First Fiction
The best first fiction 2011
Jim Bartley
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
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The Beggar’s Garden
By Michael Christie
HarperCollins Canada, 263 pages, $24.99Christie’s prose is like clear water, transparent yet dense with unspoken understanding. These stories visit the lonely, the drug-addled, the sadly but aptly institutionalized, the lost teen whose sweet callow neediness tips him into crime, the granddad who remains the only one still with hope for a misfit grandson. Christie never swans on lyricism when lucidity will do. He crafts gems of narrative flame.
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Hold Me Now
By Stephen Gauer
Freehand Books, 285 pages, $21.95A father and young adult son share a meal in a restaurant, a picture of parental love and generational divide. The next day brings unbearable news: The son’s battered body has been found in a park. Gauer builds a story of unwavering breadth and depth, borne along on the crime-and-punishment drama, but far more on the father’s interior journey. Fascinating at every turn, it ends in a beautifully rendered catharsis. Have a handkerchief handy.
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Mennonites Don’t Dance
By Darcie Friesen Hossack
Thistledown, 201 pages, $18.95These stories mix wry humour with darkest tragedy. Fallible patriarchs rule. Mothers and kids endure. A fresh calf’s heart still pumping on a father’s butcher block is at once gruesome and admirably understated. Hossack sails deftly through the metaphoric risk. She packs an emotional wallop, yet never tells you how to feel. The writing dovetails surprise and inevitability, cascading with retrospective meanings.
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Various Positions
By Martha Schabas
Doubleday Canada, 368 pages, $22Ballet is a beautiful con job, the exquisite result of a slog through artistic boot camp. Every aspiring prima knows there will be blood. Schabas offers up adolescent desire unfettered: a gifted student shocked and thrilled to learn that dance and sex share a continuum. The erotic climax is stunning, almost outrageous. The subsequent cleavings of the heart can extend over pages. This is a wonderful, courageous debut novel.
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Once You Break a Knuckle
By D.W. Wilson
Hamish Hamilton Canada, 246 pages, $32“He mashed potatoes with barbaric, two-handed thrusts.” Wilson excels at the lean, elemental punch: an exhilarating exclusion of the extraneous. It’s as if he simply states what’s in his mind’s eye in sentences unaltered since they popped from keyboard to screen. A particular dad-and-son dynamic, a kind of raw outback of the heart, haunts these tales. The portraits of coded, aggressive-evasive love feel like scraps torn from the world.
