Airstream by Patricia Young

Airstream
by Patricia Young
Biblioasis, 2005

Reviewed by Anne Borden

This is the first collection of short stories by Young, an established poet based in Victoria. A winner of the British Columbia Book Prize for Poetry and nominee for the Governor General's Award, Young adapts well to the prose form. She brings a poet's sensibility to the task, richly developing the inner worlds of her characters and often taking a non-linear approach to her storytelling.

I started Airstream as subway reading, but missed my stop (Spadina) and ended up at St. Andrew because I was so drawn into "Girl of the Week." (At least I had a good story as an excuse for being late.) "Girl of the Week," like several other pieces, is a suspenseful character study that deals with moral dilemmas that are outside of the usual fray. In it, Jean Marie Waterman keeps an almost unbearable secret from her bff, while negotiating the rough social terrain of class struggle in grade six. The strength of this piece, and others such as "Dumb Fish" and "Hitchhike" is in Young’s ability to imbue minor characters with substance. Her minor characters are few, and they are never simply foils, punchlines or wallpaper.

Young’s stories are often both startling and thrilling, much like a good ballad. She scratches a deep groove into the consciousness of her characters, and allows them to tell their side of the story without authorial nattering. Young wisely chooses the first person to delve into material such as divorce, infidelity and mourning. She has a good ear for dialogue, and like many writers has clearly listened to a lot of people tell their stories. Introducing the 15-year-old Jayne, in Hitchhiker, she writes:

People like to talk. About themselves mainly but about other things too. And Jayne is genuinely interested. She believes every story is fascinating, every person has a story to tell. And she has a way of drawing them out. For a brief time the driver forgets he’s forty and balding, forgets it’s Tuesday morning and he’s going to spend much of his life in an airless cubical drinking bad coffee. Last night his daughter ate all the play-dough and wet her bed, but these details dissipate in the blast of damp air Jayne brings in from outside. Suddenly there she is in her high boots and lip gloss asking who what why. …

If asked, she’d have to say that men are easier to talk to than women. Men, it seems, are willing to believe she has momentarily fallen in love with them.

For a poet, the transition to prose can be rocky, and Airstream hits a few bumps along the way. Perhaps because Young's writing is so textured, it is especially jarring to be interrupted in the midst of a great description with a flashback or flashforward that can turn the experience of reading a short story into a puzzle-solving session. Working out these temporal issues is a distraction from these otherwise solid tales.

Overall, Airstream is a bold and exciting collection from a poet who has successfully found her legs in the prose world. Evocatively packaged by Biblioasis, the collection makes for excellent reading either in short spurts or in a couple of long draws. Don't read it on the subway, though. You might miss your stop.

Anne Borden is a writer living in Toronto.