Help Me, Jacques Cousteau, by Gil Adamson

In the third story from the end of Gil Adamson‘s short story collection Help Me, Jacques Cousteau, Hazel, our valiant explorer and protagonist, admits that she has a terrible memory:  “I can’t remember anything in its right order, and I rarely know if it’s a memory or just something I heard somewhere.” It’s a common failing, I would think, our pasts clouded by time, by stories, by dreams and imaginings all swirling around in the depths of our consciousness. Just as on the playful and evocative cover, it’s like being under water, peering into the murky waters, searching for those brief moments when a errant ray of light temporarily clears the shadows. And it seems to me that each story in this collection, which ranges from Hazel being a few years old to her being in her late teens, is just that: those illuminated memories that we carry with us, for better or for worse.

Through Hazel’s sharp observation (it is genius for Hazel to be wearing a snorkel mask on the cover) that we are initiated into the particular miseries of her dysfunctional family. She watches as her parents grow apart, and her father spends more and more time rewiring their home in a oblique attempt to rekindle a spark, for as he explains to his daughter when he tells her about lightning, “Like any current two sides must connect or nothing happens.” For this is a family at disconnects: her brother temporarily stops speaking, her grandparents bicker, her uncle womanizes, Hazel turns to casual sex.

But while a story about disconnects could be barren, Adamson’s stories are anything but. Nothing particularly extraordinary happens in any of the stories, but Adamson presents vivid images, each rendered with precise and evocative word choice and a remarkable instinct for rhythm that makes every line a pleasure to read. I’ll quote at length her description of a child’s experience of the Canadian winter:

“… a whole world of children waddling around in torturous, unbending snowsuits. A world of sleds and snow and slush and ice balls down the back of my neck and soggy knees and the maddening zzt-zzt of nylon snow pants; the throttle of wool scarves, yanked tight by my mother and impossible to claw open; the stink of cloakrooms, the multicoloured Popsicle look of cold feet and the shrieking pangs while they thaw…”

Her metaphors are  spot on, with such gems such as a newborn baby with “toes like corn niblets,” or wedding-goers with coats over their formal gear: “We hurry along the road in the snow, looking like an assortment of bonbons in frilly wrappings.”

The characters in this collection of short stories are also collectors of stories: they  savour the peccadilloes and eccentricities of their neighbours. Hazel watches them with binoculars, her mother remembers all the details, her father strikes up random conversations, encouraging strangers to disclose their secrets. For as Hazel concludes,  “It’s a relief to find out how warped other people are.”

And that is one of the principal pleasures of this collection, to see one’s own familial dysfunction reflected in the waters of Hazel’s memories. But Adamson takes it even further, allowing Hazel to eventually appreciate her family’s own particular brand of dysfunction. In the final story, Hazel is mired in a hellish family dinner, and she experiences a flickering moment of tenderness for her family: “I think: wouldn’t it be nice if we all died suddenly, without hurting, without knowing anything had happened, and went on as ghosts, having dinner and arguing and never growing old?” And when the plum cake ignites into a startling pillar of flame, Hazel experiences a moment which will forever be illuminated in the murky depths of memory, a moment of chaos and togetherness, of both love and madness, and she sees her family more clearly than ever before, “with light pouring out, bright as a flash.”

Fans of Adamson’s hit historical novel The Outlander may initially be taken aback expecting a more plot-driven narrative, but  the interconnected short stories allow a more novelistic feel, and hopefully after a couple of Adamson’s offbeat, perceptive and often humorous tales, readers will find themselves once again captivated, poised like Andrew in “Heaven Is a Place That Starts with H,” “holding onto the dashboard with both hands, pressing his face to the glass.”

Many thanks to Trish at House of Anansi for adding this quirky and vibrant read to my collection.

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We So Seldom Look on Love, by Barbara Gowdy

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a hard sell when it comes to short stories — I think I read too many overly subtle ones in high school. Call me crass, but if you’ve only got a few pages, I want something particularly interesting. Once you’ve got my attention, that‘s when I’ll go looking for richer subtext and nuance. And I can say with perfect confidence that every single story in Barbara Gowdy’s debut collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, will get your attention. (Seriously, more than once I had to cover my gaping mouth with this book on the subway.)

For these are not stories of coming of age on the prairies or going searching for the perfect gift at the damn carnival, they are a veritable freak show of human curiosities — some characters physically,  all psychologically, out of the ordinary in some way. Step right up ladies and gentleman, boys and girls! Feast your eyes on the two-headed man, the girl with two pairs of legs, the exhibitionist, and the necrophiliac! But that’s just what will get your attention, because beneath the sensationalism, Gowdy offers rich portraits of human beings, as she says, just trying to survive.

All of these people are scarred or strange in some way; they carry their personal tragedies and disappointments like another head or pair of legs (though yes, sometimes literally). And yet even when their acts are horrifying (truly, I didn’t need to know the gory details of sex with corpses), Gowdy eschews morality and chronicles their suffering with compassion — perhaps not looking on love, but looking with a sort of love. In “The Two-Headed Man,” Simon says “Love is dangerously blind, pathetically vulnerable,” and so perhaps looking, seeing everything, and not turning away is a different, perhaps even greater  form of love. In the last story, this very act of taking in these stories is presented metaphorically when Marion has a dream:

“Marion is embracing this person, melting with love, when she discovers a hole in the small of his or her back. She sticks her hand in, reaches up and withdraws the heart. It pulses and half-rolls in her palm like a newly hatched bird. It is so exposed! She puts it in her mouth and tries to get it down her throat and into her ribcage without scraping its delicate membrane or stopping its beat.”

A little bit gross (hey, why not add cannibalism to the mix?), but a perfect illustration of what Gowdy has done here, and what readers do, if unwillingly. She has taken the vulnerable heart of another, and protected it within herself.  (And as an interesting note, a Descant interview with Gowdy in the P.S. section informs me these stories were all inspired by real people and real events.)

But back to the titular looking, which  is paramount in this collection. The exhibitionist gets off on the perceived pleasure of her voyeur, and when Emma goes to a strip club she is excited not by the strippers, but “it was the men who were turning her on, what they were feeling.” The necrophiliac’s boyfriend gets her to describe all her deeds in detail. And so perhaps for the reader, the ultimate onlooker, these unfortunate tales perhaps allow for a sort of catharsis, a way to share in and then expunge ourselves of the freakish desires in our subconscious. But more likely it is simply a matter of putting our own tragedies, our own eccentricities in perspective, “which is what Emma supposes she is doing, indirectly, whenever she reads supermarket tabloids of pumps Karl and Marion for the worst possible story, for the story that will reduce her own story to the status of contender.”

Gowdy’s clean, objective prose is the perfect container for these terrible tales, for in cases such as these, understatement and compassion are necessary, lest the author look like a carnival barker, trying to draw people into his or her sideshow. For this is not a sideshow that exploits people’s strangeness, that reduces them to their unusual part. Instead, like a curio cabinet stocked with preserved human organs, these stories permit for a close, if often horrifying, exploration of humanity and just how vulnerable it can be.

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Runaway, by Alice Munro

Well, after being scarred by my awful first year treatment of Alice, coupled with my long standing (though gradually fading) prejudice toward stories about small town ontario, I felt I owed it to Alice to return and reassess. And I must say, I enjoyed all these stories of women on the run from one thing or another. The praise of Munro’s character development is astute – she effortlessly shares the fears and foibles that make us human.
I’ll admit, that despite their quiet voice, a couple of the stories, notably the title story and Tricks, packed a harder punch than I was expecting – and that’s the mark of a good short story. Anyway, the short of my story? I don’t think I’ll be a runaway from Alice any longer.

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