Book Review: Blackouts

“Mr. Bearden does not have a wife,” notes the thirteen-year-old girl who narrates “The Mean,” a dramatic monologue of sorts that is at the centre of Craig Boyko’s first collection of stories. “He is probably over thirty years old and he has never been married and possibly has never even had a girlfriend. I think this is kind of sad.”

Good debuts are often celebrated for their surety of voice, but Blackouts transcends such simple praise, because each of these stories — roughly half in the first person, half in the third — is relayed in a manner as nuanced and distinct as the girl at the centre of “The Mean.” It’s rare enough for a young writer to have found his own voice; to have created eleven others this convincing is nothing short of astonishing.

Blackouts is an act of literary ventriloquism note-worthy not only for its ambition but its scope. Boyko conjures Stalinist Russia and wartime London with the same vivid ease with which he resurrects a long summer in a small British Columbia town. And within each of his varied settings, his purview expands even further as his gifts for characterization and dialogue compress whole relationships — whole lives, even — into tight narrative packages. Like one of his characters, a computer programmer who works on codecs, Boyko is “intrigued by the possibility of shrinking data, making something large small.”

Thematically, the stories take the title at its word, focusing on characters whose figurative and literal self-erasure finds them changing as they efface and rewrite their lives. What results is refreshing — a collection more concerned with what it is to be a human being than what it is to be a Canadian. In other words, Boyko has already moved beyond the insecurities of his identity-obsessed literary history; he’s not interested in exploring the contours of the same old garrison. And why should he be, when there’s so much else to see and he’s such a gifted guide?