Fiction

Letters In Canada 1993 Fiction ARITHA V AN HERK While the number of new fiction writers who debuted in 1993 was large, the impact of their work, on the whole, was not impressive. If new writers are a measurement of the health of Canadian literature, this is a health of quantity rather than quality. At a time when readers might expect that first fictions would exhibit risk, undertake experiment, and display the artful influence of a sophisticated and well-established national literary tradition, it appears that such expectations cannot be easily fulfilled. The first fictions that appeared this year were on the whole well-crafted and competent, but predictable, unexciting, and for the most piut, safe, as if writing fiction were something that required the same careful distance as sex with a stranger. There are notable exceptions to this rather terrible banality, but I carne away from reading and rereading this year's crop of new fictions with a distinct sense that too much is being published in Canada, and much of that without the good offices of a strong editorial hand. The sheer plodding ordinariness of many of these books was disappointing. Just when one expected the words to lift off the page and shimmer, they crashed to an earth-bound and clumsy grounding that refused any possibility for flight. Perhaps it is unfair to expect new writers of fiction to blaze trail and to test deep water, but I could not help but feel that half of these books should never have been published in the first place. Despite that bleak predication, some superlative first fictions appeared in 1993; they enable cautious celebration. Deborah Joy Corey's Losing Eddie (Algonquin Books, 222, $21.95) won the SmithBooks and Books in Canada First Novel Award. With its firstperson inflection of experience about a New Brunswick family struggling with violence and death, its raw, intense point of view is its strongest feature. Laura tells the story about the summer her 'brother Eddie got killed' and her mother Iwent to the hospital twice/ with a dispassionate curiosity that reflects her own separation from her family. When Laura's brother, fresh out of jail, crashes into a grader and dies, her Mama is unable to assimilate Eddie's death, and must undergo electric shock UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 64, NUMBER 1, WINTER 1995 2 LETTERS IN CANADA 1993 treatment. Laura struggles to shape her experience, to understand her sick mother, and to help her father try to pull the threads of existence together. Her place within this poor and less than functional family is poignant and brave, and the novel manages to work that deep-felt sadness without succumbing to sentimentality. Carey succeeds in giving voice to the small hurts that comprise unfathomable knowledge, to the shape and texture of incomprehension. Laura must rescue herself from the ashes of loss, and she does so with a deliberate concreteness, through the colour of old bottles, the secrets of Tupperware, and the marked memory of Eddie's tooth impressions. At the end of the novel, finally able to name herself, she reverberates the hope and courage of a young child agelessly determined to endure. The wrenched unhappiness of family is at the heart of another nominee for the First Novel Award, Victoria Stoett's Wisteria (Mercury, 158, $14.50). This novel too shadows the intangible shape of parents hovering over their children, but through spare, shattered scenes that prism against one another, refracting light but reflecting neither coherent narrative nor character. Unlike Carey's hotly intimate style, there is a cool distance to StoeU's fragmentary writing. Wisteria sets the idyll of a country store, selling vegetables and pop, against the sleepy violence of a small town, the twisted skeins of a claustrophobic community. Full of men who drink themselves towards forgetfulness, their wild intensity shunted into violence, the plot builds in silence and absence until the inevitable moment of departure for the main character. Loretta tries to encompass the stifling closure of the world around her by sketching, but is finally able to do nothing but walk away from her lurchingly erratic husband, one child at each hand, into the dusk. This...