Silver Lake by Alex Pugsley
A Guest Review by John Delacourt
The CanCon Lost Illusions
Balzac, with his novel Lost Illusions, arguably wrote the definitive template for a particular journey from innocence to experience. It’s an unsparing vision of the corruption of talent and the pursuit of love, in all its perplexing distortions, through ambition’s hall of mirrors. But there hasn’t been a contemporary Canadian novelist who’s taken such a story and successfully transposed it onto the entertainment business or created any equivalent of Balzac’s Lucien Chardon, poetic soul from the countryside who comes to Paris to seek his fame and fortune. No one until now, however: Toronto-based author and filmmaker Alex Pugsley has succeeded with Silver Lake, his third entry in his Aubrey McKee series of novels.
“You don’t need to start with the first two in the series to sense the larger ambition at work, but they do enrich the progression of the author’s protagonist.”
In the first novel, McKee forges his identity in the Halifax of the seventies and eighties, influenced as much by the “toughest kid in the North End” Howard Fudge as he is by an eccentric scion of an old Halifax family, Cyrus Mair, and a small clique of budding aesthetes who, inspired by the music coming out of the UK in that era, form their own bands with aspirations of Canadian-famous, artistic legitimacy. The Aubrey McKee of the second novel moves to Toronto, falls in love with a young poet Gudrun Peel and hones his craft as a writer in fringe theatre, inspired by the success of his friend Calvin Drover, an LA based actor and comedian. Drover makes periodic returns to Toronto to flaunt his newfound wealth and attractiveness to the kind of women – aspiring, ambitious young actors – that Aubrey wishes would find him attractive. But in these first two books, McKee had yet to get the chance to work at Drover’s pay grade, and among his milieu.
Silver Lake is the novel where those aspirations are fulfilled. Drover returns and urges McKee to move on from reworking a draft of an unproduced play and his menial work on film sets in order to submit a sampling of his writing to a producer Drover knows and in less than a month, McKee is in Los Angeles, writing for the talk show “Weeknights with Pete Peters.” Suddenly, McKee has some real creative capital. He reconnects with an up-and-coming starlet Poppy Price – originally from Northern Ontario and determined not to go back there. She was out of McKee’s league in Toronto but in LA she can see him in literally a new light. In the throes of this new romance, McKee gets his shot at proving his mettle when a script of his is green lit for him to direct back in Canada – an ordeal that becomes as harrowing as it is humbling. The eventual dissolution of his relationship with Price seems, considering these travails, almost a consolation. Almost.
To read Silver Lake and its depiction of the entertainment industry in Toronto and LA in the early aughts is to be immersed in a world that the streamers and our digital overlords are rendering as obsolete as Balzac’s Paris, of course. Indeed, imagining a character like Poppy Price today conjures visions of botoxed, startled looking ciphers signing autographs at Comicon conventions. It’s hard to imagine Aubrey’s fate as any more glamorous. Yet Silver Lake is hardly as downbeat as all that; it’s a poignant, beautifully written look back at an era when one could still have illusions to lose in such a business, and aspirations the equal of McKee’s – and Pugsley’s - talent.
About the Author
Alex Pugsley has worked on over 185 produced episodes of television, writing for performers such as Lauren Ash, Scott Thompson, Jenn Whalen, Mark McKinney, Dan Aykroyd, and Michael Cera. He wrote and directed the feature film Dirty Singles which won for him the Irving Avrich Emerging Filmmaker Award at TIFF. Following the publication of his first novel, Aubrey McKee, he was named one of CBC’s Writers to Watch. His first story collection, Shimmer, was nominated for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and his most recent novel, The Education of Aubrey McKee, was longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards.
About the Reviewer
John Delacourt is an Ottawa based writer and consultant whose fiction and reviews have appeared in numerous publications in Canada and the US, including the New Quarterly and the Literary Review of Canada. His short story "Liner Notes" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his sixth novel, The Innocent Canadian, has just been released.
Book Details
Publisher : Biblioasis
Publication date : May 19 2026
Language : English
Print length : 208 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771967102
ISBN-13 : 978-1771967105