Review - Between by Laurie Petrou

Between
by Laurie Petrou
Pedlar Press, 2006

Reviewed by Paul Duder

Laurie Petrou is, on the evidence of her jacket photo, quite young, and has a day job with Ryerson University's School of Radio and Television Arts as an assistant professor of digital media and design. It would almost be too easy, then, to come at Between, her slim debut short story collection, through the prism of her generation's putatively byte-sized, MTV-gestated, quick-cut, short attention-spanned zeitgeist.

Almost, but not quite. So let's begin.

Petrou shoehorns twelve stories into Between's dainty 81 pages, the longest of which has to stand on tiptoes to reach nine pages. With one exception, these are first-person, monologue-heavy efforts, and so cue (in the less charitably-minded) the unwelcome echoes of the rampant "look at me" solipsism of blogs and webcams and facebooks.

She doesn't trouble herself unduly with the rigours of--and if I could come up with a less sodden word here, I'd use it--"plot", or of anything particularly longitudinal. These are snippets, vignettes, tranches de vie--information packets, lacking the centripety, the essential gravitational mass, to cohere into what's conventionally understood as story.

(Does one shame (or, anyway, date) oneself by even thinking in terms of the primacy of the plotted narrative in this process-is-substance, non-linear, pointillistic age? Maybe, but note that at least the McSweeney's/Eggers/Chabon wing (if I have my literary cadres right) has been publicly plumping of late for a return to the verse/chorus/verse of classical story structures. And if they've seen fit to bring their unimpeachable grooviness to bear, who are we clunky plebes not to lend an ear?)

As it is, Petrou tends to rely on out-of-leftfield spasms--as foundationless as that cat always jumping into frame in horror flicks--to crank the gears of her sketches, throwing in a couple of car crashes, a death, a fight, and other assorted dei ex machinae to roil her waters. Not that such upsets are unknown in lives as lived, obviously; but the reader comes to feel a trifle ill-used, having to suffer through these unpleasantnesses on behalf of characters that (thanks her skittish style) we've barely come to know, or care about.

In this way, Between's brevity comes to be something of a relief, particularly so if one seeks in fiction the solace of some sort of order imposed on a chaotic world; for who wants to walk around any longer than that, unmoored, in a capricious, illogical universe?

When Petrou hews more to standard practice--that is, setting up a narrative wherein one can guess at the logic of, and be invested in, what happens next--she is at her best. The standout in this regard is "Fall", wherein a young new Catholic becomes something of an unlikely confessor to a questioning priest. Apart from a disappointing ending that churns too literally through the various connotations of the title, this is gripping, very human stuff, but lonely amidst its sketchier brethren.

If Between offers a theme (and I don't really suppose it does, but let this boy have his dreams), it would be about the transcendent importance of family and relationships (check out the cringe-worthy dedication, "FOR MY FAMILY I love you", for a signpost), and their inevitable stresses and disappointments. Certainly there are no bank heists or grand causes or similar to distract from this focus. Possibly the title also plays into this (and may even offer a snazzy nod to McLuhan-esque ideas of process, transaction, impermanence, but (who can tell anymore) that might be too dorkily retro).

Petrou is a wonderful stylist, even when working in the musty, analog domain of print (words--eeeuw.), but maybe these pieces would be better as short films--sorry, videos--where freelance imagistics are more easily tolerated.

Write what you know, grasshopper. Isn't that what they used to say?

Paul Duder lives in Toronto, and tries to read as much as possible (while he still can).