Buffy Cram, author
Her name befits a roller-derby all-star, and the cover design of her first book of stories – bright green with a cartoon of falling black cat – looks like it's supposed to be a snappy graphic novel or a children's book, but everything within Radio Belly is nothing like you might expect, and giving you the unexpected is what this promising young writer is best at.
When reading for the purposes of writing a review, I tend to avoid researching authors until I have finished reading and writing notes on the book in question, and only then if I'm very curious. Radio Belly is the kind of book that sparked a few questions; the author's otherwise sparse biography says she's published in a few of the usual Canadian journals and that she has resided in several countries, currently Berlin.
The most revealing thing Google says about Cram is her recent admission (in an online Proust Questionnaire) that she occasionally regards herself as the female incarnation of Ernest Hemingway, "minus the womanizing and the drunkenness and the deep-sea fishing." The comparison surprised me, because her spicy little collection of stories doesn't announce itself in any of the usual Hemingway fashions; Cram's style is not spare or reportorial, and there is more whimsy in a single one of her paragraphs than can be found in an entire volume of your average university-backed literary journal.
Cram's stories are fanciful and hallucinogenic and ultimately about the inability to express or admit to emotional transformations. In the title story, instead of writing about a young woman succumbing to the same mental illness that took her mother and grandmother – yawn – she offers up a girl who hears radio hum in her stomach that grows and grows, her whole life changing as she tries to drown out the sound inside herself. Not a cheap metaphor, and finely tuned for a seamless ratio of whimsy-to-believable.
In Mineral by Mineral, a woman's rage at being rejected by her boyfriend and demoted at work propels her on a journey to eat clay and dirt by the handful as she becomes more antisocial and outwardly angry. In almost every story, characters are afflicted by unruly appetites or curious afflictions, and each of these unusual traits or behaviours describes elegantly, and humorously, the indescribable pain the characters are experiencing.
One of the strongest stories, Drift, is an example of Cram easing up on the surrealism, and the resulting story is just as inventive and compelling as the rest. Lena, a museum promoter, travels across Canada while trying to communicate with her dementia-succumbing mother, who may have impulsively gone back to the war-torn country she escaped from shortly after Lena's birth.
Love Seat is the heartbreakingly weird story of a shock-jock radio host who falls in love with a diehard Grateful Dead fan whose appetite for both food and nostalgia leads to her death. The Grateful Dead cultural details are hilariously realistic. Oh, and the DJ turns her body into a loveseat. It's more of a tender-hearted tale than a disgusting one – for that to make any sense, you must read it.
Less successful stories such as Large Garbage and Refugee Love rely so heavily on the oddity of the idea behind the story that the story itself suffers. Minus the unlikely premise, the characters were too loosely sketched to care much about, and the premise itself wasn't enough to carry the story to the end in any meaningful way. Large Garbage – about a roving band of homeless intellectuals and poets invading banal suburbs – had a predictable resolution and some obvious moral-of-the-stories from the Occupy days.
But those weaker stories are the exception. Radio Belly is a fun ride through some strange places, and Cram is a whip-smart storyteller who aims to shake up our reading expectations in ways that delight and surprise.
Zoe Whittall is a novelist and poet living in Toronto, who will admit to a brief Deadhead phase in 1992.