McClelland & Stewart
ISBN 978-0-7710-2325-5
$29.99

A whole life can be traced through fiction. To do this, we would start with soggy board-books that teach you to count and show you what farm animals feel like. You don’t stick with these books for very long: once you’ve outgrown them, you find your life instead reflected to you in picture books and fairy tales, stories that tell you that because you are a virtuous child, everything is possible. Then, cruelly, is the coming-of-age story: a narrative that insists on presenting you with the limitations of society, introducing you to the world that you’ll be navigating. Childlike purity is gone, replaced by awkward puberty. Take heart, though! It’s not all gloomy – after the coming-of-age story is the first-love story. The one that takes your breath away. The one that makes the world around you, limited or not, worth it. Then, when the world has been discovered, when one has come-of-age and has fallen in love, is the adult fiction; the stuff of heartbreak and human politics and glimmering hope and always more falling-in-love.

And then, far beyond the first-love story or the second-love story or the heartbreak story or the mundanely political adult story is Trevor Cole’s Practical Jean. Cole’s novel is a wicked narrative for adults who know better than to entrap themselves in the genre of tedious adult fiction. It is a deadpan examination of life, slicing through a fog of normalcy and demanding that a reader understand what is truly a priority: preserving happiness, no matter how fleeting or delicate in nature it is.

Enter Jean Vale Horemarsh; a protagonist who is just rounding midlife. Jean is, in expertly-crafted fashion, just slightly normal. She is just a smidgen too tall, more thickset than she’d like to be, and has a decent complexion. She’s nice enough, and has a few good friends. She’s in what can only be described as a normal marriage to Milt, a substitute teacher whom she loves dearly, knows too well and finds irksome. But, juxtaposed against this normal life is a childhood suggestive of deep psychological damage and an obsessive passion for creating delicate foliage out of ceramics. Not flowers, but their leaves: normal, everyday leaves that are more often than not forgotten.

Following the death of Jean’s terminally ill mother, Jean’s tendency to obsess begins to unfurl in a new direction. Instead of preserving the essence of verdure in her kiln, Jean attempts to preserve the happiness of her very best friends:

[Jean] gave the shovel a wave in the air, to get a feel for its heft and to line up her swing. But it was an old shovel, made of a kind of cast iron, and quite a bit heavier than she’d anticipated. So it travelled a few inches farther than she wanted and plunked Dorothy in the back of the head.
“Ow!” she said. “Jesus, Jean, what the hell? … that hurt,” said Dorothy, rubbing the back of her head.
“But… you’re still happy, aren’t you?”
Dorothy wobbled her head as if to clear it, then she straightened her hair and put her hands on her hips. She sighed, looking off toward her house. “Yes, I am.”
“Phew,” said Jean. She raised the shovel again over Dorothy’s head and brought it down like an axe. (110 – 111)

Practical Jean’s narrative is propelled through Jean’s calculated attempts to “preserve” the happiness of her four dearest friends. First, though, she must investigate the true nature of happiness: what can Jean do that would make each of her friends vividly, memorably happy? And how can Jean sustain this state long enough to preserve it? In her quest, Jean acts as the creator of pleasure and the curator of memories, allowing Cole to subtly prompt some not-so-subtle questions: what is the nature of happiness? Is it material goods? Really good wine? A simple life? Meaningful relationships? Jean’s examination of her friends acts as a critique for a handful of different worldviews. A reader will likely find herself reflected in at least one of Jean’s fated friends, wincing as Jean so aptly guesses and fulfills your darkest secrets before performing her gruesome act of preservation.

With a deliberately vivid narrative style and a wickedly macabre lens, Cole’s unremarkable characters become the subjects of attentive examination. So much so, that their normalcy becomes exaggerated and grotesque. Practical Jean is not just a hilarious romp through heartbreaking mediocrity. It is fiction for readers who know better than to be satisfied with a normal life and mundane stories.

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXII Number 2

The post Book review of “Practical Jean” by Trevor Cole appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Light Lifting
By Alexander MacLeod
Biblioasis (2010)
ISBN: 978-1-89723-194-4
$19.95

Light Lifting is Alexander MacLeod’s award-winning debut collection of short fiction. It is a collection that should be consumed carefully; MacLeod so beautifully articulates everyday events that even the most normal (even mundane) occurrence becomes breathtaking. He takes his reader to a reality in which everything is nuanced. Every object, interaction and event has a beautiful poignancy to it, and it is in illuminating this beauty to his reader that MacLeod succeeds in breaking his reader’s hearts. A reader is left with the overwhelming sense that she has missed something in the real world; that within our reality is a capacity for depth and beauty that, somewhere along the line, we have grown to ignore. Through his collection, MacLeod seems to question why it is that we ignore these moments of everyday poignancy: have we chosen to ignore them, or is this blindness a learned behavior?

The question of why we ignore the poignancy of everyday life is explored in subtle ways through MacLeod’s entire collection, and is most richly detailed in his story “Wonder About Parents.” The piece captures an all-too familiar event in the life of many families: dealing with an outbreak of head lice. With tender consideration for the weariness of young parents at the end of their day, MacLeod captures a moment between a beaten-down pair:

I sit on the couch. Nothing for three minutes. Strange thick silence in the house. Water running in the pipes. The last two hours of a day. Aftermath. . . . Fold the rows of [my wife’s] hair with a skewer from the shish kebab set. Need to follow straight
lines. . . . She almost falls asleep. I pull an egg down the whole length of the shaft. Find one living insect, mature. Pluck it from her skin and watch it wriggle on my middle finger. Bring my thumb down hard. All the strength I can muster. The pressure between two points, crushing. I separate my fingers. The legs are stilled. Its body rests in a circle of her blood. Red seeps into my fingerprint. Parasite. Life sucked from our lives. (47-48)

MacLeod uses this moment of quiet desperation to develop a growing distance between the couple, artfully employing a sparse narration suggestive of a vast emptiness:

She touches her fingertips to her forehead and runs them from the hairline over her eyelids and down to her cheeks.
Tired.
I know.
I’m going to go up now. Don’t you stay too long. Big day tomorrow.
Yes.
Night. (48)

This typical scene of distance between two people acts as a springboard into MacLeod’s exploration of everyday beauty. From this point in the piece, the reader is taken back to the very beginnings of this couple’s relationship; their haphazard, sexually-charged meeting and virile sex life is juxtaposed with vignettes depicting their inability to conceive children a few years later. Then, scenes of later years still, as they cope with a deathly sick infant – their first, after years of fertility treatments. Within this interplay of different time periods there is again the sense of desperation that MacLeod introduces at the beginning of his story: a deeply rooted need to be closer to one another, but the inability to completely connect. A perfectly human dilemma, one that MacLeod recognizes with utmost compassion.

A need for connection is woven throughout Light Lifting. Each of the seven stories within MacLeod’s collection hums with their own electric needs, though they always come down to the need to connect with something outside of oneself, and the difficulties inherent in forging a true, lasting connection.

The beauty of all things, sing the stories of Light Lifting, is that they can connect us. Events, conversations, objects, places and even commonplace experiences have the astounding ability to forge connection, even if only for a fleeting moment. MacLeod recognizes this, capturing those connective things and moments with heartfelt resonance, reveling in the beauty of what it means to be honestly human.

The weary parents with the sick daughter pass one another like ghosts in the hallway of the hospital, watching their little girl in shifts as “Wonder About Parents” winds to a close. They have been lacking connection for ages, aching as individuals while their daughter fights for her life. It is a marriage of strangers until:

Look up and see her at the end of the hall. Waiting by the elevator. Head shaking. The numbers descending. I call her name as I move, almost run, down the corridor in my sock feet. Meet her on the way. Kiss.
Stay, I say.
Please stay.
She smiles.
We go back. Squeeze onto the vinyl chair. Her legs between my legs. Arms hanging over the side. Heads touching. Everything forced together. (76)

A connection, finally. It is possible. It is beautiful.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXII Number 1 Winter 2012.

The post Book Review of “Light Lifting” by Alexander MacLeod appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.