Like the Crack of a Canon
The Journey Prize Stories 19:
The Best of Canada’s New Writers
Eds. Caroline Adderson, David Bezmozgis, Dionne Brand
McLelland & Stewart, 2007
176 pages, $17.99
In the wake of this year’s controversy over Canadian short story anthologies, with CNQ and The New Quarterly contesting the inclusions and exclusions in The Penguin Book of Short Stories, it’s encouraging to know that emerging writers are continuing to lick stamps and mail their stories to literary journals. Even as the debate pitches and rages around them about who defines the old Canadian canon, they are defining the new. The absolute best of their efforts are anthologized each year by McClelland & Stewart’s Journey Prize Anthology. The 2007 edition of the anthology, in which four-time nominee Craig Boyko finally earns the $10,000 top prize, is a superb example of why this collection is the definitive source for well-crafted, fearless stories by Canada’s brand new writers.
To earn a place in this anthology, a story must first be published in a Canadian journal – already the obstacles are great, as journals receive far, far more submissions than they accept – and then be nominated by that journal as a contender for the prize. The 2007 selection jury, which included writers Dionne Brand, David Bezmozgis, and Caroline Adderson, read through seventy-six nominations from such distinguished journals as The Fiddlehead, Maisonneuve Magazine, and The Antigonish Review. Somehow, and certainly with superhuman effort, the jurors managed to whittle that list to the eleven included in this anthology. (Caroline Adderson says of this task that she read “at least a dozen stories three times, and a few even four times. Every word. Then I had to choose which ones I liked best when, really, I would rather have mailed out medals to all seventy-six writers.”)
The best part of the Journey Prize collection is that its only objective is to collect excellent writing, and as a result its thematic and stylistic range is limitless. Each story occupies a vastly different corner of the world, using singular blends of energy and wit, pathos and restraint. Krista Foss’s beautiful “Swimming in Zanzibar,” for example, captures a quietly contemptuous relationship between a man and a woman while they swim above a seaweed farm in the Indian Ocean. By contrast, Patricia Robertson’s “My Hungarian Sister” is narrated by a young British child, lonely in her “lopsided, boy-heavy family,” who obsesses over media coverage of Hungarian refugees and grows tormented by the familiar, bullying logic of impatient parents: “How could I sit there eating cream buns among acres of white linen when in Hungary children were starving?”
In Pasha Malla’s “Respite” the scene changes once more, this time to a nameless winter city weary of roadside slush and perpetual dusk. Womack, who spends his nights writing a novel while his unsatisfied girlfriend sleeps behind a curtain, works once a week as the home caretaker for a dying twelve-year-old boy. Without overemphasis, Womack addresses the difficulties facing a writer alone with his craft; halfway through “Respite,” he asks himself the very question that Malla must have had to answer as he drafted this story:
He has wanted for some time for this boy to become a character – someone tragic, his novel lacks pathos – but how to write about a dying child without resorting to sentimentality, to cliché?
Malla himself manages to avoid cliché by taking the reader inside ordinary moments, such as the first meeting between Womack and his young charge – moments that, within their apparent banality, surprise and touch the reader:
He likes to have his face touched, said the boy’s mother. She cupped his ears, demonstrating. The boy laughed, a sudden burst like the crack of a cannon. Womack jumped. He composed himself, squatted beside the boy in his wheelchair and, looking up at the mother, replaced her hands with his own.
Like a veteran writer, Malla recycles key images without appearing to, nudging the reader towards a nuanced understanding of his lead character’s dissatisfaction. To appreciate the loneliness of Womack’s domestic world, for example, Malla repeats the image of covered ears, linking the man trapped in an unhappy life with the boy trapped in a dying body:
All around, crumpled Styrofoam tubs sat like ruined sandcastles. Womack placed his hands over his ears, tightly. There was a dull echo inside his skull: the empty, hollow rumble of a stalled train.
Like Womack, Grant Buday’s character Jay, the central figure in his story “The Curve of the Earth,” struggles to find traction in a life that often feels beyond his control. Buday’s character is a Canadian ex-pat living in Italy, who waits for his more or less estranged Romanian-Canadian parents to arrive in Venice at the end of their cruise-ship holiday. Jay finds only his terrified mother at the arranged meeting place, his father having been plucked out of the disembarkation line at a cruise stop in Romania, charged with forty-six years of back taxes. Buday crafts a sharp picture of Jay’s mother, who stoops to reduce her incredible height and whose wrist, held in Jay’s hand, feels “disturbingly like cutlery rolled in a damp napkin.” Likewise, the socio-political distress of this family – Jay’s father long ago changed his name from Pavel Bogza to Paul Bond – is powerfully illustrated in a simple observation when Jay finally reaches his father’s hospital bedside in the Bucharest State Prison:
A clipboard hung by a wire at the end of the bed and on it was a report typed in faded ink. Jay read the name Bogza, Pavel. The key had punched a hole right through the o in Bogza. He wanted to weep.
Children’s relationships with their parents are examined under very different circumstances in Alice Petersen’s story, “After Summer.” The piece introduces a nameless first-person narrator and her brother Jake, motherless children whose father summers as a hack poet in the attic of a rented boathouse. Peterson’s talent is her evocation of missing scenes; we don’t know how the children’s mother died or disappeared, or under what circumstances their father settled for his fussy new partner, Maybelle. These missing pieces, though, are all the more resonant in their absence. The narrator’s anecdotes give readers the perfect dose of detail. One slow afternoon, for example, the children try to spy on their father, alone in the boathouse attic, but the ladder they use collapses and knocks Jake unconscious. Petersen engages a family’s entire dynamic in the single, unadorned sentence following this accident: “‘Dad’s got no clothes on and he’s crying,’ he said when he woke up, by which time Dad was fully dressed and driving us into town as fast as he could.”
A child’s view of the world – the baffling decisions of parents, the unspeakable importance of social standing – is likewise considered in the winning story, Craig Boyko’s “Ozy.” Boyko invites us into a child’s mind during the early days of video games, a world where places like the general store patrolled by damp-eyed Mr. Kacvac are settings for life-and-death drama among a group of young boys. These boys establish or destroy their social standing by dropping one scavenged quarter at a time into the “battered and scuffed” arcade game, recently installed by Mr. Kacvac. What is most compelling about this scenario is its familiarity: the game in Mr. Kacvac’s store, given the hyper-masculine, generically recognizable name “Ballistic Obliteration,” represents all such games; the boys, who call themselves “the Obliterati,” represent all such boys – or rather, all such people, anyone who has ever been so uniquely obsessed with a goal that the rest of the world becomes inconsequential:
It was not respect we sought. Those who were better than you could not respect you, and those who were worse could not even like you. Those who did not play – my mother, our teachers, the President of the United States of America – did not really exist. It was not respect that we were after but immortality.
Here we arrive at the muscle of Boyko’s story: the intersection of a little boy’s infatuation and a philosopher’s dilemma, where arcade game meets abstract contemplation in a remarkably inventive way. The story itself begins in the abstract, with a cryptic series of numbers and letters gradually decoded as high scores and their associated players’ noms de guerre, or handles. When the arcade game is first delivered, the high scores are meaningless computer-generated figures with invented handles. (“They even seemed to have been chosen to rule out offensive acronyms,” complains the narrator. “Not a single DIK or TIT or AZZ among them – another sure sign that they were fakes.”) The boys steadily colonize this list with their own top scores, using handles carefully chosen for maximum coolness, until a fight between two of them escalates to the unthinkable:
Roger reached around behind the machine and pulled the plug out of the wall. Wally shrieked. Fran closed his eyes. Jack Thomas’s face went white. Then he stepped forward and punched Roger neatly and expertly in the stomach.
When the game’s power is restored, the boys discover the horrifying consequence of Roger’s fury:
ROG, TOM, FT, and OZY were no more. Gone. Just like that. Without a trace. In the blink of an eye. Forever. So what was the point?
Boyko’s young narrator lies awake at night, traumatized by the sudden awareness of eternity and, as he puts it during his sleepless contemplation, “how long gone things stay gone.” Through this little boy and his arcade game, Boyko suggests what other novels and stories expound with clumsier instruments: that everything we do and say and love in life, while it might feel eternal at its conception, is but a pale fire, burning for a moment and then extinguished for eternity. You see? Even as I write these words, I am aware of their inadequacy, their unappealing preciousness. But in “Ozy,” the writer’s craft supports his theme convincingly. Consider, for example, the adult version of this little boy, remembering “Ballistic Obliteration” and what it once meant:
I was good at something once. Great, even. It was a long time ago. I was ten. Now I’m forty-three and not good at much of anything. I’m not complaining. You’re only forty-three and not good at anything for a short time. But you will once have been ten and good at something forever.
Paragraphs like that one, without a word or insistence too many, reveal why Craig Boyko won the 2007 Journey Prize for “Ozy.” Begin with his story, then move into the rest. You will be entertained and moved, pushed oh-so-gently towards a new and surprising view of the ordinary world.
Tags: Caroline Adderson, Compilation, David Bezmozgis, Dionne Brand, Issue 76