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Play the
Monster Blind
by Lynn Coady
Doubleday, 2000
Reviewed by
Harold Hoefle
Play
the Monster Blind,
Lynn Coady's new collection of short fiction, will wow you.
Any reader who finds fault with her plots, characterizations,
or style would be merely revealing the source of their own criticism
- jealousy. For story-writing rarely gets better. Of course,
many writers describe well the nuances of womanly thought and
feeling, but these authors don't make you laugh very often,
and when they do it's an ironic in-your-head chuckle. Coady's
bag of insights is as big as anyone else's, yet her humour will
make you clutch your stomach and laugh aloud.
Here's a
man whose daughter comes home late, swearing and holding a take-out:
"You're getting a mouth. ... You're eating chicken. You
have to go back to religion." Another dad, angry at the
drunk he's trying to help: "You're more full of shit that
my own arse." And the single mother who's just been offered
a job, knowing it is "such a rare thing that to refuse
would be like showing your middle finger to God just when he
was in a good mood." Coady's voice, her sensibility? Pretend
Flann O'Brien was a woman and randy James Joyce had not met
Nora Barnacle, then pretend sexual communion and the birth of
a girl - that girl would be watchful, scatological, lyric and
playful. Lynn Coady.
Nine of
the eleven stories in this collection are set in Cape Breton,
the other two in British Columbia. In terms of character, diction,
and tone, Coady shows impressive variety and modulation. In
"A Great Man's Passing," a young woman returns to
Cape Breton after years away - a common Coady plot-starter.
In a time of coping with single motherhood, she meets her old
friend Cookie Sloane at the tavern, and he tells her about sex:
Mummy
told me you was living down here now. ... Said you got knocked
up and have a little boy now. That can be tough, eh?. ...
I'm saying to Mary Catherine [his sister] all the time, 'Now
don't you fuck! I don't care how bored you get, don't do it.'
It's not all that much fun anyhow and it gives a lot of stupid
bastards something to talk about and a person to feel superior
to. But I suppose the girls've gotta get their rocks off somehow,
too, that's only fair.
Coady moves
easily from serio-comic, colloquial speech to sentences that
echo David Adams Richards. In "Ice-Cream Man" she
describes a girl's memory of living with her bath-loving, now-dead
mother: "And the whole hallway saturated with the smell
of lavender and honey and Jim Beam, still hanging in the air
when you're getting up for school." The sensory-detail
and despair mix - you see the picture and feel the dragging-down
atmosphere.
Coady's
stories have women narrators and protagonists who, refreshingly
un-self-involved, get through their tough moments with face-the-fumes
stoicism. With convincing honesty and shrewdness, they describe
themselves - that "boring useless anxiety dream" -
and the people and situations around them. For example, on attitudes
to children: "Children are the only people that other people
stare at without worrying about it. Children aren't supposed
to notice, or care." You get the sense that Coady understands
people, but it's an understanding lined with humility. In "Run
Every Day," a woman recalls Gerald, the wild childhood
friend who would point to someone on television and crow "That's
just like me!" though there was no apparent resemblance.
"But I understood what he meant. It was just like the way
that he was in his head. I understood how difficult it was to
show people how you really were in your head."
Reading
these stories and knowing that Coady lived for many years in
Port Hawkesbury, the temptation is to slot her into the tradition
of past and present Maritime writers: people like Hugh
MacLennan,
Alistair MacLeod, Richards, and Ann-Marie MacDonald. But these
writers are Maritime writers by a stroke of genetic and geographic
fate, and their greatness derives not from where they grew up,
but from the way they write. If Lynn Coady had grown up in
Kathmandu,
she would be a great Nepalese writer. As things stand, however,
I'll call her Canadian, and say that Play the Monster Blind,
is as good a story-collection as this country has seen. Coady,
thirty years old and with awards for both her plays and the
novel Strange Heaven (1998) behind her, is the author
you should go to next. If you haven't already.
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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