The Dominion - short fiction

October Books

Moira Peters — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:02:42 +0000

New works by Holbrook & Holtz, translation by Rexroth

Joy is So Exhausting
Susan Holbrook
Coach House Books: Toronto, 2009

On writing humor, Dorothy Parker said, “There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind.”

Susan Holbrook’s Joy is So Exhausting is a collection to make Parker proud. Tongue-in-check tart, Holbrook’s poetry is full to the brim with truncated aphorisms (invented) and the juxtaposed rhetoric of double-entendres: “Your First Timpani? Take a deep Brecht and relapse.” Her words play musical chairs and broken telephone at the same time.

While I’m less keen on the Canadiana in-jokes (Green Party, Conservative Party, Peter Mansbridge) and other CBC News refrains, I appreciate that even these dropped names exist in a galaxy far from purple.

Speaking of blue, Holbrook’s sexy lady-love responses to Lorca move liquidly, acting as a sort of Psalm and response style poetical liturgy. And “Poetsmart Training for Your Poet” is hold-your-sides hilarious. Show it to your scruffiest poet and get them in line already.

You’ll read Joy is So Exhausting with a dry pair of eyes; this writer’s whet her wit sharp.

—Melissa Bull

Written on the Sky: Poems from the Japanese
translated by Kenneth Rexroth
New Directions: New York, 2009

At some point, most Canadian pre-teens gain a rudimentary understanding of Japanese poetry. Unfortunately my exposure to this tradition has never branched out from those unrhyming lines of five, seven, and five syllables I learned in grade four.

Given this limited exposure, I was excited to learn something from this short collection. However, this is far from an educational tool. Apart from the names and genders of the poets, and the dates they lived, no background information is provided. But this lack of supplementary material is only slightly disorienting. When confronted exclusively with the poems themselves, you can uncover a lifetime of visceral images in these succinct verses.

I keep returning to Masaoka Shiki’s poem, which reads in its entirety: “Frozen in the ice / A maple leaf.” Bare and direct, that maple leaf can spark deep imaginative involvement. Then again, it can be just a leaf in the ice. Stripped of decorative phrasing and emotional triggers, each re-reading provides a new response.

Packaged in a glossy black and gold jacket with ornate flowers and butterflies, this collection seems so much like a romantic gift that they could have published it on pink heart-shaped pages. Cynical as that might sound, it’s probably damn effective as such.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

This One’s Going to Last Forever
Narine Holtz
Insomniac Press: Toronto, 2009

It’s one thing to look for love in all the wrong places; it’s another not to look at all.

Narine Holtz’s style cuts to the point and embraces our so-called sexual deviances, her characters share the same confidence to love and find love in the most unexpected places.

Take the sexy amputee who fulfills the fetishized desires of a man and wonders at the cosmic joke of “leaving her homophobic girlfriend” and finally discovering pleasure where she’d only known pain. The phantoms of her past disappear as “her cunt caramelized like sugar sweating in a hot pan.”

One of This One’s best lines is delivered by a middle-aged gay man who performs drive-through weddings dressed as Elvis. The words he speaks about his fag hag, Tracy, and the reasons he’s drawn to her eccentric drama, are among the most tender of this collection.

While the writing is not overtly sexy, Holtz delivers enough intimacy and eroticism to tease but not quite satisfy. This suspended gratification almost has me begging Holtz for a collection of erotic stories that fulfils the fill-in-the-blank anticipation of This One.

This collection of short stories is anchored by the central chapters, telling the story of Clara and her emerging politicization. If you weren’t a small-town Alberta lesbian coming out in Montreal in 1989, Holtz takes you there: “Even the meaning of the words the other students used—words like ‘colonialization,’ ‘hegemony,’ and ‘deconstruction”—weren’t clear to her.”

The greatest source of internal conflict for Clara is her sexuality, and despite her experience with men, she’d rarely known the pleasure of intimacy and love. Say hello to Gabby, who makes Clara blush when she says, “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.”

However, Gabby’s loyalty is to women, not to one woman. Here Holtz, who was awarded the Alice B. Award for debut lesbian fiction for her previous novel, channels Nietzsche: “In the end, one loves one’s desire and not what is desired.”

Clara’s sexual soul searching may not have been written for comic effect, but her insecurities and coming-of-age epiphanies rarely failed to crack me up. On one hand, her voice is prescient, endearing and sweetly pathetic. On the other, it’s self-absorbed and tedious. Her doubts also flit through the minds of many queer women; she’s not alone and she’s not original. Once between the sheets with her lover, her mind is finally put at ease.

—Megan Stewart

Melissa Bull works in Montreal as a writer, editor, and translator. Her first collection of short fiction, Eating Out, was published by WithWords in 2009.

Megan Stewart is an independent journalist in Vancouver, where she is completing her graduate degree at the University of British Columbia.

Shane Patrick Murphy is the former executive editor of the McGill Law Journal. He is slowly getting around to writing his first novel, Still I Dream of Grandeur.

September Books

Moira Peters — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 05:43:36 +0000

Short stories by Goldbach, humour by Leiren-Young

Selected Blackouts
John Goldbach
Insomniac Press: Toronto, 2009

Sometimes realism can be too realistic. Without narrative flare or insight from the author, superficial realism can spiral around banalities that make the life of an amateur literary critic look like an atomic bomb of excitement.

John Goldbach occasionally gets trapped by the boredom and frustration of his characters in Selected Blackouts, his debut collection of short fiction. These stories rapidly shift from exuberant experiments to monotonous dialogues with little compromise between the two. It’s a shame to see a few drawn out and directionless stories deter from otherwise brilliant moments scattered throughout this collection.

Luckily, Goldbach’s humour often shines in original narrative structures and bleak subject matter. “How Much Do They Know?” is the inner-monologue of a character reunited with some long-time friends at a Christmas party. It would take timelines and diagrams to unravel the years of cheating, jealousy, and backstabbing outlined in this short story. But the essential point is the narrator knows several secrets about each person around the table. In listing his own collection of secrets, he comes to realize each friend likely holds an equal number of unspoken stories about himself and the others. The story’s conclusion is a straightforward and inevitable comment on friendship itself: “I really don’t understand why we tolerate each other.” The idea is familiar to most close-knit friends, but Goldbach infuses this everyday observation with his own insights and humour, which is what realism should set out to do.

Goldbach has a talent for unveiling the psychological tensions that awkwardly bind people together, but one story in particular, “Easter Weekend,” simply gets bogged down in tiring exchanges between characters who can’t express themselves. Here Goldbach takes a security-camera view, recording objective words and actions in colourless prose. There is some logic in presenting the teenage stock-characters in their own light: They repeat cliches, they interrupt each other, and they leave the most important parts unsaid. But too often Goldbach gives us only these mumblings while neglecting the anxieties brewing in the undercurrents. Unfortunately, a realistic depiction of a boring conversation makes for really boring reading. Nevertheless, these somewhat lifeless dialogues find their balance in Goldbach’s shorter, punchier, and more endearing pieces.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Never Shoot A Stampede Queen: A Rookie Reporter in the Cariboo
Mark Leiren-Young
Heritage House: Victoria, 2008

A cub reporter haphazardly lands himself at a small-town community paper and over-uses the adjective venerable as if the irony were original.

Naturally, 22-year-old Mark Leiren-Young has a lot to gain from his months at the Williams Lake Tribune in the early 1980s and, 25 years later, he introduces the memoir Never Shoot a Stampede Queen with the goal of staying true to his younger self.

Stampede Queen won a Leackock Award for humour, but much of the prose struck me as condescending and aloof—not the insight and wit I hoped for. Maybe it’s the immature narrator’s persistent indelicate stereotyping after he arrives in the Cariboo, a ranching region in the central interior of British Columbia. But in time he dismantles many of his own caricatures and begins to write with pathos, maturity and even humour.

The narrator laments, upon arriving in Williams Lake, population not very much, “It was my worst nightmare. I was about to start work as a newspaper reporter in a town with no news.”

By the time he realizes how wrong he is, Leiren-Young is on his way back to Vancouver and restless to finish the profile of a local judge, an investigative piece on bigoted landlords, and the series on the town’s crime rate he committed to and was genuinely keen to report. He proves himself a very good reporter with natural storytelling instincts and a common touch.

Despite unfair leaps and character assumptions, Leiren-Young nails the reality of community reporting: an epic 24 news briefs and stories in one day; typing merely to fill column inches; covering issues of poverty, housing, and First Nation rights that merit national attention; wages that have barely risen in two decades; vicarious traumatization in the criminal courts; and the surprise of finding humanity where it’s least expected.

The strength of this collection of non-fiction stories is voice and storytelling. When he’s not making a Clint Eastwood comparison, Leiren-Young shares fantastic anecdotes worthy of broad Canadian attention. We hear the narrator grow up through language and professionalism—he becomes a better journalist and is progressively more open-minded. His writing becomes increasingly nuanced, and it seems as if Leiren-Young eventually sees past the cliches to connect with a more honest portrayal of the Cariboo.

—Megan Stewart

Megan Stewart is an independent journalist in Vancouver, where she is completing her graduate degree at the University of British Columbia. Shane Patrick Murphy is the former executive editor of the McGill Law Journal. He is slowly getting around to writing his first novel, Still I Dream of Grandeur.

August Books

Moira Peters — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 05:26:53 +0000

New works by Steinberg, Comeau

We Could Be Like That Couple...
Sarah Steinberg
Insomniac Press, 2008

Picture a paper plate. On the plate you’ve got some bite-sized quiche, a little cube of cheese, and fingers of tooth pick-skewered meats. You’re looking at a plateful of mini-meals. Sarah Steinberg’s tip of the iceberg collection, We Could Be Like That Couple... is like this dinner of hors d’oeuvres—her stories are Spartan, salty. They’d go well with booze.

The title of the first story, "We Could Be Like That Couple From That Movie That Was Playing Sometime” sets the tone of the book: wistful, colloquial, ironic. And it spoke to me immediately: “Do you know how it feels when you need a certain taste in your mouth and instead you have, like, the opposite of that flavour in your mouth and all you want, in that instant, is whatever it is that’s going to satisfy that craving?”

Having one thing but wanting another makes wanting a kind of having all its own. We Could Be Like That Couple’s parade of characters express their desires and dissatisfaction slant-wise. They don’t gripe, they just notice how things are off, how routine details take up so much space in their lives that their expectations get blurred.

The narrators consistently fit their stories: in the tragi-comedy “You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This,” Rhonda, who lisps, appears “hand shoved deep inside the mouth of her purse,” rummaging for a tissue. She’s at a vernissage and her eyes are leaking. She’s hot for a teacher, who’s there, coincidentally. Maybe Rhonda’s stalking him, maybe she’s imagining they’re having a relationship. Professor Halle asks if Rhonda’s all right. She answers—with a line that puts Dirty Dancing’s “I carried a watermelon” to shame—“It’th okay. I jutht can’t control my eye excrethionth.”

Uncomfortable, long-suffering, judgemental and moving, Steinberg writes with a sharp, strong voice. Her stories often end with a shift from specific details to big ideas—a horizon, vertigo, loss, or a near-miss. There’s a breathing pace to the collection, and the way text is set on the page—sparse paragraphs with justified margins all cut by an asterisk—gives the prose room. It looks like a René Gladman text but reads more like Mary Gaitskill or Joyce Carol Oates.

We Could Be Like That Couple... is one scrappy, skinny book. I’d like more. This won’t hold me ‘til suppertime.

–Melissa Bull

Overqualified
Joey Comeau
ECW, 2009

Cover letters are a consistently depressing form of writing. After I finished a master’s degree, I spent almost a year finding new ways to say, “Choose me! I’m good! And desperate… horribly desperate!” Eventually I found work in parking lots, mail rooms, and a cowboy-hat factory before giving up and retreating to law school.

And that style of writing was all I really expected from Overqualified, a collection of cover letters by Toronto writer Joey Comeau. The angst and misfortunes of job searching can be amusing and predictable. But Comeau doesn’t get bogged down in the usual cover-letter routine beyond a few introductory lines to each letter. Instead, he spills out bits of autobiography, dreamscapes, perversions, and generally unleashes his id in a manner guaranteed to never land him a job of any sort.

Comeau takes the structure of a cover letter and completely removes himself from the job-searching context. We don’t learn much about what Comeau does for a living or if he’s looking for a job at all. We learn in gritty detail that his brother Adrian recently died in a car accident, his Acadian grandmother refuses to speak to him in French, and he’s got a girlfriend named Susan who he feels reluctant and relieved to love. He’s a self-confessed pervert who wouldn’t trust himself with a webcam. His dreams mix sex and violence. On top of that, John Wayne apparently calls him crying in the middle of the night.

A novelty act? Well, sure. The idea of making a book out of cover letters isn’t a grand innovation. But Comeau’s skill is to weave his life story, including its neurotic undercurrents, around a literary structure that encourages us all to sound like duller people, not to mention dull writers. These rambling cover letters are utterly bizarre, but they also present their author’s genuine complexity. Overqualified never unravels into an angst-soaked diary, even when it comes close. There is a compelling tension behind each letter which makes the book consistent and weirdly enjoyable.

–Shane Patrick Murphy

February Books

Moira Peters — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:04:26 +0000

New works by Romanik and Gass

10 Things to Ask Yourself in Warsaw and Other Stories
Barbara Romanik
Enfield & Wizenty, 2008

Barbara Romanik’s short fiction rips along with streetwise verve, displaying an eclectic sense of style and some beguiling idiosyncrasies along the way. Several of the stories take place in the prairies (the author is described in her bio as a “Polish Canadian from Edmonton who now resides in Winnipeg”), but Romanik has an outsider’s eye for the details. Consider the way the prose comes alive when she begins to describe the prairie cityscape, as in the following evocation of Edmonton’s “slumburbia” in “Caught Up”:

At its worst, downtown lets itself go east of 97th street. It turns into a crumbling concrete, broken glass and rotting plywood on buildings, parking lots, and street alleys behind the restaurants, bars, and sexshops. There the pavement gives birth to resignation, a numbing stench of nuclear proportions, as moldy as cheese. Yet both Little Italy and Chinatown manage to rise to the top of it like cream. The wind and the snow, winter’s avenging angels, have covered most of it up and masked the stale odour.

Those who have lived in a prairie city will recognize a trace of themselves in “the pavement gives birth to resignation” amid a paragraph that perfectly conjures forth the bleak atrophy of life in a deep freeze. Intermingling interview transcripts, newspaper articles, advertisements, and other “found” documents, Romanik isn’t afraid to mix genres: a kind of patchwork that suits her characters’ conception of themselves as misfits. It also seems logical that this literary mash-up aesthetic would suit a longer form, meaning that if Romanik follows the most common career trajectory from a first short fiction collection, readers will be hearing about a novel at some point in the future.

Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas
William H. Gass
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009

William H. Gass is one of the senior practitioners of American literary postmodernism, and he comes by it honestly. Of the works collected in Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (first published in 1998 and newly available from Dalkey Archive Press), “Cartesian Sonata” appeared in 1964, making Gass one of the early experimental writers to join in the movement’s mid-century flowering. Gass’s reputation was achieved not by appropriating a set of pre-established conventions, as is the case with many “postmodern” writers (an increasingly empty descriptor) emerging even today, but through the gradual refinement of an aesthetic and years spent reading and writing on the vanguard. The book collection in Gass’s St. Louis home reportedly contains upwards of 19,000.

It’s a fascinating glimpse into the foundation of these techniques, in abundance over the last several decades to the point of cliché, at play for the first time. The title novella comes soaked in the kind of metafictional conceit instantly recognizable as one of the defining hallmarks of the postmodern sensibility: a story begins, and almost immediately the anxious writer’s own personality insinuates itself within the narration, explaining, fretting, and ultimately deconstructing. But Gass’s work is not without its straightforward rewards. For example, a passage in “The Master of Secret Revenges” enunciates with glittering precision the ethos that drove postwar writers of Gass’s ilk toward the subversion of established fiction writing technique:

[R]evelations are rarely the result of the minds climbing a ladder, each clear and definitely placed rung surmounted foot after foothold like a fireman performing a rescue; they are achieved more in the devious way cream rises to the top of its countless globules of fat are floating free and slipping upward . . . until gradually, nearly unnoticed, the globs form a mass which forces the blue milk beneath, whereupon the sweet cream crowns the carton, waiting to be skimmed.

Gass’s is the kind of work born of an artist’s total immersion within a form, to the point that, at some stage of development, the artistic enterprise begins seeking to change that form’s rules entirely. The latter novellas are the most controlled execution of Gass’s style and, as a result, feel the most accomplished. In general, the novella demonstrates a peculiar insularity, transient yet sustained, that sets it apart from the short story, perfectly suiting Gass’s more mature sensibility.