Advance copies of our September issue arrived the other day, which means it’s probably about time that I say something about July/August, soon to disappear from shelves. The 2008 edition of our annual Summer Reading Issue is centred around the idea of escape. We have, among many others, Don Gillmor on his brother’s final, tragic escape; Wendy Dennis on fleeing Toronto for Austin, Texas; and Stephen Henighan giving Mozambique its best treatment since Bob Dylan’s Desire.

But my personal favourite section of the issue is what we call our Escapes, which are short little sketches—some fiction, some non-fiction—by several of Canada’s best writers. (And Pico Iyer, who, while not Canadian, is still excellent.) And among these, I’m particularly fond of Michael Redhill’s “The Getaway”and Miriam Toews’s “The Double Knot.” Redhill’s is a very fine piece of lyrical prose. Tonally, it reminds me a bit of Michael Chabon’s underrated novella, The Final Solution, probably because of its lush metaphors and rural setting. What I love here is the tension between the language’s specificity and the story’s uncertainty. The narrator was “a factory worker or a soldier,” “a widower perhaps,” a man of mysterious origin who has “lost [his] mother tongue” and whose “old life has been vanishing like a document put to fire.” Yet he lives in world described in fabulous detail, with “fruit trees, all in bloom now, with shoals of white flowers” that eventually grow “heavy yellow and orange peaches [that] drop into the grass like wet bombs.” Against the character’s vagueness, Redhill’s present is cast in sharp detail, and the contrast gives this short story far more nuance than its word count should allow.

Miriam Toews’s “The Double Knot” is a very different thing, though just as wonderful. Toews is a low-key master of voice—those who loved A Complicated Kindness loved it, at least in part, because they loved being in Nomi’s company—and that skill carries this short piece. (It also continues in her new novel, The Flying Troutmans, which is out this September. It’s first, spectacular sentence: “Yeah, so things have fallen apart.”) “The Double Knot” is also lifted by the deftness with which Toews makes her choices as a writer, another of her true gifts.

Take the story’s opening: “I’m in a bag. I’m in a straitjacket in a bag. It’s a sky-blue laundry bag that Angie my ex-wife made me.” As an experiment, think of how different this beginning would be with two minor changes: “I’m in a bag. I’m in a straitjacket in a bag. It’s a canvas laundry bag that Carol my ex-wife made me.” It’s not that it ceases to be an interesting passage—the idea of a man in a straitjacket in a bag will grab you no matter what the writer does adjectivally—but that Toews’s execution makes the first passage so much better. Sky-blue: what an unexpected colour for a laundry bag, the sort of detail that makes the image stronger and tells you something about the offbeat taste of the bag’s creator. Angie: what a perfect name for this man’s ex-wife, the sort of handle that calls to mind the precise type of weary beleaguerment that this woman must feel. To return to Michael Chabon, and paraphrase his character Grady Tripp’s (another great name) observation in Wonder Boys, good writers make choices. Toews goes beyond that, and makes really good choices. Which makes her, in turn, a really good writer.

Next on The Shelf: part thirty-six of my premature assessment of the forthcoming graphic novel edition of Stephen King’s The Stand.

Tags: literature, michael chabon, michael redhill, miriam toews, short stories, stephen king, Walrus

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Posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 12:27 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.