Review: The hidden depth of Nadia Bozak’s Thirteen Shells and Alice Petersen’s Worldly Goods

Thirteen Shells

By Nadia Bozak

Astoria/House of Anansi, 308 pages, $19.95

Worldly Goods

By Alice Petersen

Biblioasis, 171 pages, $18.95

If the cover image on Nadia Bozak's new collection of linked stories reminds you of the poster for a recent Academy Award-winning Richard Linklater film, that is entirely intentional. Indeed, Bozak's publisher explicitly references Linklater's Boyhood in the back cover copy, along with that touchstone of CanLit coming-of-age linked story collections, Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women.

That book is appropriate as a comparison to Bozak's Thirteen Shells, in part because of their shared subject matter: Both trace the growth of a young female protagonist from childhood through adolescence and sexual awakening, to the cusp of adulthood. Bozak's novel begins with her protagonist, Shell, just about to start kindergarten, and ends when she is 17 and eager to depart the stifling confines of Somerset, the small city to which her parents move her in the opening story, ironically titled Greener Grass.

Indeed, the idea that the grass is greener in Somerset (a town that bears certain resemblances to Jubilee in Munro's book) is a notion Bozak extends and interrogates throughout Thirteen Shells, most specifically in the story Hole in the Wall, which finds Shell, older now but still young enough to qualify for the child's fare on the Greyhound bus, embark on a visit to her father in Toronto, the city that her parents decamped to settle in Somerset. Now separated from her mother, Shell's father ekes out an existence that, it quickly becomes apparent, is precarious and down-at-heel, notwithstanding his efforts to appear parental in front of his daughter.

What Shell finds in Toronto is an expanded horizon, complete with exotic food from around the world and rock 'n' roll cassettes for sale at Yonge Street's Sam the Record Man (this story takes place in the mid-1980s, before the iconic store was demolished). It is here that she also narrowly misses being more-or-less abducted by a creepy man who accosts her when her father is not looking: an indication that the big city's promise is not without its seedy and dangerous underside.

Like Munro, Bozak is less interested in dramatic incident than in a careful examination of everyday events; like Linklater, she focuses closely on isolated moments in Shell's life, while skipping over wide swathes of time between stories, and relegating major events to the interstices. Frozen Fish opens with, "The summer before Dad and Mum get separated, Dad digs Shell a fish pond for her eleventh birthday." The following story, Snow Tire, has Shell's father already in Toronto; the separation itself occurs offstage, as it were.

This lends the volume something of an impressionistic quality, and forces the reader to do the work of making the various pieces cohere into an overarching whole. This willful blurring of genre is another commonality Bozak's work shares with Lives of Girls and Women, a text that has provided CanLit critics with endless opportunity to argue about whether it constitutes a novel or a story cycle. Depending upon what aspects of the work a reader chooses to highlight, both Munro and Bozak offer sufficient evidence to support either assertion.

What is interesting in the case of Thirteen Shells is the way the differing understandings of genre lend different readings to the individual pieces. The opening story introduces a horsehair button box that had belonged to Shell's mother, but was passed on to Shell after the girl broke the hinges on the lid (an act that happens, of course, off the page). This item, resonant on its own in the introductory story, becomes a kind of leitmotif, reappearing at various points throughout the collection, where it accrues meaning and resonance as the book unfolds. Likewise, early foreshadowing of the parents' separation can appear contingent if the stories are read individually, whereas they take on the note of inevitability if the various pieces are seen as chapters in a larger whole.

Bozak has structured her work carefully, providing repeated images and symbols, as with musical themes, that serve as unifying devices across different stories, deepening the reading experience as the volume progresses. Close to the end of Greener Grass, Shell compares her mother to their new house's backyard garden, "smooth on the surface but with surprises hidden deep." One of those surprises, a broken piece of a glass Mountain Dew bottle, has cut Shell's foot, requiring 18 stitches; the implication here involving her mother is not accidental. In any event, this description is a fairly accurate condensation of the book as a whole.

Smooth surfaces with surprises hidden deep could also describe Alice Petersen's second collection, which otherwise bears scant resemblance to Bozak's book. Worldly Goods is the antithesis of a linked story cycle: its 15 entries are completely individual, with separate characters, themes, and subjects. What unites them is Petersen's approach, which is subtle and elliptical. Where Bozak keeps many of her inciting dramatic moments off the page, Petersen likes to circle back to them, as in the opening story, Music Minus One, about an aging man who takes a tumble down a flight of stairs. Immobilized at the bottom of the staircase, the man flashes back to his life as a 27-year-old living in a mouldy Camden Town basement flat.

A later story, The Fruits of Our Endeavours, also features a character who takes a fall, but this time, the victim – who significantly is not the narrator or the story's central character – dies, leaving his wife to discover an heirloom he's asked to be destroyed in the event of his demise. The piece – a needlepoint sampler – refracts and reconstitutes the relationship between the protagonist, her dead husband (a rural doctor), and a young unwed pregnant woman.

Like Bozak, Petersen prefers to work in minor keys; her stories unfold quietly, with minimal recourse to drama or incident. But whereas Bozak is concerned with the trajectories of her characters, Petersen is a stylist: it is the language that is front and centre in Worldly Goods. "I believe in examining the foreign power and poetry of a sentence," writes Prudence Harper in one of the unsent letters reproduced in Dear Ian Fairfield. "I am not talking about nuances of meaning, which can go on forever. I am talking about the clicks and sounds of Latinate articulation, like the combination of numbers on a bike lock, and only afterwards the opening of the chain." The story, with its epistolary conceit, is one of the weaker entries in the collection, but this passage contains as concise a distillation of Petersen's method and focus as any we're likely to find.

Steven W. Beattie's column on new short-story collections appears monthly.