It happens too often. Fresh and stirring new writing gets a few nods of praise, a flurry of marketing and media noise, and then is abandoned, a child lost in the book world's mega mall of the new and next. We can't escape the brain-scrambling bombardment. Coerced by Web bling, incrementally robbed of the focus and purity of ink on newsprint, minds that used to have a clear and contained space in which to exercise thought are now faced with point-and-click irrelevance and pushy animated ads drop-kicking the cerebrum. What is a reader to do after attempts to block the bouncing balls and dancing rodents have failed? Do you tape a sheet of paper (if you can find one) over every new bit of mind junk?
So, dear addled browser, if you are reading this online, try to ignore the perky-jerky retinal imprint and consider the healing fiction of Deborah Willis. She has quite the concept. She wrote words and managed to get them printed up on clean white pages between covers. Read these words and images appear in your head – your images! You make them from your own storehouse of experience, triggered by the skills of an artist. Forget the Web for a day or two. Plunge into a book of life.
Vanishing: And Other Stories
, by Deborah Willis, Penguin Canada, 256 pages, $24
The collection is called Vanishing. It's also the tag for the first story. Nathan and Marlene are a bookish couple with a young daughter, Tabitha, our window on their world. Nathan spends the evenings writing and has made a modest success in Toronto as a playwright. One day, he walks out of the house and never returns, leaving his attic office unusually tidy. Tabitha's view shifts us smoothly forward and back through 30-plus years, gradually giving us the tools to penetrate the mystery of Nathan's disappearance.
It's a story of hidden love betrayed, interwoven with the unravelling threads of Nathan's creative life and the evolution, over decades, of Tabitha's grief for his loss. The absence of authorial ego from the page is coupled with Willis's utter sleight-of-hand control of the proceedings. It's as if you, the reader, are the source of the understanding that emerges.
The Weather offers a very different take on a daughter and a lovelorn father. Set in prairie tornado country, the story's risk – and gratifying payoff – is the elaborate linking of weather with the characters' emotional arc. Willis thrillingly revisits the dark and stormy.
Willis's overriding theme is the mutability – frequently the malleability – of love
In Traces, a woman faced with a cheating husband channels her hurt into giddy detective work with a new girlfriend. The lush forest and seascape of the West Coast wonderfully augment the sensual nuances, even if the closing erotic encounter feels somewhat more tacked on than earned.
Willis's overriding theme is the mutability – frequently the malleability – of love. Some stories, such as This Other Us, explore the unstable ground between friendship and love, where impulsive missteps can ruin everything, or abruptly reset the heart's compass. In Caught, an illicit affair is repeatedly revisited at the moment of discovery, each time relaunching the three players into different trajectories. Willis deftly structures the experiment, as if the straying, smitten wife is imagining possible outcomes, returning always to the frozen moment when her husband first caught the truth.
Remember, Relive reprises Willis's talent for stealthily priming the reader's imagination. A young woman recalls the rushed and risible teenage sex she had with the groom at an older sister's wedding party, launching a tale that entwines secrets and their eventual telling (or not) with the fragility of memory and the cruel process of losing it. Like the best pieces here, the story doesn't so much describe human intricacies as draw you into your own. You feel the insights blooming from within.
There's much more to savour here. Perhaps the best entry is And the Living is Easy. On a sweltering Toronto summer in the 1970s, a teenage boy works for his widowed dad in a tailor shop on Spadina. He endures a familiar embarrassment as his father flirts with a young woman in an ice-cream parlour.
Once more, we enter the territory of fractured love. In 20 pages, lives unfold and expand with a breadth and force approaching the intricacy of a novel, unaccountably compressed. I later found myself recalling the characters, the streets, the heat, food, clothing, voices, smells, bound up with a sense of them rising from hundreds of pages. It's the best-ever connect with an author: to encounter a fully realized world inseparable from the uncanny fact of it existing as mere words, magnificently strung together.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.
