Sex is Red
by Bill Gaston
Cormorant Books, 1998
Review by Aidan Baker
Sex is Red is Bill Gaston's third short story collection. Gaston has
an excellent grasp of voice, character, and setting. Each story features
unique and strong men and women in situations that range from the quirky
to the absurd to the simple every day, in an intriguing mix of playfulness,
gritty realism, and surreality. However individual each story, though,
the collection is connected by a theme of estrangement. Estrangement from
friends and family, from children and lovers, from the very self.
In 'The And', Don, a middle-aged man, is reunited with an old friend
who has retained the ideals and lifestyle from their younger years. The
difference between these old friends, one 'grown-up' and matured, the
other unchanged and still into pot and popular music, is sobering to Don.
He realizes his life, his marriage, his parenthood, is stagnant: "Don
suddenly felt old. Severe and humourless. How many years ago had he lost
the notion of 'Friday nights'?" Don tries to justify his misgivings, putting
it down to middle age: "the glare of these doubting years. Typical, missing
an old life that memory had cleaned up to look way more fun than it had
been".
He soon realizes the falsity of this justification, though: "what
was it about age that first of all complicated fun and then made it impossible?"
This encounter with his old friend leads Don to realize he has
grown estranged not only from old friends - and new friends, for that
matter, including his wife and children - but the very ideals he once
lived for and was proud of possessing.
Sexual estrangement is dominant within Gaston's general theme. In
the story 'Your First Time', a group of drunken young hockey players tell
each other about their first time having sex. The title character is uncomfortable
because, "I didn't want to tell about my first penetration-time, because
it still made me feel queasy. The whole next day I'd felt sick. Soul sickness."
He has trouble coming up with any story to tell because all of his encounters
have been so negative. The story he finally tells - also the first time
he did acid - is just as depressing and disturbing as any of the others,
despite his attempt to make it a joke.
Not all of these stories are entirely negative or depressing. The
story 'Fire Heaven' likewise deals with people's inability to be intimate
but there is a positive, if ambiguous, resolution. The title is taken
from an euphemism for orgasm; orgasm as gateway to enlightenment. Noel's
wife Sharon asks him to wait for her so that they can experience orgasm
together and, when they do, that he look into her eyes as they come. Noel
at first finds himself incapable of doing this:
They looked into each
other's eyes all the time. What would be so awful about looking into
them while coming? It might be a neat little adventure.
As a psychologist, Noel begins to analyze himself, his own fears:
Is he estranged from his wife? is he estranged from himself? if he follows
the path to enlightenment, to fire heaven, will he like - will he even
recognize - what he finds. Maybe one thinks too much to begin with, his
wife tells him, and Noel finally comes to terms with whatever it is haunting
him, and forces himself to meet Sharon's request. And they do orgasm together.
But the last few lines of the story seem rather negative:
he saw what he had
always known he would see: two eyes framing a clanging bright emptiness,
Sharon nowhere to be seen, space so vast and so clean it was only eyes
after all, the fact of blue-green absolute and frightening, the black
holes even more.
Several of the stories in this collection end abruptly and ambiguously.
This tempered my enjoyment of Sex is Red, as it was not clear,
on occasion, the meaning behind some of the endings. Perhaps this was
intentional on Gaston's part - readerly estrangement - but it slightly
marred what was otherwise an enjoyable and intriguing collection.
AIDAN
BAKER IS A TORONTO-BASED WRITER AND MUSICIAN WHO HAS PUBLISHED INTERNATIONALLY
IN SUCH MAGAZINES AS INTANGIBLE, STANZAS AND THE COLUMBIA REVIEW.
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