of them. It was that kind of vibe- the men here are all kind of regretting getting old but can’t admit it. As Pete Townshend once sang, “I don’t wanna wear no ripped shirt / can’t pretend getting older doesn’t hurt.”

It’s interesting and I liked it, although it didn’t blow me away or anything. I will keep an eye out for more of his stuff.

[Adam Vanderlip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smiths writing crackles when he veers into powerful thirty somethings and the complicated dance of dating, marriage and position that makes for a confusing time for many of the characters. The stories about twenty somethings, with their forced and dated dialogue, drag on. Some of the stories seem to want to say something about the banality of modern life but just end up looking precious instead. Still, the overall effect is of flashes of genius from an author I have been enjoying.

[Emily Weedon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark as scorched espresso, intricately constructed, fluidly worded, fearlessly provocative. Plots ratchet mercilessly. Frequently hilarious. Always unflinching. There's damnation of human activity here, and deep celebration at the same time. Can't recommend highly enough.

[Lisa Macklem · Rating 2 out of 5]

Far from my favorite of Smith's work. Perhaps I'm just too far from this demographic. If you like reprehensible men - all of whom cheat on their significant others - this book is for you. Yes. It does capture that "yuppie" Toronto feel, but I wanted to shoot every one of these characters in the head. It was pulling teeth to finish all of these...

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad. According to critics on back cover, these stories are 'a poisonously funny portrait of the so-hip-it-hurts fashion, food and bar scene.' Maclean's ...Well, way past the 30 something crowd am I but not so suburban that I can't appreciate a good time out with friends...oh, wait, these stories aren't really about friends more like people who cannot sustain relationships or marriages and cheat like bunnies procreate all over the place. Sorry if that sounds a little harsh. Maybe this is what the condo 30 plus crowd in Toronto is really like. If so, then my apologies to the subject matter. The time I did the bar scene was a very long time ago. Writing is good, sharp, neat and I won't fault the author that. I like Russell Smith in the Globe & Mail and always read him. I was curious about this new book of 8 stories. They just aren't for me. As for the order of the stories I almost gave up after the first two but story 3 onwards redeemed themselves. Two drug laden stories to start off with did not bode well. Mixing up the order would have been much better. Raccoons was my fave story. And not about raccoons at all. Like I said, not bad and if you are under 40, do read.

[Len · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly unlikeable people in mostly hard-to-believe situations, made enjoyable. I loved his writing, and each story brought me in immediately, but what keeps me from rating this higher is how genuinely difficult it was to feel endeared toward any of the characters. And really, in Smith's world, is every single person doing drugs?

[Marta Kule · Rating 4 out of 5]

I LOVE it! Sex, drugs, and despicable people! Like a tabloid but from an insider's, not paparazzi's, perspective. Spoiled Rich Frustrated Torontonian Male Tells All.

The prose is tight and precise—no unnecessary words, one-phrase spot-on descriptions, short and clear sentences.

Clever, inventive, and jaded. I want more.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories are darker than some of Smith's previous work but I really enjoyed them. I felt as if he was exploring what happens when a certain kind of person (young Torontonian, artsy, possibly shallow) gets a little older and has responsibilities and has to adjust (or not adjust) to a different version of reality.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of a mish-mash. There are a number of stories that are full of fascinating characters & situations...and stories that simply didn't hold my interest. I'm splitting the difference in the star rating as a result. Occasionally this collection hits a bullseye, but it also feels like Russell Smith is trying too hard to be zeitgeist-y with an aging crowd.

[August Bourré · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Colibri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second book that i'm reading by Smith. Dark short stories, which describe how we've become. That's quite frightening.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book of short stories takes you to places that are so honest and true. What a way to write. I loved this book!

[Jen Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25. Lovely collection.

[Tricia Dower · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection. Smart, funny and sad all at once, it captures a certain urban psyche.