Author Guy VanderhaegheLiam Richards/The Globe and Mail
Daddy Lenin and Other Stories
By Guy Vanderhaeghe, McClelland & Stewart, 264 pages, $29.95
Daydreams of Angels By Heather O'Neill, HarperCollins Canada, 354 pages, $22.99
Guy Vanderhaeghe's Daddy Lenin and Heather O'Neill's Daydreams of Angels reside at opposite ends of a formal spectrum. The former is a collection of stories in a naturalist vein, featuring recognizable characters – men, mostly – in more or less familiar situations. They may be set in the present or the near past (nearer, that is, than the 19th-century setting of his acclaimed trilogy of western novels), but the dominant approach remains consistent throughout the collection. O'Neill is more varied (and more profligate – 23 entries to Vanderhaeghe's comparatively spare nine), but operates most often in a fabulist mode: Angels and otherworldly creatures waft through these stories, alongside sentient androids, feral children and clones of Russian dancers. Anton Chekhov, this ain't.
Which is not to suggest that Vanderhaeghe has all that much in common with Chekhov, apart from a strain of psychological realism and a tendency to avoid pat endings. Vanderhaeghe's central focus is on men struggling to achieve a sense of purpose or dignity in the face of external forces bent on frustrating them.
In Live Large, plumbing contractor Billy Constable takes great pleasure in besting a rival on the golf course, but this victory proves to be a Pyrrhic one (as do most of the small victories Vanderhaeghe allows his men in these stories).
Billy is emblematic of a kind of masculine bravado born of conspicuous consumption and the ability to best competitors: He locates his self-worth in the family cottage, a powerboat and his golf-club membership, all of which he is in danger of losing as a result of a downturn in his business prospects. His circumstances do not dampen his outsized – some might say delusional – determination; he compares himself to summer, "a season as hot-blooded, aggressive and optimistic as he had always been."
Here we have Vanderhaeghe working at peak irony: Billy's misplaced optimism can't rescue him from impending financial ruin, although it does prove sufficient to stave off a challenge from his links opponent Malcolm Forsythe – a weaselly, venal car salesman (the kind of person who thinks that a wool cap from St. Andrew's automatically confers credibility on the fairway) who once talked Billy into buying a luxury car he could not afford by appealing to the latter's male vanity: "A Corolla is great value. Very economical. You can't imagine how many of them I sell to female schoolteachers."
The appeal to masculinity–especially in relation to women–looms large in Daddy Lenin, most especially in the collection's best story, the blisteringly satirical Tick Tock.
Ostensibly about a man named Charley Brewster who intervenes with prototypical, testosterone-laden violence when he suspects his new neighbour is physically abusing his wife, Tick Tock is also an incisive and unsparing dissection of masculinity as an ideal that has been replaced by a societal outlook steeped in the dubious virtues of postmodernism and therapy.
This latter attitude is embodied in Eva, Brewster's girlfriend. Recently appointed director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at the university where both she and Brewster work, Eva is the kind of au courant academic who uses contrasting YouTube videos of Klaus Nomi and Sting performing a Henry Purcell song as a means of investigating different "enactments of masculinities" (the plural here is corrosively funny). Brewster, meanwhile, teaches English and spends his time marking-up students' essays with tips on how to improve their writing, "tips that would be inevitably and blithely ignored."
Of course, it is Eva who proves more effective in separating the abused wife from her abuser; Brewster, reduced to the only recourse he can muster – his aged and aching fists – proves finally impotent in his rage and violence. Here and elsewhere, Daddy Lenin wrestles with the seemingly intractable divide between modernity and postmodernity, between masculinity and postmasculinity, in a way that is direct and vigorous. It is an entertaining return to the form that launched its author's literary career.
If Daddy Lenin represents a return to the short-story form after an extended absence, Daydreams of Angels is its opposite in this way, too: the first foray into short fiction from a writer with two previous novels to her name.
Those books – Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night – were both set in Montreal, and though they both contain elements that might be considered magical (or at the very least whimsical), they were grounded in grittiness and at least a kind of social realism. Many of the stories in Daydreams of Angels abandon naturalism altogether in favour of a fantastical approach born of myth and fairy tales. "It's not their fault," says the titular ursine in the collection's opener, The Gypsy and the Bear, in reference to the humans who persecute and threaten him. "What are they supposed to do when they've been told their whole lives not to believe in fairy tales?"
The bear's question looms over the entire collection, lending it resonance and meaning. It is no accident that the story in which the bear appears begins with a human boy who exits his own tale in the opening paragraph when he is called to lunch; the Gypsy, whom the boy has invented along with his trained bear, is left alone on a country road, "contemplating his existence."
This, too, is typical of the tension in many of O'Neill's stories, between existence and imagination, reality and a kind of dream life. In Bartók for Children, an inversion of the Pinocchio story, a toy maker brings a mortally wounded soldier back to life by supplying him with a clockwork heart and mechanical vocal cords. At one point, the soldier asks the toy maker for something to read, but becomes indignant at what he is offered: "Are you mad? A tale about a goose? What kind of insight can a goose have? Do you have any of that existentialism that's supposed to be all the rage in Paris?"
A scant few outliers notwithstanding, it is clear on which side of this equation O'Neill falls. The best of these stories–like the best fairy tales–are the ones that manage to marry their fantastical elements with a subtle inquiry into the nature of human existence and identity. Swan Lake for Beginners plumbs these ideas in a tale about a Russian scientist who manages to clone the iconic ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, though the clones prove less than ideal, since it is impossible to physically embody personality, let alone talent or a drive to be a world-class dancer.
One of the best stories in Daydreams of Angels, Swan Lake for Beginners combines philosophical inquiry with a narrative invested in tropes of speculative fiction and a strain of humour (to keep it utterly secret, the Russian project is relocated to a small Quebec town called Pas-Grand-Chose, the name of which should have prefigured the project's failure). Some entries – including a series of trifles that originally appeared as short radio plays on the CBC–are less ambitious and less successful, but it is nonetheless interesting to read a collection that rubs so defiantly against the grain of naturalist short fiction. If Vanderhaeghe brushes Chekhov, O'Neill is closer to Gogol: strange, unconventional tales that nevertheless have something profound to say about the human condition at their core.
Steven W. Beattie's short-story column appears monthly.