Leon Rooke

Below is a review I did of the "best stories" of Leon Rooke and an interview that first appeared in The Danforth Review. There was a second "best of" Rooke; some overlap, some not. When you've written over 300 stories, putting together a single "Selected" is kind of tough.

Great advice: "Allow your friends a high degree of slack."

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Painting the Dog: The Best Stories of Leon Rooke
by Leon Rooke
Thomas Allen, 2001

From Leon Rooke's story "The Heart Must From Its Breaking":

Mary, the Farmer

See that horse? He told me. And pointed off. I went on shelling my peas.

Don't you have one iota of sense, I told him. That there is the supernatural.

The supernatural appears frequently in the stories selected for Painting the Dog: The Best Stories of Leon Rooke. It's not always as blatantly presented as in the above example, but it's never far from the surface. Rooke's narrators report on a world full of mystery. Rooke fuses ordinary events with strangeness, and gives strangeness the solidity of the ordinary. "That there is the supernatural," says Mary, the Farmer. Don't make a big deal out of it. Don't be so surprised.

In an interview in The Danforth Review (see below), Rooke said he had published 300 stories so far in his well trod career with "another fifty or so piling up from the desk and floor." Painting the Dog contains 17 of them. Are they really Rooke's best? I'm not sure. What I can report, is that I liked some of them more than others. And some of them were very good indeed.

Which ones did I like best? and why? Early Obscenities in the Life of the World's Foremost Authority on Heidegger (1995) and The Only Daughter (1985). Placed side-by-side these two stories show both the range of Rooke's talent and the recurrence of his dominant themes. Both focus on domenstic relationships. Both revolve around a lone girl child. Both girls are testaments of sanity and intelligence in a world sliding off the rails (betrayed by adults?). Both stories offer the hope of resolution. However, the former (as its title suggests) pushes post-modern boundaries, involves intellectual discourse, and is self-conscious about its own telling. The latter, meanwhile, set in the rural southern USA earlier in the 20th century, is probably the best William Faulkner imitation I've ever read.

Leon Rooke is what Kurt Vonnegut would have turned out like if he had never gone to war. Both writers are concerned with big themes, but where Vonnegut obsesses on the arbitrary, Rooke obsesses on the mystery.

TDR asked Rooke why he writes so many short stories. Here was his answer:

Why? Other than it is a beautiful form? Other than the enticement to enter a flood of hugely diverse human lives? Other than a desire to explore a form the full properties of which have yet to be realized? Other than a writer's submission to the sheer, witless power of language, the invitation given to the writer, say, in a simple declarative sentence such as "A white dog was walking the beach"? Whose white dog? Why? What does the dog do next? Would not any sensible person who is a writer rather be tracking that dog than remain where one was before language had that dog put in an appearance?

Rooke's stories overflow with curiosity for unexplained situations. Sometimes this results in sharp, sustained insight; sometimes it results in peculiar speculation about the marginal and the odd.

Take the story Saks Fifth Avenue, for example. That story begins:

A woman called me up on the telephone. She was going to give me twenty thousand dollars, she said. I said come right over, I'm not doing anything this evening. Then I went back into the living room where my wife was, seated on the sofa with her nail files and paint, painting her nails. I wanted to keep it to myself for a bit.

Right there Rooke lays out the whole story. The narrator has been offered $20,000. He confronts his wife with his silence while waiting for his money to arrive. The story is framed by the offer and the arrival of the money. In between Rooke explores the dynamics of a marriage in tension. Is this interesting? To me, it seemed a little like shooting fish in a barrel. A little too easy, is what I'm saying. On the other hand, the story has one of Rooke's trademark narrators, who looks at the world with big-hearted bemusement. And I like Rooke's narrators. But sometimes I want them to be more, well, like David Foster Wallace's narrators.

Sometimes it seems like Rooke's narrators are playing with their uncertainty just a bit too much, like they want to keep "it" to themselves "for a bit." Like the mystery isn't really a mystery, but they need to pretend that it is, just to get by, or just so they can make it to the end of their story. Shakespeare said, "The world is but a stage." Rooke might say life is just a story, held together by the mystery behind all things. The story is held together by the mystery. Without the mystery, why bother?

Rooke has already earned his spot in the Canlit canon as one of the nation's literary innovators. In his review of Painting the Dog in Quill & Quire earlier this year, Nathan Whitlock questioned how innovative Rooke actually was. The short answer might be more than most, less than some. Every reader can make his or her own decision about that question. For certain, Rooke has made a mark worth noting. He has written more than few stories worth reading. He has staked out a literary universe that is uniquely his - and worth the visit.

This review and below interview were first published in The Danforth Review.

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TDR: First the biography. You are U.S. born, and have been in Canada quite a long time. What do you consider the major peaks and valleys of your autobiography so far?

ROOKE: Writing about the self has never held even the smallest attraction for me, so I think I will largely by-pass this question. My personal peaks and valleys can be defined pretty much the same way as those of any other party. As for highs and lows in the writing life, the lows one always recognizes, whereas the highs--unless very high indeed--mainly pass unnoticed.

TDR: Next, moving from the biography to the work. I’m not sure how you feel people attaching labels to your work, but “post-modern” seems to easily apply, which places you strongly on the strange side of Canadian literature though in the comfortable company of your American contemporaries (Pynchon, Vonnegut, et al). Canada has been called “the most post-modern country in the world,” but its popular literature tends to turn away from anything radical. Do you think Canadian publishing has a tendency to domesticate its stranger writers (and have you felt such pressure)? Or do Canadian writers domesticate themselves (and for what reason)?

ROOKE: Interesting point, that Canada is the most post-modern on the planet. Maybe so. Maybe France and Italy contend. I likewise find it weird that (not only) popular literature but literature here in all its major forms remains among the most insular on earth. What a peculiar contradiction. I am pretty sure it is writers who domesticate, or strangle, themselves, and the publishing industry should not be blamed for this. Nor should the the rather timid taste of the general public be blamed.

TDR: Ken Sparling told us your writing has an "earnestness" which attracts him to it. He defined earnestness as a way of handling individual characters as though they are all trying to do good, no matter how misguided they wind up looking in the face of the plot they wind up on. What do you think about that characterization of your characters and their worlds?

ROOKE: Well, one has to be earnest, which is to say, serious. What is the contribution apt to be if one says, oh, I am just fooling around? Naturally, a party often is just fooling around. The curtain opens and there's a guy buried up to his neck in sand. A basic situation where, when the idea first comes, clearly the author is just fooling around. The pursuit is to find something of value within the fooling about, and not to have foolishness as the final result. Ken's take is pretty much straight on.

TDR: One of the more interesting literary collaborations in the past 25 years was the writer/editor collaboration between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish. Recent years have seen a debate about how much of Carver is really Carver and how much of Carver is really Lish. Some people think Carver was the real genius; others lean towards Lish. To borrow a term from Sparling: Carver might be the earnest one, and Lish the cynic. What do you make of this debate? In your opinion, does the Carver/Lish conflict represent a significant aesthetic cleaving? In what way?

ROOKE: Both occupy a genius zone. Carver's stories before Lish crossed his path are nost unlike those of the later period. Was Carver at one point in trouble? Did Lish assist. I think so. One difficulty I have with your appraisal is that I don't see Lish as a cynic. In any event, he served Carver well. There is considerable heart within Lish's cynicism. He is evangelistic in his zeal for excellence. I've sat in, for a week or so, on his uninterrupted, vastly eloquent, spiel: his call is for the writer to align him\herself with the best, and the best is always in alignment with humanity's summons. The Carver stories, by the way, published after his death -- especially the fine one about a dying Chekhov -- is Carver through and through. Lish was there, but when he wasn't, Carver was.

TDR: You've worked in a number of genres, including drama and novels, but your greatest measure of output seems to be short stories. Any idea why that might be.

ROOKE: Yes, some three hundred published stories now. Another fifty or so piling up from the desk and floor. Why? Other than it is a beautiful form? Other than the enticement to enter a flood of hugely diverse human lives? Other than a desire to explore a form the full properties of which have yet to be realized? Other than a writer's submission to the sheer, witless power of language, the invitation given to the writer, say, in a simple declarative sentence such as "A white dog was walking the beach"? Whose white dog? Why? What does the dog do next? Would not any sensible person who is a writer rather be tracking that dog than remain where one was before language had that dog put in an appearance?

TDR: George Murray suggested we put this one to you. Any advice for sustaining literary friendships over the long term (given the competitive environment, the seeming inevitable jealousy and bitterness, and the constant, exhausting ego-stroking most writers require in order to feel even partially actualized)?

ROOKE: One, remember all gets sorted out in a time beyond our own. Two, remember no one forced you into this field. Three, even the most vaunted should recognize that there are people we have never heard of who are better than any of us. Four, allow your friends a high degree of slack.