The Journey Prize Stories 20:
The Best of Canada’s New Writers
Eds. Lynn Coady, Heather O’Neill,
Neil Smith
McClelland & Stewart, 2008
213 pages. $17.99.
The relationship between the Journey Prize Anthology and its parade of nominees is devoutly mutualist; the anthology offers young writers a safe and tasteful home and the writers, in turn, provide an exceptionally bright and cheerful welcome mat to lure the passing reader. And who wouldn’t love the invitation to the boisterous little party going on inside, audible for miles around? Two of the three jurors for the 2008 Journey Prize had stories featured in past editions, and this volume’s first ten pages, as well as its jacket, collect enthusiastic statements exclusively from past nominees. Elyse Friedman, quoted on the book’s back cover, calls the anthology that featured her in 2003 “one of the best showcases for short fiction in Canada.” Alissa York, who won the $10,000 prize in 1999, describes the Journey Prize Anthology as “a national tradition of literary discovery.” And Yann Martel, in the feistiest and most provocative statement of them all, declares that “for young writers, it’s the Journey Prize or nothing.”
I suppose short story writers – artists that 2008 jurist Neil Smith calls “The Burned Children of Canada” – simply cannot afford to be humble. They are advocates for themselves and each other, giving their collected work its velocity, and this kind of loyal enthusiasm must certainly pay off in terms of public interest. But after a while such frenetic praise, built to magnificent heights, begins to cast a shadow over the work itself. It’s hard not to become suspicious.
Indeed, after having carefully read the collection, I now scan the table of contents with an uneasy sense of amnesia – what was that one about again? – which makes me dubious of all those fantastic claims.
They are good stories, even those that slid away from me after I had read them. But many are not great stories. Their resilience – their potential for sticking to a reader’s bones and nourishing the imagination far beyond the last paragraph – is often limited, muting the tell-a-friend-immediately sort of impact that the book’s packaging promises.
A good-but-not-great example from the collection is Scott Randall’s “The Gifted Class.” First, its satisfactions: the story is told from the unique perspective of several precocious children, who solve advanced math problems, build geometric shapes from cereal boxes, and discuss the texture of the gelatine in their Fruit Roll Ups (“finer than salt but not as fine as talcum powder”). Their hungry young minds can almost, but not quite, intellectualize the deteriorating adult relationships they see around them. When the story’s central character, second-grader Belman Oz, considers a pair of anthropomorphic punctuation marks holding hands on the classroom wall, he wonders “if they were really a couple or if they just dated casually.” These recurrent collisions between a gifted child’s categorized understanding of the world and the complexity of romance give the story traction and humour.
Unfortunately, much of that traction is worn away by the story’s frequent detours into banal reports of the class’s routines. When Belman and two peers are required to tell an anecdote to the class, Randall stalls the story’s momentum by reproducing each child’s effort (the first tells a long story of wounding his finger while an infant; the second, a cute tale about visiting an organic farm).
Belman tells the classical Greek tale of Orpheus searching for his dead wife, which could potentially illuminate Belman’s relationship with his enigmatic father, a classical studies college instructor, but the clutter of the other children’s stories crowds out this opportunity. If Randall wanted to have readers experience the routine boredom of a classroom, he could achieve that without sacrificing precious real estate in a form already so jealous of its limited space. For that reason, the story reads like a draft, in which a compelling central theme is beginning to emerge, still buried in the inessential.
A similar sense of over-saturation encumbers Naomi K. Lewis’s story, “The Guiding Light.” G. Virginia Morgan is a severe and confident self-help guru preparing to lead a seminar in Tucson while a journalist tags reverently along, hungry for enlightenment. Within this story are moments of deeply satisfying tactility: the perilous heat of the desert where Morgan wanders without any protection or direction; the relief of cold water gulped from a sports bottle; the nostalgia of tasting a long-forgotten food. Morgan herself is an intriguing creation: a brain injury from falling down a set of stairs estranged her from her previous life and inspired her book The Willing Amnesiac, which established her self-help empire. There’s powerful vulnerability in her character, and constant, tantalizing hints that she is about to do something more wild and unexpected than walk through the desert without a sun hat – though she never does.
The journalist, too, never travels far into the unexpected, often reflecting on her testosterone-heavy family and her disappointing writing career, without taking compelling steps to reverse any of it. The pages and pages of conversation between the two women feel heavy and didactic, though jurist Lynn Coady praises the story for being the refreshing antithesis of fashionable, “pyrotechnic” innovation in writing; she says that, within its “understated language” and “total eschewal of quirk” is a story of familiar quotidian banality ignited by “deepening unease and, yes, mystery.” I agree, but I feel that the banality of it plays too heavily, and the mystery, where the story’s real venom is stored, plays too lightly.
Perhaps at the heart of this anthology is a conflict threatening many juried collections; where consensus is necessary, it is possible that the most provocative stories (in terms of style, approach, and perspective as often as subject) polarize the jury, and the stories left in the middle, pleasing all, are ultimately sent out on stage. I struggle with this notion, though, because there is nothing placating or particularly “safe” about these selections, as a whole. Opposing the unhurried, meditative style of Lewis’s piece, for example, is Mike Christie’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.” The absolute outrageousness of this story is its chief pleasure, and if the same jury agreed to select both this piece and “The Guiding Light,” then they can hardly be accused of accommodating a modest middle ground.
In Christie’s piece, Henry, a cocaine addict living in a cell-like apartment near Oppenheimer Park in East Vancouver, meets the reincarnation of J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, who wants to sample cocaine “in the spirit of scholarly inquiry.” The two men stagger through their neighbourhood on this scientific quest. “Oppie” becomes increasingly belligerent and lost to himself, finally ditching Henry to join another gaggle of junkies, his parting words drawing interesting parallels between his new quest for drugs and his historical one for nuclear armament:
Crack may not be the panacea, but… I refuse to stop. Not now, not when I feel like I’m so close to a breakthrough… To be frank, I think the world in which I shall live in from now on will be a pretty restless and tormented place.
Certain fringe characters, like the forgettable man who harasses Henry in an alley where he huddles with his drug high early in the story, seem invented only as puppets to expose the wretchedness of Henry’s life. Other characters, though, are brought to life with impressive deftness despite an economy of language, such as a nameless woman who attaches herself to their duo:
At the skid-row country and western karaoke bar, it’s me, Oppie, and the woman who told her boyfriend not to break my collarbone, our beer glasses hydroplaning around a small, slick table. She is wearing Oppie’s porkpie hat in the way some women flirtatiously grab and wear men’s hats, perching it on top of her hair like she is balancing it there, her neck stiffened, hoping the novelty of it will promote a new appreciation of what’s beneath.
Moments like this, of characters parachuted into repellent situations and left to grope their way free, provide the most memorable scenes of the anthology. In Oscar Martens’ “Breaking on the Wheel,” a tyrannical father attempts to boost business at his failing country gas station by advertising a “FUN FARE,” its only attraction an unreliable Ferris wheel on which his daughter is forced to ride for hours each day in all weather. Her manic smile, ratcheted to “high voltage” to attract customers (only one boy accepts a ride, and is crying before it’s over), is deliciously unsettling throughout the story. The piece’s ending, though rather abrupt, manages to twin the story’s sinister atmosphere with a very fragile possibility of hope when a social worker arrives to investigate:
Sharon does not like the way farms have a range of lethal weapons at hand… But mostly, Sharon does not like the way her vision is obscured by the screen door, as she looks into the dark room behind it, straining to see what’s there.
Saleema Nawaz’s “My Three Girls” opens with an equally disturbing image, made all the more horrifying by its irreconcilable contrasts:
There is a photo of me and Kathleen in the rec room with Maggie, our dead baby sister. She is slumped in a car seat, swaddled in a pink flannel blanket, eyes and mouth sutured shut, every crease downturned with the heaviness of death. Kathleen and I are posed to either side, legs outstretched, hips pressed into the orange carpet.
This story, which ultimately won the Journey Prize, achieves quite a lot in just a few pages. A family tries to cope with the loss of a baby daughter, and the surviving girls of that opening photograph eventually have babies of their own before one of them is struck down by cancer. The story is full of moments of exquisite, understated pain, as when the girls’ “dry-eyed and harried” father explains that the baby girl’s death, caused not by accident but by an inevitable birth defect, was “something closer to a disappointment than a devastation.”
But some of the characterisation in the story is just too obvious to satisfy, particularly regarding the family matriarch. The final line of the story is especially overdone: “I sometimes see my mother walking from room to room, her face sagging in grief, looking like a lost little girl.” A sagging face, that hazy reference to loss – this pattern of writing grief is too vague and commonplace to stir a sincere emotional response in the reader, which is especially disappointing since the mother’s anguish is demonstrated so effectively earlier in the story, as when she meets her baby granddaughter:
Like a reluctant Lazarus, my mother is drawing closer and closer to Hannah bit by bit. She grabs a handful of potato peels and steps toward the garbage can to the right of the table. On her way, I see her shoot a glance at the baby, her pupils dilating until her brown eyes are suffused in black.
I understand why Nawaz’s story earned her the top prize; she writes well, carefully selecting moments from decades of family history to inject a novel’s worth of pain and endurance into just a few pages. I’m glad Canada has such a prestigious prize to honour her accomplishment. Nonetheless, the self-congratulatory bumph of the book’s back cover and opening pages still fills me with unease. No question, there are some very respectable stories collected here. I only wish the collection’s overall impact was more memorable, more consistently outstanding, to justify all the hype.
Tags: Issue 77