Rhymes with Useless
by Terence Young
Raincoast Books, 2000
Reviewed by Harold Hoefle
“People take the sun for granted. They think it’s always going to be
there, but it’s just a regular star like all the others. It’s got limited
fuel and one day it’s going to explode.”
So speaks the eleven-year-old
narrator in Terence Young’s story “Kraut,” and the boy’s words resound
beyond his world to the twelve other stories in this début collection. For
the boy’s consideration of the sun becomes a symbolic warning about another
supposed fixture in Young’s universe and ours: the family. Young’s use of
sensory detail also evokes the emotional maelstrom that is family.
In
“Yellow with Black Horns,” six-year-old Evelina slowly intuits the collapse
of her parents’ marriage. As she puts the shards of her smashed cup proof
of an unseen parental argument into the kitchen’s garbage can, outside of
her suburban home a “lawnmower ignites the air somewhere down the street.
Two cats screech at one another. Upstairs, Peter leaps from his bed onto
the floor and yells for Evelina’s mother to bring him his favourite shirt.”
Young’s verbs describe the girl’s outer world, while echoing the violence of
the inner.
Of course, the fact that daily living threatens personal and familial
calm is not profound. Young’s work, however, calculates the price which the
pursuit of calm exacts as his characters adjust to the frailty of the
present, a frailty born of ennui, relationship misunderstandings,
meaninglessness, even self-loathing. Not surprisingly, these forms of psychological
splintering and emotional pain often surface in the place
where family meets: the home. Hence the ambivalence Young’s characters feel
toward their putative refuge.
This thematic concern first surfaces in Young’
s poetry; his collection The Island in Winter was a 1999
Governor General’s Award nominee, and has been reviewed in TDR. In the poem “My Mother Who Was Forever,” Young limns the plight of
suburban-Victoria women: “hungry for some conversation,/ not afraid to go
home,/ but of what they’ll do/ when they get there.” Similarly, in his
story “The New World,” the widowed Rachel moons around her empty house,
flipping switches and “trading one dull light for another” as she reaches a
tired conclusion: “Home is what she was forced to call it when she was
leaving someone.”
Yet the Victoria-based Young is much more than a chronicler of familial
and existential bleakness. His stories work to elicit empathy in his
readers, as his characters go about their jobs and try to understand their
beloveds; as they try to act dutifully to others, to
themselves in their attempt to ward off what one of his poem’s speakers
calls “whatever hunts us down.”
Empathy for the hunted but who are they? In Young’s fiction, they are
the marginalized among us, the individuals disconnected from the members of
the burgeoning, suburban Canadian middle-class, the values of which another
West Coast writer the American poet Robinson Jeffers has also decried:
“In pleasant peace and security/ How suddenly the soul in a man begins to
die.” Young’s stories brim with characters who cannot or will not embrace
the middle-class wish for that gossamer ideal: “pleasant peace.”
In Young’s
story “Fast,” Jerry is the husband-father protagonist; upon realizing how
many evenings he and his wife have spent visiting couples-with-kids and
eating dinner with money managers, he “felt he was slipping away.” His
evening-marginalization is compounded by his daytime job, for Jerry repairs
photocopy-machines at the local university. There, people “talked about him
in the third-person…Girls treated him like a construction worker, only one
up on the food chain from a rapist. Some walked around him as though he
were diseased, others as though he didn’t exist. None of them spoke to
him.” For the entrenched middle-class faculty and the middle-class-bound
students, the repairman is less important than the machine he fixes.
A different form of estrangement besets seventeen-year-old Anna in
“Dead.” Hungry for life’s offerings, she consents to have sex with her new
boyfriend, and discovers that carnal intimacy means he’s “bouncing around
for a while…and when his eyes glaze over like he’s about to pass out, they’
re finished…and she usually has to stop herself from yawning.” Young deftly
describes what happens to his outsider-characters, thus offering the reader
insights into the ways of people who have helped to make such characters
outsiders. In Young’s work, outsiders see the rest of us best.
His characters ultimately win our empathy, and we give it partly because
we recognize these people as real; they speak like their real-life
counterparts. Young a father of two, veteran high-school teacher,
co-founder and co-editor of The Claremont Review, a journal
dedicated to publishing teenage-writers has got the teen argot down-pat,
along with that of sniping couples and what used to be called “the
working-class.” His teen-characters mouth the monosyllabic replies, vague
sentence-endings, and pause-words you hear today in the malls and schools
and video-arcades: “sweet,” “harsh,” “cool,” “got busted,” “or something,”
and the ubiquitous “like.”
Meanwhile, in the collection’s title-story,
Billie tells her husband Eustace that she’s jealous of anyone in love. When
he assures her that he wasn’t in love with the still-unknown Joni Mitchell
he met up north before his marriage, Billie retorts: “Not with her, sweetheart. You were in love with yourself.” And in “The Day the
Lake Went Down,” Willie is the archetypal booze-guzzling working-class wit.
He describes sex with a menstruating partner as “Sort of like humping a
leaky water-bed…Slappety, slap, slop.”
Credible dialogue hooks us into the stories, and so do credible forms of
duty; Young reveals his knowledge of how most people try to give meaning to
their daily lives by working. Sprinkled throughout the stories are
informed references to dry-walling, teaching, fishing, outboard-motor
repair, cleaning-contractors, crematorium work, liquor-store clerking,
mutual-fund sales, and farming. These kinds of job-related details enhance
what John Gardner calls “the fictional dream”; when we read details which we
know or accept as accurate, we willingly ascend into the world of the story.
Young’s characters fulfill their financial duty, working to pay their
rent or mortgage, to buy their food and clothe their children; some of his
characters also struggle to fulfill their human duty. In Young’s fictional
world, that duty is, and again, empathy: the only salve for the pain of the
marginalized and estranged. It’s a Christian vision, and one which Young
often frames in very English, which is to say understated, ways. As Thomas,
the retired literature-and-writing teacher in the collection’s last story,
“Maintenance,” notes: “We come into this world to look after things and then
we leave.” And in the last lines of Young’s poetry collection, we read:
“We/sip at our lives. Bitter, we say./Sweet.” Throughout his verse and
short fiction, Young seems to be saying that we must sip because the drink
is all that’s being served, and we must remember to remember to replenish
the cups of others sitting across from us. We all sip the same wine.
*
Rhymes with Useless is a fine short-story collection written
in an unpretentious prose-style, not Raymond-Carver minimalism nor
Marquezian baroque, but nevertheless precise and evocative. Young’s sharp
dialogue enhances the foreground drama while his narration paints a
background full of nuance and symbol. And his structural choices also work;
he often uses vignette-driven, parallel plot-lines, sometimes skipping
between past and present. He also employs first- and third-person
narrators, and his protagonists are impressively varied: children,
teenagers, middle-aged and elderly adults; male and female; fathers and
mothers; married, divorced, and widowed. In Young’s stories, much of
humanity breathes; because of his art, we want these characters to breathe
easier. To survive.
Harold Hoefle teaches literature in Montreal; he has published fiction
and journalism, and he regularly reviews novels and story-collections for
TDR. |
