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  • New Canadian Fiction
  • Richard J. Lane (bio)

1 / First Fiction

The quirkiness of everyday life is a dominant theme this year, especially as seen through intimate personal relationships. The smallest detail becomes charged with significance, creating a surreal mood in the midst of the mundane: life’s character changes just a smidgen but is nevertheless thereby transformed, and if not, the unexpected twist or turn lies just around the corner performing the same action. In ‘At Sea’ in the short-story collection Bird Eat Bird by Katrina Best, a Canadian family visits an American beach while on vacation; there is something slightly threatening about the juxtaposition of public and military waterfront, and the ‘sinister looking, unmarked black aircraft’ flying overhead that are ‘an odd shape, darkly futuristic – part hexagon, part stingray.’ ‘I knew we should’ve rented that cabin in BC’, says Carol to her husband, Martin, before turning to her children while she pondered the fate of her slightly tired marriage and ignored the advice from the lifeguards about moving nearer to their beach station because of the dangerous riptides. Life’s edge, especially that of intense relationships, has been blunted by the mundane, yet Carol is not entirely sure she even wants the ‘edge’ that she and her partner had once thrived on: ‘They dressed in edgy clothes, said edgy things and hung out with an edgy crowd of counter-culture people who dressed primarily in black. [. . .] These days, the last thing she wanted was edge. She wanted consistency and calm and companionship, a family-centered life, though obviously with some excitement too, [End Page 514] just not the kind born of anxiety.’ Carol is poised between the energy of that earlier edginess and the edge that has become mere irritation; instead of witty dialogue, Carol and Martin engage in frustrated exhausting argument, tempered only by the calm advice of a marriage counsellor. If only they could accept the prosaic, ponders Carol, they would realize the irony in the fact that what they both secretly crave is to finally settle down and become responsible parents, comfortable in their stage of life. This liminal state does not mean that Carol is cloyless: she still has ‘the hungry edge of appetite’ as Shakespeare puts it in Richard II, one that will not be sated by the ‘bare imagination of a feast.’ And so she gets jealous when her husband is found desirable by other women on the beach, and because he manages to go out surfing on a boogie board with panache and ease, returning with a look of exhilaration. Carol goes out on the boogie board and finds herself in an even stranger, apparently becalmed, state. Inevitably she is caught by a riptide after spectacularly failing to boogie board with style, crashing into the beach and hurting herself in the process. But what is so eerie about this scene is less the intensity of the surf and more the intensity of her aloneness, the muted noise, the deceptively calm sea that is nonetheless pulling her away from the shore, and the other surfers who simply ignore her as they ride the waves. Out at sea, Carol’s voice is ‘thin and reedy,’ unheard as she shouts for help. For Carol, the thought of her demise in this manner is farcical, ridiculous, even ironic material for the stand-up comedy she had failed at in Toronto: ‘The punchline would be something to do with her untimely death and the boogie board. Death and the boogie board. It sounded a bit like the title of a surreal but comic play.’ Carol had wanted to be not only a stand-up comic but also a writer, and now she repeats her thought: ‘Perhaps if she lived she would write a brilliant surreal but comic play. Perhaps she’d start a blog.’ The ‘black humour’ here is that of surrealism: not just the relation to death but also the undercutting of the attempt to represent oneself, just as the undertow is dragging Carol away from her family life on the beach, a life which she has been representing as troubled and problematic. Even the black humour of turning Carol’s situation into a...

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