Review: Once

The twentysomethings that populate Rebecca Rosenblum’s dazzling debut collection of stories are lost, searching for a niche and an identity, and marked by a scrappy yet poignant vulnerability. And the Toronto cityscape in which she sets these stories is as indeterminate as her characters: not the Toronto of bustling Queen Street West, but the Toronto of strip malls and ramshackle houses and endless bus routes.

Delivered in prose that is at once compressed, poetic, and precise, these tales do not move forward with a classical narrative arc. Rather, they meander, their conclusions less revelations than uneasy question marks. But there are revelations, and often at unexpected moments. In “Linh Lai,” for instance, a recent Vietnamese immigrant works as a waitress at a Vietnamese restaurant ironically run by an older Jewish man; she becomes obsessed with riding the skateboard of a kid named Jimmy who hangs out near her work. When she finally gets on the board, “She feels each bit of gravel under the wheels, the cool fall wind and exhaust on her skin… feels her weight steady as she flies forward, a wonderful wordless feeling of on and on.” Of course she attempts to jump a gas pump and crashes onto her back, the board slamming into her, but what’s important is the wordless feeling, the brief but immediate contact with the world.

Rosenblum can also register the aching and melancholic, but with a remarkable lack of sentimentality. In one of the collection’s finest stories, “Steal Me,” Aida watches a boyfriend she does not love at a bar with an old high school friend who is about to leave her husband. “White teeth glinting, the loop of silver in his eyebrow, the fall of gold down her back,” she writes. “They were so beautiful, these unloved ones. If she could’ve given them to each other, she would have.” These young characters’ futures are a sea of uncertainties. But what we can be certain of is that Once is a first by a young author of singular talent.