The Quick
by Barbara Scott
Cormorant Books, 1999
Review by Harold Hoefle
In Barbara Scott's debut story collection, The Quick, she never shies away from what is bleak
in life: the wasting effects of age, sundered relationships, human and
animal cruelties, teen death. Yet the characters never cave in to that
bleakness. Scott, born in Saskatoon and now living in Alberta, imbues
her protagonists with a prairie hardiness, an ability to size up their
pain, get into their car, "open her up ... and [aim] the leaping ornament
at the open road."
In five of the stories, the kitchen becomes the locus for important
rituals and events. A daughter recalls the care her mother and grandmother
took when styling Easter eggs, a middle-aged woman wows her husband with
Tillicherry peppercorns and tenderloin, a grad student's romantic life
begins over a chili dish garnished with coriander and jalapenos. Food
preparation becomes a metaphor for the violence of relationships both
romantic and familial. The peppercorns are "crushed", the tenderloin "deep
red"; the coriander "chopped" and the jalapenos "minced". Such metaphors
do not wash over you; it is only near a story's end that their resonances
surface.
While the careful sensory detail and metaphoric overtones of Scott's
kitchen scenes recalls the Cape Breton kitchens in Alistair MacLeod's
stories, like his work, hers can also be read as social history; specifically,
the Ukrainian immigrant experience in Saskatchewan. In Scott's opening
story, "Oranges" -- a finalist in two fiction competitions, and broadcast
on CBC's "Alberta Anthology" -- she shows how a stoical bearing links
four generations of women. The narrator, Blane, notes the disposition
of her great-grandparents and admits her own stoical tendencies. Still,
amid the heavy fatalism which attends such an attitude, she can remark
to herself: "As my mother has said -- and probably her mother before her
-- we do what we must. But I will dare what I can." Such a statement indicates
the personal growth and self-knowledge, vis-à-vis family, which Scott's
protagonists strive to achieve.
Her sure handling of various blue-collar and low-income jobs -- herbicide
sprayer, lifeguard, waitress -- recalls The Anarchist's Convention,
a story collection by John Sayles. As in the American's work, in Scott's
stories a job often symbolizes what is happening in a character's life.
The female grad student killing weeds in "How to Talk to Plants" slowly
learns how violence to the natural world reflects human violence; a waitress's
contemplated violence to herself -- breast reduction -- echoes the sexual
abuse she gets at work.
Structurally, Scott is impressively flexible: she uses first-person,
second-person, and third-person points-of-view. Her protagonists are women
in six stories of seven; the exception is a convincingly colloquial male
teen lifeguard. One weakness in the collection is Scott's overuse of vignettes.
Almost every story is broken into numerous sections, some as short as
three sentences; such a technique puts pressure on each vignette to be
dramatic, but too contrivedly so -- sometimes the result is a story whose
dramatic crescendo becomes staccato.
This critical concern aside, Scott's collection of short fiction is
deftly written, expansive in its thematic concerns, and wise in its understanding
of our pained lives.
Harold
Hoefle teaches literature in a Montreal high school, and his story "Spray
Job" appeared in the Fall 1999 issue of The Nashwaak Review.
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