August 17th, 2011

Addenda

Addendum to Myths of the Full-Time Writer
Myth #5: If I’m free during the day, I’ll run all my errands during the quietest times in stores, banks, post offices, etc., and save tonnes of time. Nope. As it turns out, the stores and banks aren’t empty at 10am–they aren’t packed, but they are populated with another breed of people–people who are self-aware enough to know they are inefficient, annoying shoppers, and are trying to stay out of the way of the busy 9-to-5ers. These folks include people in wheelchairs and scooters (very hard to navigate in the narrow aisles of urban grocery stores, inevitably snagged on half-a-dozen things before they hit the dairy case); parents with small children (who are hard to navigate, period, and inevitably want to push their own strollers directly into the bread shelves and then stand in front of it, wailing); people who do not speak English but have a complicated transaction they need to request at the bank; shut-ins hoping for an in-depth conversation about current events with the bank teller; and people for whom simple tasks like remembering one’s PIN or selecting a yam are deeply unsettling and hard.

These people try to do us a favour by shopping at 10am, and I found that if I showed up at the grocery store also at 10am, I had to forbid myself from impatiently rolling my eyes at the lone parent completely outnumbered and overwhelmed by her children, who let them throw bananas on the floor because who could stop them. I didn’t cough aggressively at people who had *no idea* their credit cards had chips in them, and I never once glared (I don’t think) at someone who was simply standing in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare, blinking at the sky.

The daytime is for shoppers for whom efficiency is not the first priority, if indeed it’s even on the list of priorities. It’s wrong to bother those people when they try to avoid the crowded times, just like it would be wrong for them to show up at the post office at 5:30 and ask the pros and cons of bubble wrap vs. a padded envelope. You can run errands during the day if you want (I did, just to get out of the house), but it won’t save you much time.

Addendum to The Cohabitational Reading Challenge We both agree that *A Prayer for Owen Meany* falls off a bit in the second half, though I think, for a while at least, I was more dysphoric than Mark about the whole thing. I really love the high-school lit class discussions of *Tess of the D’Urbervilles* and *The Great Gatsby,* because I love a good close reading. But if you don’t, then those passages aren’t very well integrated and are too long–not good novel writing, even if good literary criticism. They exist mainly to unsubtly instruct the reader on how to read Irving’s own novel. Nick Carraway anyone? Ugh. I think Irving is a fine writer and deserving of respect, but no, not deserving of comparison with Fitzgerald. Yucky that he would suggest it, in my opinion.

In vaguely related news, I’ve ripped the cover partways off my copy, ensuring that Mark’s copy will be the one we keep. If you need a paperback of *Owen Meany* and don’t mind a ripped cover, I can get you one in about a week–for keepers!

August 8th, 2011

What’s Happening

Saturday: The Big Dream received its first review, in Publishers Weekly and it was good! I am hoping this starts a trend!

Sunday: Mark and I had our first Co-habitational Reading Challenge chat about Owen Meaney. We tried to record it for you, but it turned out the batteries in the recorder, *and* the spare batteries in the drawer were dead (???) I blame the kitten. Anyway, we’re both really loving the book this time round, which is a relief since it’s awfully long. We both love nervous, OCD Owen and his all-caps diction, and the way Irving is in such complete control of his narrative that it can swoop and dive in time and the reader never gets lost. I also have a soft spot for crotchety Grandmother Wheelwright (“it’s that boy again!”)

Monday (that’s today!): I am reading at the Toronto launch of the Fiddlehead fiction issue, tonight at the Dora Keogh on the Danforth. Mark Jarman, Leon Rooke, Kathleen Brown, and yours truly–so excited.

Thursday August 25: Jeff Bursey is launching his new novel at Type Books, and Mark and I are reading too. This will probably be my last reading before TBD launches, so I’ll probably read from *Once*–I haven’t in ages–for old time’s sakes.

What more could you ask from August? Well, actually, one of my most beloved-est friends is getting married on Sunday and I am maid-of-honouring it up, so this week may well be a write-off, writing-wise–there may be a mini-break in the blogging in order to attend rehearsal dinner, hair appointments, and sundry other fun frivolity. If someone takes a picture of me in my adorable be-crinolined purple dress and I don’t look insane, I promise to post it.

June 11th, 2011

What I’m Doing Tomorrow

Just a reminder that I’ll be reading in St. Catherine’s tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon at 3pm, in the fine fine company of short-story-ist Carolyn Black and poet Jacob McArthur Mooney. This reading is part of 31 days of reading in June in the Niagara reading, as part of the Niagara Literary Arts Festival, a very very cool endeavour.

If you can join us tomorrow, please follow the link and scroll down to June 12 for more details. If you can’t make it tomorrow, click the link and scroll through the many options of awesomeness to see what else you might enjoy. There’s tonnes of good stuff!

May 19th, 2011

Upcomings

I use this post title a lot, but everything that is not now is upcoming, so the upcoming occurs a lot. Sorry, that’s an awful sentence; I’ve been ill. Hopefully to be better soon. Here’s what’s going on!

Ok, this one actually is from now, but also upcoming–I answered question 5 of The Devil’s Engine on Thirsty blog, and have a few more answers in the pipeline. This is a discussion of Biblioasis’s short-story authors about stories and their writing, so if interested, please read and stay tuned.

I’m reading at the Niagara Literary Arts Festival on June 12 (scroll down to that date to see the listing), in the fine company of Carolyn Black and Jacob McArthur Mooney. If you should be in St. Catherines that afternoon, please check us out.

My story, “Dream Inc.”, is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead‘s summer fiction issue. Rest assured, I’ll let you know when it’s available!

May 15th, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews *Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone* by J.K. Rowling

Well, it took me 14 years to read the most wildly loved children’s book of my generation. Partly because I just never got around to it, partly because I’m not a big fan of fantasy, partly because the Harry Potter zealots are so obnoxious. “You’ve never read Harry Potter?? But you love books!” one such specimen remarked. Humph.

I finally read it because someone I respect asked me to very gently, and I’m glad she did because J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone is truly charming, very funny, and sweet as pie.

On the front flap of the book, it says that HP&tPS won the 1997 Smarties Gold for 9 to 11 years, and this truly is a dream book for that set. The first 3.5 chapters are a hilarious sendup of awful British bourgeois family values, complete with privet hedges, vicious capitalist dad, smarmy mom and spoiled child. And a spider-filled cupboard under the stairs where they hide even the gentlest, most innocuous weirdness in their lives, orphaned cousin Harry Potter.

The horrible hinjinx of the Dursleys, including vicious assault on innocent loveable Harry, is cringy and funny simultaneously. As the book goes on, it becomes increasingly unclear whether the world the Dursleys inhabit is meant to be our own or not and, if it is, where is child services. But if I were 9, I wouldn’t care; I would only laugh gleefully over passages like this, where awful Dudley Dursley, brat and bully, cannot have his way:

“He’d screamed, whacked his father with his Smeltings stick, been sick on purpose, kicked his mother and thrown his tortoise through the greenhouse roof and still he did not have his room back.”

I think it’s the British-ism of “been sick on purpose” that makes this so funny, but I can’t really be sure–it’s just so hyperbolically *evil*. Someone told me that the American version of HP is rather bastardized to get out those Britishisms–I wonder if that version says “thrown up”? I have the Canadian, Raincoast edition, and it seems to have retain all the Britsy cadences (“to hospital,” “give it here”) as well as more obvious references like the West Ham football team (I don’t quite know what that is, but I can guess). Then again, having not read the original Brit edition, I don’t know what I’m missing.

Sorry for the digression–as I was saying, so Harry is a lonely and miserable orphan at his aunt and uncle’s until one day a letter arrives, admitting him to Hogwarts, a school for wizards and witches. The aunt and uncle try some very amusing stunts to prevent Harry from going, motivations on this being somewhat unclear as they purport to hate having him in their home.

In the end, Harry is spirited away by Hagrid, the loveable gameskeeper from Hogwarts. Hagrid also introduces Harry to his legacy–his parents were powerful and well-respected wizards, killed by an wizard gone back. That bad wizard, named Voldemort, tried to kill Harry too, when he was but a very tiny baby. He couldn’t; baby Harry was powerful enough to defeat this bad dude and save himself when his parents couldn’t. Even better, his triumph sent Volemort packing, and no one’s seen him since.

Harry Potter has become famous as a hero in the magic world, while the non-magic world (the world of “Muggles” in the language of the book) thought he was just a loser who had to sleep with the spiders. Moreover, his parents had wealth and social position, all of which he is now entitled to. Hagrid takes him shopping for all sorts of wonderful magical paraphenalia, and since Harry is finally in possession of his inheritance, he can afford whatever he likes.

The delights continue when he heads off to Hogwarts where his fame, and that of his parents, is well-known, and Harry is the immediate object of interest and admiration. He has never had friends before, but he picks up a few quite easily. He has never played the magic world’s premier sport, Quidditch, before but he is a natural and easily makes the team.

This is, without a doubt, the best possible fantasy for the 9-11 set, and much older besides. I loved all the descriptions of the beautiful old castle Harry moves into, the delicious foods they have the welcome banquet, the sporting equipment and spooky labs (not mentioned in the book: who pays the tuition here?) The dream of finding out that one is not as dull and ordinary as one appears is as old as time, and Rowling does it superbly. And the invention of Quidditch, and making the very complex descriptions perfectly clear in my mind is the act of a superlative creative force.

But…does it make me sound snobby to say this really is a book for children, and very young children at that? The first half of the book is entirely devoted to Harry’s life with the Dursley’s, his passage to and arrival at Hogswart’s. The second half is a series of adventures that lead Harry and his friends to discover a mystery at the school, and then to solving it.

The whole second half is one self-contained adventure after another, although in retrospect, HP and co usually discover a clue to the ongoing mystery in their seemingly unrelated scrapes and mistakes. They are thwarted by a very bad bully named Draco Malfoy, and annoyed then befriended by a know-it-all girl named Hermione Granger (all the names in this book are wonderful). There is no character development to speak of–good people are very very good, bad people are very very bad (often for no reason) and there’s no good saying anyone might reform because they won’t.

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything for you to say that everything works out awesome in the end, Harry becomes more of a hero than ever, and the reader is very glad that this is so. Rowling crafts a simple, elegant tale. Even though there’s no real suspense (there’s six more books; I know no one dies now) I was very eager to keep reading and to find out what exactly happened.

And now that I know, I’m quite satisfied, but feel no particularly burning urge for book 2.

April 14th, 2011

Hart House Review

I can’t help myself from saying this: I heart Hart House. If you’ve never been there, it’s the deeply old-school student centre on UofT campus. There’s a gym with a pool, a cafeteria that serves a wide variety of chicken-based meals (and some without chicken), a radio station, a tiny library, a gorgeous courtyard that is apparently the most expensive place in Toronto to have a wedding reception, and loads of “common rooms” (how 19th-century girls school!) where you can hold events.

I spent the vast majority of my free time in grad school here: using the gym, swimming, eating, wireless-internetting, reading, even studying. When the weather got nice, I liked to move the reading and studying onto the lawn across the drive from the building, but still well within sight of it. But actually, even in hottest summer (of course I still came to campus in summer) the fact that the building is stone and shawdowy made it still relatively cool. It’s my favourite place on campus, and probably one of my most favourite in the city.

I was there on Monday for a lunch meeting, and now on Friday I’m doing a reading there to launch the Hart House review. This annual literary review is another wonderful thing about Hart House–student run, printed by Coach House Books, very communal yet very professional-looking, it’s a lovely anthology of work by students, community members, and the occasional alum. I was in it as a student, and I’m proud to be asked back as an alum. In the current issue you can read work by Helen Guri, Prathna Lor, tonnes of other awesome stuff, and my story, “Sarah” (which is an early look at a story from *The Big Dream,* where it appears under another name) as well as an interview with me and the charming Kira Dorward.

Copies of the review are free, but I believe you pretty much have to come to Hart House to get one. Even if you can’t make the launch, there will be copies at the front desk and elsewhere for a couple weeks hence, if you happen to be passing through. And if you won’t be, and really wish you could get one, hit me up–I’ll grab one for you.

April 12th, 2011

What’s this book about?

Bookstore employees, librarians, students and teachers answer this question with aplomb–accurately, succintly, and without hestitation–but I think anyone who has actually written and published a book knows how baffling it is. Something 200 pages, or even less, full of people and places and thoughts and ideas, is not easy to sum up. Even if there is in fact a spy, a grim police investigator, a hooker with a heart of gold, and a car chase through the Andes, the guy who spent a year or two of his life writing it is not going to say, “Classic spy novel,” and leave it at that. Once you’ve spent hours and days and weeks poring over the minutiae of the characters’ lives, you’ll never be able to boil them down to quick descriptors–they are far too human and complex and difficult and weird and…oh, if you really want to know, why not read the book?

Basically, when someone asks me what my book is about (either one), I am extremely tempted to say, “Everything.” Because though the characters and situations in the stories are deeply specific, unique, and definite, the book itself represents my way of seeing the world: what I think is important, worth noticing, worth dismissing, funny, strange, exciting, stupid, boring, and/or cool. A book is a world view because a book is by its nature a microcosm: what get left in versus ignored constitutes what the writer sees as important.

I can’t say for sure, having not gotten very far down the road yet, but I think this might be more pronounced in writers early in their careers. You have so many years (nearly 30, in my case) to work up to your first book and then–well, most people’s first books aren’t satires of European governance. First books are usually very personal, which is not at all to say autobiographical (though many are, of course): you can tell who people are through what they care about, just as easily as through what they’ve done.

And all this is to say: I’m having trouble coming up with a decent summary of The Big Dream. I had this problem with *Once* too–it took me months *after* the book came out to work up a competent summary of what one might expect in reading it. This necessity shouldn’t have taken me by surprise–I wouldn’t read anything that had offered no clue what it was about. But it’s only being on the inside that has shown me how hard it is to offer that clue.

So, here’s what I’ve come up with so far–what do you think? Sure, I’d like people to want to read the book after reading this paragraph, but even more important is that they have some sense of what they would experience if they did. After all, there are people in the world who would just *hate* this book, based on who they are and what they want when they read–they might as well be able to flag an inappropriate choice from the outset and not get involved. So, do you think this gives you a clue?

The Big Dream is a collection of short stories about life at the Canadian offices of Dream Inc., an American lifestyle-magazine publisher. In a tough market, the staff is struggling to do their jobs well–or even to keep them. But they’re also trying to have friends, to be good parents and good children, to eat lunch and answer the phone and be happy. The Big Dream is a book about how life doesn’t stop on company time. It’s about how the “dream job” and dream life that is supposed to accompany it do not necessarily happen, but the joys and sorrows and sandwiches of waking life are more than enough to occupy our minds and hearts. The Big Dream is a book not about jobs, but about the people who have them.

March 23rd, 2011

What is a short story?

In honour of The Year of the Short Story, I’ve been wanting to do a short-story post. I decided to do a “What is?” post because I’ve read a few things lately that challenged, for good or ill, my personal definition of the story. And that reminded me that this definition *is* very personal, so I bet if I make this list, lots of people will be able to add to it, or debate various points, or tell me I’m wrong entirely. And the best way to celebrate the short story, I think, is to engage with the form: debate it, read it, write it, and think about it. So let’s do that:

Short stories have character(s) and events. Let’s get the really controversial stuff out of the way first: in my mind, short stories have one or more characters doing things, or having things done to them, or reacting to events, in a particular time and place. I’m ok with characters that aren’t human: dogs, aliens, faerie princesses, even a well-written tree character might exist somewhere. And the events can be minor–in Jincey Willet’s “Justine Laughs at Death,” the very dramatic story is actually a couple conversations on the phone. Much is *said*, and threatened, but there are few actual events. Still a really powerful story though. I think many writers are stronger at either character (Katherine Mansfield, anyone?) or event (Guy de Maupassant?) and just kind of take a swipe at the other side, which is fine if you can pull it off. But even if the story is mainly the creation and explanation of these wonderful characters, they need to do things sometime. And even if the wild logic of events *seems* to stand on their own, there still have to be people living them out. I really think there has to be a throughline of personality, and an internal logic to events to make a story. I know, craziness–have at me.

Short stories are short in word-count, and use their shortness for concentration of meaning. There is no exact word-count that defines a short story for me–I’ve seen some great ones that were more than 10 000 words, over forty pages. I can’t put a cut-off on the actual length, yet there comes a certain point where the scope changes the tone, and it just doesn’t feel story-ish anymore. Slowly evolving characters with lots of back-story, a build to a fore-shadowed climax of action, and then a reflection period after that–I guess you could do anything in a short story, but those things to me seem inherently novel-ish.

I just finished reading Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (for the first time; am behind) and though it is usually termed a novella, and 117 pages I think that’s proper, I’ve also seen it deemed a short story. I think there might be a 117-page short story out there, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s is not it. Capote uses the pages for things that, in my definition, novelists do: framing of the story in future and past (Joe Bell’s story about Africa), situating the characters in lives outside the story (the arrival of Doc, which doesn’t influence the action one way or another, just teaches us a bit about Holly), and neat set pieces that sort of flesh out the characters but are mainly just neat set pieces. Don’t get me wrong, as a novella I think it’s brilliant–but the length gives it a very different flavour from a short story.

For a true short story, the length appears not a constraint or a limit, just the amount of words it takes to show what needs to be shown. As I said above, short stories are not constrained by length; they are exactly as long as they need to be to give the reader the joys, sorrows, laughs, or whatever the author wants to give in that space. But they are shaped like stories, whatever their lengths. I’ve read a few stories recently that read like the first chapter of a novel, or maybe the fifth chapter of a novel (I’m in the midst of judging a story contest at the moment, so I have a wide variety of these on-hand). The first-chapter ones, you get a lot of background and insight into the characters and their problems, and they’re sort of mulling over what to do about them; then it’s over. In the fifth-chapter stories, there’s tonnes of action, drama, intensity, but you don’t know anything about the characters or what all these events mean to them, or where anything is headed.

Both these issues used to come up a lot when I was teaching high-school students to write stories (teaching is perhaps too strong a word; try encouraging). When I urged them to give the reader a more complete, consolidated picture of the characters and their dramas, they retorted, “You said it had to be 2/5/10 pages, and that’s all I can fit.” Which is fair if you’re 15, and this is your first story, and you’re only here because your mom forgot to sign the permission slip for the band trip. But despite short stories’ well-earned reputation for inconclusive endings, your ending should still have a bit of that, “I see” sort of feeling, even if you get it three days later. Short story endings, as a rule, don’t shut anything down or solve any problems; they open things up to the next page, the page that isn’t there. Amy explains very well: “it’s always a bit of a shock to end a short story, as a reader or a writer, but then you carry that shock with you for the rest of the day. you feel restless, unquieted, maybe even a little angry. you’re fucking confused! and you don’t want to admit it, but that’s kind of the best feeling in the world.”

Many readers offer short-story writers the compliment of “It ended too soon–I wanted to know what happened next!” To a certain extent, that’s a wonderful compliment–well, speaking only for myself, I love to think I could create a world people would want to continue to live in, and characters they’d like to continue to know. However, there should be something basically satisfying and self-contained about a short story–you should receive enough knowledge, emotion, action, whatever the story requires, that when it ends, some part of you is like, “Yeah. I see…” and what you see is your own version of the next page. It takes work to craft that page for yourself–maybe this is what some people hate about stories–but the writer should have given you the basic tools to do so.  It is difficult to explain the difference between the ending-feeling you get with a crafted short story, and the feeling you get when the writer has just run out of space or steam and dropped in “The End” instead of writing the next bit. But trust me, there’s a big difference.

There’s this great Robert Coover story that I just read that elides almost everything that actually happens–the skips are bigger than the hits, and the story itself is tiny, just over 1000 words (what, you never cut’n’paste a story into a word processor to see how long it is?) And yet it packs a huge wallop; the elisions are the story, in a certain sense; but the fact that they are elided for both the reader and the character are the story, too. So you care at the end, about this man whose life you don’t really know, because he doesn’t know, either. Now, in my mind, that’s a good ending.

Short stories don’t do stunts or party tricks. I occasionally find (sometimes in my own work) things stuck in stories that are really cool, either stylistically (unusual narrative voices or perspectives, time fragmentation, kooky narrative structures, etc.) or content-wise (alien invasions, gender-bending, political or media satires) but don’t belong there. Not that I’m saying there could never be stories with the above, even all in the same story, but there’d have to be a bloody good reason for it. What makes a story not a story is when it contains a string of effects that don’t have anything to do with what the story *is*–the writer is just thrilled to be able to do this stuff, and is, essentially, showing off. FYI, this is why my flying baby story never worked out, but I think if I could integrate that baby more fully into the narrative, it still could.

The very wise Kim Jernigan says that stories are “research & development branch of contemporary fiction, where much of the stylistic and narrative experiment occurs” and I heartily agree. However, a successful experiment has to become one with the story, so that you can’t imagine anyone ever writing or reading that story without it. A true innovation is one that renders itself, in the moment of its creation, indispensible.

Like, for example, Matthew J. Trafford wrote this story, “Gutted,” that is about adolescent turmoil, about father-son relationships, about sexuality and “otherness” and violence. It’s a really wrenching story, one that leaves you exactly “gutted” when you finish reading it, and for that it is brilliant. The things I was thinking when I finished reading it were, “I really feel for those people” and “I wonder what they did next.” The thing I was *not* thinking was, “Hey, mermaid story–neat-o!” though in fact there is a mermaid in the story. There’s nothing wrong with “neat-o” but it doesn’t bear rereading, rethinking, mulling over in the shower. Trafford’s story transcends “neat-o” by doing a thousand other things right and writing the mermaid in so finely and subtly I seriously don’t think the story would have been possible in any other guise.

I’d say the same thing about Spencer Gordon’s short story, “Transcript: The Appeal of the Sentence, a story that’s a single, nearly 3000-word sentence about the speaker’s crush on Miley Cyrus. It’s a terrifying story, and terrifyingly good, because the interrogation of language and celebrity obsession, and the modern “It’s not what you’re like, it’s what you like.” ethos, plus this one guy’s personal and very sweet lunacy doesn’t seem doable in any other way other than the way Gordon did it.

—

I guess what it boils down to for me is, it works if it works. There are stories I love that break every rule above, but that’s because they aren’t rules–they’re really just observations of what I’ve seen working really well in a lot of stories. I’d love to hear/read other people’s observations, if they should like to share them…

March 21st, 2011

A few random entertaining things

1) When I read a book, I read every word–the copyright page, the credits and acknowledgements, even a skim through the index to see how it’s done (professional interest; remember, I work in the word mines too). Sometimes I find cool stuff hiding in these odd spots, and feel it my duty to bring it to the attention of the non-obsessed. For instance, this, from the copyright page of Matthew J. Trafford’s The Divinity Gene, which has cool stuff on pretty much every other page, too:

“These stories are works of fiction and as such do not purport to be factual or representative of reality. Where stories use the names of ‘real’ corporate, media, political, or historical figures, they do so to denote figures, images, and the stuff of collective dreams. They do not denote, or pretend to provide information about, actual 3-D persons, living, dead, or otherwise.”

The stuff of collective dreams–I love it!

2) Yesterday, driving in the car, Rebecca in the passenger seat, Mark driving. Please keep in mind that I’m still really sick, and pretty heavily drugged.

RR: What is a (reading with great difficulty of a billboard) “microcarbonated lager”?
MS: Microcarbonated lager? Search me.
RR: It was on the billboard.
(pause)
MS: Hey, what kind of beer did you buy?
RR: (struggling yet more with the pronounciation) Microcarbonated lager.
MS: No, you didn’t, because you just heard about it for the first time right now.
RR: Oh. (pause, then thoughtfully) I thought we were doing a little skit. (pause) You actually wanted to know what kind of beer I have in my fridge?
MS: Yes!
RR: (finally figures out what is going on, dissolves into laughter)
MS: And still I have no answer.

March 11th, 2011

Canada Reads Independently: Home Truths by Mavis Gallant

I really admire Kerry Clare‘s Canada Reads Independently program, and this year I’ve read two out of the five books, which is actually pretty good for me. All the books on the list look fascinating, and I’ll probably try to track’em down eventually, but for now, I did the story collections. The other collection in the running, Lynn Coady’s *Play the Monster Blind* was fast and furious, while Gallant’s collection was huge and a bit slower moving, but I adored it too.

As Kerry mentions in her review the stories aren’t ideally presented in book form here. I agreed, the book was too long and overcrowded, but the way I got round that to read really slowly (according to my diary, it took nearly 2 weeks), in and around other things, so the stories stood in my head a bit more as *stories* and not bits of a book.

It’s funny how much I like this book considering how antithetical Gallant’s style is to the things I usually admire–there’s very little dialogue, even very little scene. In the Linnet Muir stories, the final section of the book and some ways its crowning glories, there are massive paragraphs, mainly written in the past imperfect–the general sense of the things were happening, could and would happen, during a certain period or in certain circumstances. She slides from the habitual to the individual in such stealthy increments you barely know she’s doing it. Sometimes it feels like a story is just a random collection of notes and memories, but you get to the end and the weight on your brain is, in fact, story-like. How does she do that?

The bit about the notes and memories applies only to the Linnet Muir materials–the other stories feel highly organized, though always organically so. My favourites are the long, fleshy ones about Canada folks meandering through Europe, trying to…what? They are lost souls, mainly, drowning in provincialism and the false confidence that their new-world births divorce them from history. Well, doesn’t that sound lofty! In truth, sometimes the Canadian/European dicotomy is laid on a bit thickly, but for the most part it’s shockingly subtle–the characters are so much themselves, you don’t wind up thinking that they are also part of a larger category…until the characters themselves think of that!

Mavis Gallant’s fabled parallel to Alice Munro is often described in differences–urban versus rural, Canadian versus global, etc. I think the big difference for me is that Gallant writes with a bit more distance from her characters. This is not to say that Munro is kinder, or doesn’t subtly judge her characters, but she stands inside their brains, it seems, and follows the machinations of even their worst impulses. Gallant leaves a certain privacy to the folks in her stories, the room for a grim or silly failure that adults are allowed.

Her best stories are, I think, third person narratives about these grim and silly folks and their failures where we know the general schema of their hears, but perhaps not their inner workings. An old favourite of mine, which I once wrote a grad-school paper on and have read now half a dozen times, is “The Ice Wagon Coming Down the Street.” Here is a quotation to show a little of how it works. This is a long passage, but Gallant’s genius is a slow-burning kind:

At the wedding reception Peter lay down on the floor and said he was dead. He held a white azalea in a brass pot on his chest, and sang, “Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea.” Sheilah bent over him and said, “Pete, darling, get up. Pete, listen, every single person who can do something for you is in this room. If you love me, you’ll get up.”

“I do love you,” he said, ready to engage in a serious conversation. “She’s so beautiful,” he told a second face. “She’s nearly as tall as I am. She was a model in London. I met her over in London in the war. I met her there in the war.” He lay on his back with the azalea on his chest, explaining their history. A waiter took the brass pot away, and after Peter had been hauled to his feed he knocked the waiter down. Trudeau’s bride, who was freshly out of an Ursuline convent, became hysterical…

We don’t find out exactly why Peter wanted to lie on the floor and say he was dead; we can surmise he was drunk and wanting attention, but that is our surmise and not Gallant’s. She probably does in fact *know* though; Peter might not. We also never find out what Peter did in London during the war, other than fall in love.

What I mean is, Gallant is smarter than some of her characters, and she often makes gentle fun of them, especially those with intellectual pretensions. Sociology comes in for a particularly hard go, and though I must protest as one born into the House of Sociology, I also laughed at the jokes. On Sarah’s relationship with her father in “In the Tunnel”: “Between eighteen and twenty, Sarah kept meaning to become a psychosociologist. Life would then be a tribal village through which she would stalk soft-footed and disguised: That would show him who was subjective.” And Lottie, a sociology student on the loose, of a countryman encountered in Paris in “Virus X”: “…he began bemoaning his own Canadian problems of national identity, which Lottie thought a sign of weakness in a man. Moreover, she learned nothing new. What he was telling her was part of Dr. Keller’s course in Winnipeg Culture Patterns.”

Ha! I find Mavis Gallant’s stories very very funny (despite my House of Sociology resentment), and often unspeakably sad. The sadness is that people are often less than they could be, weak or blinkered or selfish or some combination thereof. And there’s little fatalism, I feel–choices are made, often bad ones. And yet the humour is there, though it  can be hard to find if you’re not on her wavelength, and maybe that’s one reason the length of this collection can be an advantage–it gives you time to get into the Gallantian mindset. I certainly enjoyed spending 2 weeks with her.