Wait & Party

My essay on my attempt to start reading again after the death of my wife.

Kate O’Rourke, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett: Wait & Party

Published on Numero Cinq.

Mrs. Dalloway

I noted today that my last post here was on May 8th. That was a day of rest. On May 9th, I went with my wife to her oncologist to find out if the news was going to be bad or worse.

It turned out to be worse, and on May 23 she passed away.

I have been unable, among other things, to read. But this past weekend I decided to read Kate's favourite novel, one I hadn't read before: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

Here's what I found there (p. 105): "Beauty was everywhere."

That and much more. It's a novel, among other things, about a woman planning a party. How very Kate. I hear her on every page.

I Heart Short Stories - Part 2

Inspecting the Vaults by Eric McCormack (Penguin 1987, 1993).

The 1993 edition includes the novella The Paradise Motel. It also includes a cover blurb from a Montreal Gazette review: "odd and unsettling ... murder, deformity and cruelty are treated as everyday occurrences."

McCormack taught contemporary literature at the University of Waterloo while I attended that institution in the late-1980s, early-1990s. I didn't take his course, but I sat in on a couple. He taught Raymond Carver, Borges, Donald Bartheme. None of whom I'd heard of before.

He was also known as the author of a freaky collection of short fiction, Inspecting the Vaults.

I read it after I left Waterloo, during a period when I trembled with desire to write decent short fiction. What was that even? What was a short story?

I remember one McCormack class when he described meeting a woman whose grandmother had sat on the knee of Thomas Hardy (if I remember correctly). "There's a direct line from this classroom to Thomas Hardy," he said. Then he went on to describe a Hardy novel as one that turned on a plot point: "she drank a cup of tea."

No such subtlety to the degree of manners in the curriculum of McCormack's class. Later, after I'd asked McCormack to read some of my budding short fiction, I mentioned the blurb on his book to him.

"But murder, deformity and cruelty are everyday occurrences," I said.

He nodded knowingly and made a clever comment.

Cleverness is what shines out of his stories. Pessimism, too, likely. More than a flirtation with the gothic. A deep knowledge of world literature and movements away from realism. A fantastical imagination.

An un-Canadian disinterest in earnestness.

Reading this book helped me to define for myself what was the essential "storyness" in a short story. It wasn't the movement of action within a plot. It wasn't a twist or surprise ending. It was a manipulation of language and an attempt at a new kind of see-ing.

A digging deeper past surfaces and a stark honesty to reveal what one felt.

Eric, thank you. I haven't forgotten.

Life Is A Carnival

Believe it or not.

Goodbye, Levon.

Derek Hayes

In his TDR interview, Derek Hayes describes the characters in his short story collection, The Maladjusted (Thistledown, 2011), as people "who suffer from anxiety or whose thinking is a bit distorted."

My Oxford Concise dictionary defines maladjusted as "(of a person) unable to adapt to or cope with the demands of a social environment."

Judged by that definition, Hayes' description of his book is bang on. This is not a noir collection of stories about people from the wrong side of the tracks or an exploration of marginal sub-cultures. These stories are character sketches of people who view reality through a prism slightly (or more) askew.

Now everyone's perspective is different, so what I'm trying to get at here is more than simply subjectivity. What Hayes' characters have, rather, is a self-awareness about their relationship with others and how a conflict within themselves prevents them from sharing common ground with others, or connecting deeply with others, or feeling "a part of it" (feeling apart from it), or being able to manage, per the dictionary definition, "the demands of a social environment."

Yes, there is a David Foster Wallace-ness to these stories, though Hayes' characters are more ... what should one say? Real? Less extremely different, perhaps?

The Maladjusted packs 16 stories into just over 200 pages. The stories also take place around the globe and the narrators speak a multitude of voices: different races, different genders, different ages, different intellectual and emotional capacities.

Anxiety knows no boundaries.

The diversity of the collection is abundant and rewarding, and the ease of the storytelling is deceptively simple, though the stories are often anything but.

A debut collection worth checking out.

I Heart Short Stories - Part 1

It all stared with Hemingway, with the self-conscious literariness of the short stories, with the iceberg comment, with show-don't-tell and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place and Hills Like White Elephants.

I was taken with the idea that the author could provide, say, 10 per cent of the story (the iceberg above water) and leave it up to the reader to fill in the rest. The story would be like a painting, requiring engaged interpretation, not simply an exposition stuffed with all possible details, which is what Dickens seemed to me, over-written nonsense.

Later, I would read in A Moveable Feast how Hemingway's style evolved from viewing the suggestive brush strokes of the Impressionists, and the circle of influence grew tighter. Impressionism is what I thought art should be. But then I was a teenager and listened to The Doors.

Break on through. Capture the small, essential granules of life.

Portray grace under pressure.

Over the years, I've tried to unwind Hemingway's influence on my reading habits. I've broadened and complicated my views of what a short story can be. I've noted the limits of the Hemingway style, how minimalism can be a trap, how the heroic, the depressive and the male ego mix in Hemingway in sometimes destructive ways.

But even after all of that, it's where I've chosen to start what I hope will be a series of reflections on different short story authors and books, a random flowering of opinion and fact.

When I first read Raymond Carver, Short Cuts, I saw how he had taken Hemingway, added some Kafka, and revealed new textures of storytelling. Story making. So Much Water So Close To Home, for example, has a title that sounds like Hemingway. The minimalist style forces the reader to interpret "what's missing" in order to make sense of the action, the story also critiques the male ego and introduces a female voice in a way Hemingway could never quite provide.

So Hemingway is still part of the foundation of my reading experience, but also I look for writers who can breakout of the perspective of the Hemingway experience and put their own stamp on "reality."

Which is something I'll get to later, the whole question of whether language can refer to anything other than itself and the struggle between the realists and fabulists. Which may not be a struggle at all, just different points on a storytelling spectrum with no contradiction inferred between them.

For now, though, I salute Hemingway and his declarative sentences. They are built to last.

Short Story Reviews

Go to this page on the CBC website, then under "display" and "all genres" change that to "fiction-short."

And you will get a pretty good list of recent short fiction in Canada (from Quill & Quire reviews).

Cheers.