‘Ballistics’ by D.W.Wilson is a novel about what it really is to be a man

Ballistics is the debut novel from D W Wilson. It playfully and interestingly twists and pulls at the heart of what we understand about human relationships. This is rural Canada, where men are men and Hemingway is a sissy. These are the blue-collar workers of Bruce Springsteen and no problem is too small not to be solved by increased muscle, increased drinking or, failing that, the ballistics of the title. Yet, underlying the bravado and occasionally excessive butch depictions of butch life, this is a subtle novel. For example, we are repeatedly told that Cecil West, the grandfather at its heart, is an unreconstructed male and that it’s ‘a hell of thing to picture, Old Man West as a romantic’. Yet the narrative quietly undermines these assertions throughout, with the dedication West shows as a lone parent, first to his son and then to his grandson; the guilt and quiet grief he feels when he has to kill a deer struck by his truck and that the only person he will cry for is his dead wife.