Fiction

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Short fiction is paradoxically unprofitable, or so say the publishers, and necessary for emerging writers who must get their work into circulation and their calling cards into play. One could safely hold the view that only reviewers and airplane passengers read new short fiction and that, Alice Munro notwithstanding, the genre is a mere stepping stone to more creditable achievements. This is a time-honoured but unfortunate view that continues to undermine the rich range of short fiction being produced in this country every year. And a wide range it is, from the epiphany-driven traditional to the open-ended experimental.

Newfoundland-based Beth Ryan's first collection inclines towards the traditional but it also bristles with resistance to that end of the spectrum in exciting ways. The stories in What Is Invisible are as unpretentious as the characters who are drawn on its pages. Above all, Ryan is resolutely interested in the human subject, endowed with dignity in even the most humiliating or deprived circumstances. The men and women who are shaped by St John's or the small towns where they dwell in rural Newfoundland are remarkably average and yet unavoidably interesting, driven by the familiar impulses of sex or, more often, fear of sex. Traces of Roman Catholicism linger in people's lives like wood smoke, even long after the Church has lost its authoritative grip. Social patterns still keep men and women as distant from and incomprehensible to each other as cars are to moose. Sometimes the effects of such difference are full of both humour and pathos, as in 'Northern Lights':

Debbie's a good-looking girl, with her silky brown hair and big green eyes. Her eyebrows are tweezed in a dramatic arch, a style that makes her look as if she's always amazed. She knows all too well that she makes the men silly and useless.

Women might be bound by the tired demands of appearances but they often inhabit potent inner lives. Men are more often lost in a fog of bewilderment, rendering them comic or vaguely pathetic. Most often, as in 'The Patron Saint of Hitchhikers,' characters strive to claim some individuality in a world of oppressive convention, although there are usually limits on standing out too much:

Jackie works at Zellers, where the cashiers wear name tags and red scarves tied around the necks of their white blouses. The key to standing out is to find a special way to tie your scarf, Jackie says. She favours a floppy bow.

What remains most striking about What IsInvisible is how Ryan's stories seem to be playing with their conclusions. Some rise to sudden surprise while more than a few advance tentatively, without clear markers of resolution or noticeable change, scarcely hinting at new beginnings. It is as if Ryan were experimenting with the short story form itself and its inherent demand for meaningful endings. The reader is compelled to wonder where things are going and if they will ever get there, satisfied to know that perhaps there is nowhere to get to after all. The genre almost always raises the ending question and so it is refreshing to read a fine debut collection that cares more for its characters than the phony places to which narratives might artificially direct them.

Roads Unravelling by New Brunswick writer Kathy-Diane Leveille is far more decidedly traditional in its approach to the genre. Here, almost all characters realize deep truths and have transformative experiences. In Leveille's hands, it is as if the short-story form were especially designed to capture such moments. Women, especially those who suffer and endure, are at the rapidly beating heart of the collection. Always it is they who struggle to get beyond the debilitating circumstances of social, usually working-class, histories, of family or marriage. The unravelling roads are apparently there for the taking, and each central character in her own way manages to find a map to a better life. A more cynical reader might...