Particle and Wave
A Mansfield Omnibus of Electro-Magnetic Fiction
Mansfield Press, 2007

The Vagrant Review of New Fiction
Edited by Sandra McIntyre and Mary Jo Anderson
Vagrant Press, 2007

Reviewed by Paul Duder

It seems that it’s become possible in recent years--thanks, Alice Munro--to drop a "Canadian short stories" reference in polite society without inducing drowsiness or mild distaste. (This is no mean feat. Recall Michael Kinsley’s contest a few years back to determine the dullest headline of all time. The winner (loser) was "Worthwhile Canadian Initiatives."; not exactly on point, but suggestive of what we’re up against). Herewith a new cohort of aspirants to passage through the door in the zeitgeist that may, for the nonce, be open.

Coming Attractions 06, the latest-but-one of Oberon’s annual next-big-thing compendia, promises "three new writers of massive promise and talent and charm, dedicated to reinterpreting our weird world and nailing down mysteries of the psyche." (Sure: dream big.)

First up is Roseanne Harvey, a Montrealer by way of England, Japan and an ashram in B.C. She offers not short stories, exactly, but three arbitrarily broken-off chunks of a larger work in progress, apparently centered around Wonder World, a mammoth, full-service Japanese theme park. Right away, this seems like a bit of a put-up job. Unless one is planning some Westworld-ian, robot-Yul-Brynner-gone-mad business, this shrinking of the planet down to size for easy cross-cultural interface seems too convenient a one-world/global village metaphor.

Each piece focuses on a different park denizen, who we meet--unsurprisingly, given the milieu--in the depths of some kind of existential stew. Kaname is a young Japanese who works in the park’s was museum. He is an uncomfortably typical otaku fanboy, with his Joey Ramone coif and obsession with black American bluesman and Lady Di. Shy and ineffectual with people, comfortable in the inert and malleable wax world, Kaname longs for a relationship with a real woman. No such luck.

Harvey’s other two leads are western girls, working as Snow White and Anne of Green impersonators, having culturally unmoored, Lost in Translation moments amidst aimless sex, drunkenness, and much talk of personal reinvention.

The back cover quotes Harvey as saying that "the destinies of my characters are driven by uncertainty, but they never lose their sense of wonder about the world they inhabit"--I, on the other hand, never lose my sense of wonder at the po-facedness of these blurbists--but this seems too sunny. Her focus is on dislocation, anomie, deracination. The Baedeker to the street level Japan is both interesting and handy; otherwise, the talk of youthful rootlessness would be less involving, more obviously generic. These are character studies, not stories; heavy on exposition, light with plot. Harvey is clearly a talent, but I think we might profitably have waited for the completed work.

Larry Brown’s blurb’s first order of business is to mention his fondness for Hawaiian shirts, which gives fair warning of the prevailing level of quirk. He traffics in a very distinctive (and, frankly, hard to describe) prose style, clotted with weirdly non-linear language--not as self-justifying exercise, thank god, but (one suspects) as a simulacrum of actual thought and dialogue patterns. There is precious little stage direction, so that the reader is repeatedly required, not entirely begrudgingly, to flip back to recover the string, to figure out who’s speaking, and what about. Though this feels a little gimmicky at times, and his characters are a tad type-y and hee-haw crafty (he’s from Brantford, as it happens), he manages to create an oblique but heavy sense--part comedy, part genuine dread--that the future will not bring good things.

Edmontonian Joel Katelnikoff’s beat is dystopic, near-term sci-fi, most unabashedly on display in "Notes on the Apocalypse," a series of short, stand-alone paragraphs limning some brand of post-armageddon future, laden with mudwasps, metal streets, and a stroppy neighbour who won’t stay dead. The whole thing may be some form of polylinear fever dream, impossible to follow, tough to care about it. The thought occurs that neither following nor caring is part of the agenda.

"Fireworks," a sociological exegesis of a state fair as held in the Twilight Zone, is as close as Katelnikoff comes to actual narrative, and is the easiest piece to like. "[Untitled]" is a story of a mini-Kafka in the brave new impersonal and mechanized world, interspersed with some sort of diarized recasting of the bizarro events described. There is little distinction between the two versions, and the reader feels as if forced to sit through a breathy recitation of someone else’s dream, receiving an approximately commensurate level of entertainment.

Katelnikoff's riffs are too wonky, almost entirely crowding out plot and characterization. Though impressive in its way--you can’t pull this stuff off without a fecund imagination--it’s all too easy, too show-off-y. (In his quirky bio--these people at Oberon are cut-ups, I tell you--Katelnikoff claims that one of his goals is to "provide masturbation fodder for readers of all sorts." It grieves me to report that he has a lot of work still to do here.)

Particle and Wave, a showcase for five of Mansfield’s writers, is (I’m somewhat sorry to say) neither as skewed nor as experimental as the jazzy title suggests.

Kent Nussey, about whom very little biographical info is provided, offers two stories, which present as two offshoots of the same spine. Both involve young male protagonists coming out the other end of unspecified illness or injury, trying to readjust to and reintegrate into a changed world.

He talks movingly about illness, both literally and as metaphor; this is affecting stuff by its nature, but not shown to its best advantage in the short form, where there isn’t enough room to settle in with the characters and develop empathy. There are lots of writerly flourishes and phrase-making, but Nussey hasn’t quite managed the trick of making it all seem organic. As is common nowadays, his stories end without concluding. A talented writer who hasn’t yet mastered panache.

Poet and creative writing instructor Alexandra Leggat has civilization and its discontents on her conscience. In "Monsoon", a fat and bibulous mayor stews in his balcony, very Ionesco/Beckett, worrying about the rains and the chemicals that are killing pigeons also but nourishing the giant pumpkins that are--decisions, decisions-- the pride of his town. In "Apples and Rum", a longer and more heartfelt effort, she covers some of the same territory but in more straightforward fashion, mixing in some romantic tension and release along with her exploration of city values vs. the Old Ways. Though this strays a little close to hoary McCanLit territory, she registers more with the earthy approach than with the absurdist.

Salvatore Difalco, from down Niagara way, contributes two stories that freelance weirdness in a way that recalls Katelnikoff (though with improved masturbatory fodder). In "The Big Picture", the slightly less bizarre and slightly more successful of his two offerings, he writes of a young couple invaded by a mysterious cousin who seeds all sorts of upset, romantic and professional, until lives spin out of control. A puzzling tale, but eerily evocative on some level of the miasmic urban angst under which we labour. The difficult-to-parse "Hypnotist" tells of a mesmerist on the lam, toting a somnambulant victim, mysterious metal discs, and a promise that "someday all of this will mean something", which we certainly want to believe, but really can’t.

After "Up Up Up", a brief and fairly weightless palate cleanser about (I think) frustrated motherhood, Torontonian/poet/teacher Julie Booker serves up "Encounter", my favourite and I think the best of all these stories. With immense amounts of empathy and quiet verve, Booker gives us Jill, single, forty, underemployed and lonelier than she admits to herself, as she roots around, somewhere near the oddball nexus of speed-dating and evangelical religiosity, trying to find a bearable way to live.

Jill is sharp and appealing, and given to little apercus that show her kool-aid glass as still half full. (She wants salvation "to be like a visit to the optometrist, clicking those two lenses round and round until the bottom row is clearly black"; of a co-religionist with a leaky slicker, she "thinks now that maybe being saved didn’t protect you all that much".) Booker maintains a sure-footed balance between respect and derision. You are made to feel the loneliness that drives people to (say) religion, but don’t laugh at all at the duplicity, the opportunism. You can scoff at the drippy, cult-y basement prayer meetings, but not at the anchor they offer.

You really care for this squat, plucky lass with the pigtails, about what and whom she’ll decide on and/or settle for. I wish I could better understand, or articulate, or--best--replicate how Booker manages this. But manage it she does, and it’s a treat.

Kingston poet Jason Heroux contributes just one story, the longest of all considered here. Mixed in with banal details of our unnamed narrator’s life--his eight years at Harvey’s, his high school friend’s gig as a masseuse, trips to the dentist and a strip club--"Hello in There" details his wheelchair-bound friend Ray’s efforts to end his own unhappy life. Unusually, there is actual story arc here: will Ray succeed? Are his increasingly paranoid ramblings simply medication-fuelled, or something more? Will the narrator ever hitch up his socks and move on? A nice effort that would read better at two-thirds the length.

The Vagrant Review of New Fiction, a collection of 15 new Atlantic writers, one story, each, is perforce the most varied, and uneven, of these collections.

There are some fairly obvious, one dimensional entries, including "The White Rose Barbeque" (Brent White), a picture-perfect Reader’s Digest tale of farmers and country fairs and heritage moments; "Goin’ Back to Blue Rocks" (Rhian Calcott), wherein a damaged, lower-class kid works up the gumption to leave the big city and set things right with his abusive stepfather; and "About Face" (Russell Barton), about 1950s-era schoolboys plotting against their strict, Hitleresque master.

A good majority of the stories are successful, to a point. "You, Jane" (Joanne Jefferson), as an example, a story of lesbian awakening in an academic setting that’s both genuine and a little banal, insofar as the frisson of forbidden passion no longer attaches in our enlightened times. Similar, and similarly affecting, is "Pardon-speaking Blood" (Michelle Butler Hallett), whose obvious good-heartedness allows it to climb partially over its no-longer-scandalous take on Salvation Army good works and unwed mothers.

A couple of stories stand out. "Why Do Birds?" (Lee D. Thompson), a Hitchcockian tale of a woman with an ever-present personal flock of birds, is, if a little unfinished, still legitimately discomfiting. And "I Like to Hold Your Hand", a first effort by university student Nina Lassam, who uses the Rashomon device to take two looks at death, both from the point of view of a dying father, and of a daughter who we learn he doesn’t really know.

One mustn’t infer too boldly from small samples, of course, and yet it’s the mind’s tendency to impose order on a random universe. So: Canadian short story writers are teachers, moonlighting poets and get more female as we move east. They care more about impressing than entertaining; as for instructing, the jury is out. Canada is fine as setting, but not as subject, at least not in the CBC-approved, telling-our-own-stories-to-ourselves kind of way. Tranche-de-vie is a de rigueur buzzword; but third act, denouement, coda--not so much.

Protagonists tend to be heterosexual, sick, angsty, mistrustful of the urban environment, unhappy, working class, and insufficiently sexed. They don’t fly to the moon, spy for Her Majesty’s government, play professional sports, or kill their spouse for the insurance money. Of elderly people, we do not speak. Visible minorities? None today, thanks.

Returning to Ms. Munro, I think it’s fair to say that her sleep shouldn’t be unduly troubled, though with the right care and feeding some of the writers here--I’d nominate Booker and Brown, at a minimum--might eventually have a shot at becoming canonical.

Torontonian Paul Duder was born in Japan, and feels that that culture--all cultures, really--would benefit from a higher class of masturbatory fodder.