Fiction 2

FICTION 17 2 / T.L. CRAIG This half of the fiction in English category traditionally introduces first novels and collections of short stories. What is unusual about this year's harvest of such firsts is that many of these authors are already well established in genres other than what they offer here. Mary di Michele, for example, already had five books'of poetry to her name before her first novel appeared in 1994. L.L. Tostevin had four books of poetry. Diane Schoemperlen had four books of short stories. Richard Cumyn, Carole Giangrande, Brian Johnson, and Oakland Ross have considerable publications in journalism. This is still a collection of firsts, but these twentynine novels and twelve short story collections have been produced by writers with a lot more experience, self-confidence, and maturity than is usually seen .here. Taken as a whole, the first fiction of 199~ is far more impressive than that of the last three years. The other noticeable trend in this year's work is the paucity of books from Western Canada. The reviews do not fall neatly into groups this year, and I have instead discussed novels first and then short stories, both -in a rough descending order of interest and quality. In the Language of Love, by Diane Schoemperlen (HarperCollins, 350, $24.00), is a lesson for any beginning writer about how much can be extracted from the superficially mundane daily life of an 'ordinary' middle-class Ontario family. Without a murder or a sensational car chase, Schoemperlen traces the somewhat tedious life of a woman growing up in the 1960s and having a baby in the 1980s. The novel is a 1960s collage of the bits and pieces of the interior decoration, music, clothing, and behaviour of girls just a little too young for Woodstock. It seems a cliche to use the word 'vivid' to describe writing that is so forcefully evocative, but it certainly fits here. Schoemperlen provides the whole background of growing up in the 1960s, right down to the details of partitioned picnic trays. This background remains behind the narrator's insightful musings and reminiscences, which accumulate to build up the central character. These are truly fascinating musings, as motivation and stages of selfawareness are rearranged in a gradual movement towards the character's understanding of life in general and her parents' lives in particular. It is not surprising that Schoemperlen's work should be compared to Alice Munro's. There is the same kind of excruciatingly close examination of casual phrases ('You're too smart for your own good') and the same intense focus on lower-middle-class mother-daughter relations. Schoemperlen burrows into such everyday phrases and platitudes like a cancerous worm, forcing the reader into an awareness of the language used to envelop and make bearable the conflicts and tensions of parenting. If the style reminds one of Who Do You Think You Are?, the theme is that of Love in the Time ofCholera. This is a love story, of a woman disappointed 18 LEITERS IN CANADA 1994 inevitably in love and yet forever driven to passion. It is also a story exploring the idea that children grow up to become their parents. Furthermore, it is a story describing and explaining the anger of women living lives of such disappointment, trapped in 'normal' but semidysfunctional families, passing on their anger to their vaguely guiltridden children. A passing reference to 'a Bruce Cockburn song called "Trouble With Normal'" catches the whole novel in a phrase. Schoemperlen has built this novel on the interesting structural premise of using one hundred words from a Word Association Test as the jumping-off points for her one hundred chapters. The novel thus has the appearance of a random set of points of entry into the different levels of one character's life. These triggers into anecdotal musings often come up against firewalls in language, as the reveries intensify meaning beyond the capacity of 'normal' words. Schoemperlen interrupts these narratives and highlights this incapacity by inserting dictionary definitions, with their bold type and capitalization. These definitions foreground language as the dense but flexible and sometimes weak medium that defines what can be done with...