Stuart McGill, Back Mechanic

uncanny allusions & rooftop poses

“As Captain Barbosa stated in that famous line in the film ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ upon reneging his deal with Elizabeth, ‘Ah, the Pirate’s code — they’re more like guidelines!’”

Among the many advantages that non-writers have over writers is the ability to sound effortlessly like themselves. More times than I can count I’ve looked up after a day of struggling to capture some imaginary person’s voice (How would a pompous, retired psychiatrist tell his daughter that he would like her to come home for Thanksgiving?), only to receive an email from some non-imaginary person — a relative with a political opinion, a lawyer with a question about grammar — that is positively dripping with the marks of selfhood, the distinctive rhetorical loops and ridges, of the sort that I’ve spent hours failing to capture.

And this linguistic uncertainty bleeds inward: How would I tell someone that I’d like them to come over for Thanksgiving? Do I use too many dashes? What’s with all the exclamation points?

For the days when emails aren’t enough to restore in me a feeling of naturalness — when I need a veritable soak in the quirks of an authentic and unstudied voice — I turn to a genre that I hear discussed so little that I’m not even sure how to describe it: the self-published, non-fictional musings of non-writers. I’m talking about the collection of life lessons from the hospitality trade found on the bedside table of a roadside motel in Montana. I’m talking about the book of essays about prison life handed eagerly over by the stooped and squinting trainer at the boxing gym. I’m talking, above all, about Stuart McGill’s Back Mechanic.

For reasons that close readers of this newsletter will surmise, I sought out Back Mechanic in a spirit of corporeal, rather than literary, desperation. The stiff and battered doorway of back pain turns out to open onto a dubious literary bazaar  — there’s Dr. Sarno and his slim blue book for those who believe it’s all in your head; there’s Esther Gokhale for the anthropologically inclined; and there’s Stuart McGill with his wide and diagram-rich book for those of a materialist bent. I could go on and on about the substantive goodness of Back Mechanic — it has, I’m quite confident, alleviated more suffering than the collected works of, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne — but I want here to talk about its accidental literary virtues. I came to the book seeking physical relief; it didn’t occur to me that I would find joy.

McGill’s intentions in the book are strictly practical. Here’s how to test whether your pain is caused by a slipped disc or arthritis. Here’s why not to have surgery. Here are a series of exercises to be performed with the rigor of daily prayers. The writing throughout is appropriately brisk and no-nonsense (“We train the core to stop motion and train the shoulders and hips to create motion. This requires two entirely different philosophies and approaches.”) But occasionally McGill — a mustachioed Canadian professor who is, I gather, proud of his method and maddened by those who continue to resist its logic  — can’t help but let his personality leak, spinal-fluid-like, onto its pages.

A few chapters in, sensing that the reader might be wearying of all the talk of lumbar nerves and transverse abdominis muscles, McGill offers a list of ten plain-language Guidelines for Back Health. If the book were to be reduced to a laminated card you could keep in your back pocket (reach for it without twisting), this would be the source.

McGill introduces his list soberly:

Successfully avoiding future back pain, managing current pain and achieving full potential from your back requires that you adhere to the “code,” that is, the “code” required for a resilient back and pain-free lifestyle.

This is already promising, in terms of vocal distinctiveness, with its air-quotes and its nervously inserted “that is.” David Foster Wallace — with his pages of perfectly heard, straight-faced bureaucrat-ese in The Pale King — would have been proud to have written it. But the next sentence is my favorite in the book.

As Captain Barbosa stated in that famous line in the film “Pirates of the Caribbean” upon reneging his deal with Elizabeth, “Ah, the Pirate’s code — they’re more like guidelines!”

I worry that this will sound like I’m beating up on the poor professor (who saved my back!), so I want to be clear: I sincerely believe that this sentence, as a piece of writing, is worthy of attention. It is bristling with effects that the most perceptive of writers, assigned to capture the voice of a nerdy but cheerful Canadian academic, would struggle to achieve.

There is, first of all, the uncanny wrongness of the allusion, with The Pirates of the Caribbean being both too recent and too well-known to serve the usual audience-dazzling (How does he have all this stuff at his fingertips?) function of allusions. Think how different the effect would be if he had quoted The Searchers or Rififi.

And then there are the microscopic overcompensations for this sense that he might, by referring to a favorite movie, be bringing down the tone — stated, famous, upon reneging.

And finally there is the exuberant, to-hell-with-it joy of the quote itself: Ah, the Pirate’s code — they’re more like guidelines! This is a tiny joke McGill is making, not worth the trouble — he could just have written, Take these more as suggestions than as rules — but he thought of the scene and, enjoying the brief autocracy that comes from sitting behind a keyboard, he decided to grant himself this indulgence. The serious work of rehabilitation need not cancel out the simple happiness of familiar movies half-glimpsed on cable.

I love this sentence not only as a study of the ways in which character infuses the smallest of linguistic choices, but also as a demonstration of why it does a body good to occasionally read books that aren’t on anyone’s Best of the Year lists, that don’t come with reverential blurbs from authors you feel guilty not to have read, that weren’t thoughtfully set in typefaces first invented by Belgian monks.

Imagine the world of literature as an expensively-catered party on a hotel rooftop. There all the authors stand, chatting with you, the reader, yes, but also posing for posterity’s photographer, marveling at the fact that they’ve finally made it up here, glancing over your shoulder because they’re pretty sure that woman over there is… it is — it’s Margaret Atwood!

Stuart McGill stands in the corner of this party wearing a stained shirt tucked into khakis that have that zipper-defect that makes the top of the fabric bunch out awkwardly. His posture is exemplary. His smile is sincere. He looks right at you when he talks to you, wondering what’s brought you here, not worrying whether he’s read that article in New York Magazine that everyone’s talking about (he hasn’t). He’s here in service of literature’s oldest and noblest purpose: to share what life has taught him, in the hopes that it will ease your pain.