Stories to make us feel fiercely alive
Author one of best Canada has produced
Steven Heighton is fascinated by the things couples do in bed. Which is not to say he’s a voyeur or a pornographer. Rather, he is a writer who is exceptionally clear-eyed about the fact that emotions are only alive to the extent that they are incarnated in physical acts: in looking, in touching, in caressing, in cuddling, in grappling, and in all the other motions that led up to the act of lovemaking and are intensified by it. Nor do these tactile experiences disappear after consummation but rather linger in the body like still-warm embers from an exhausted fire.
The stories in Heighton’s new collection The Dead Are
More Visible are impressively varied, but one feature that gives the book unity is the author’s recurring concern with the biological and emotional urges that bring couples together and also sometimes push them apart.
Here is an account of a longmarried couple who lost a son in an auto accident: “Every night for months they lay twined without ever having sex, a strange shift from all the years when they had often made love but always slept a little apart.” Here is a Canadian who teaches English in Japan describing the postcoital routine he has with his employer and lover: “Always, after the night’s last sex and cigarettes, we would turn away from each other and lie back to back, space between us, to fall asleep, but when I woke up in the small hours she would be furled into me, face on my shoulder or pressed into my nape, sleeping hard.”
Here is a husband about to divorce thinking about the lingering sexual tensions that exist between him and his soon-to-be ex, a woman whose outwardly cool exterior conceals her private passions: “Whenever they were in each other’s vicinity, a vital arc would leap the synapse between them, etching the air … And in the sweaty aftermath of sex she would act as if nothing shocking had just occurred, as if she hadn’t just been far beyond herself, laughing wildly, her hard little thighs crushing his hot ears and cheeks.”
Sex is a slippery activity that notoriously resists the efforts of prose fiction to grab hold of it. It is a testament to Heighton’s authorial gifts that he not only can write about sex with exquisite delicacy, but that many of the best passages in his stories are about intimacy in the broadest sense, meaning not just carnal acts but the full spectrum of sensations that underlie all human relationships and also our very existence as self-conscious animals.
Heighton is a full-bodied writer, disconcertingly candid about fleshly urges in a way that shocks us into recognizing and remembering intense experiences that we’ve been socialized not to talk about.
In an autobiographical essay, Heighton once asserted that “I wouldn’t have to write if I could be a gifted athlete, an artist of the body — a runner, a swimmer, a boxer.”
This admiration for artists of the body — those who live by doing rather than more sedentary activities — explains some of the focus on sports in this collection. One story is about boxers, another focuses on a sports doctor who once had a promising career as a runner, and a third deals with the nonathletic but still very physical job of being a firefighter.
All of these artists of the body are described with the same vivid and precise prose Heighton brings to describing sex. At its best, this prose manages to achieve the same miracle of incarnate expressiveness found in Joyce or Nabokov, masters whose words are so intensely textured and specific that we feel them pulsing through our body.
To say Heighton is an immensely talented writer is true enough but insufficient. Thanks to creative writing programs, Canada has many skilled writers who can carpenter together serviceable sentences to make a readable story or novel. Middling competence in fiction is now the Canadian norm and enough to win prizes and even sell a few books. Unfortunately, given the small army of writers who can jump over the bar of adequacy and win attention and some praise, it is forgotten that there is a much smaller cadre of writers who belong to a different league, who write fiction of first rank. If Joyce and Nabokov seem like too distant and foreign as points of comparison, then here is a comparison closer to home: the best stories in this book — the title tale, Shared Room on Union and Nearing the Seas, Superior — are as good as the fiction of Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant. Or to be more blunt, Heighton is as good a writer as Canada has ever produced.
Critics are paid to be querulous and to earn my keep I can find a few faults. Heighton is an ambitious writer, which means he occasionally aims further than he can shoot. In the last story, Swallow, the plethora of secondary characters overwhelms the central plight of the protagonist. I wish Heighton hadn’t reprinted (in slightly edited form) his older story Heart & Arrow, which is written in a florid prose style he has since, thankfully, abandoned. But these are niggling quibbles. The best stories in this book do what only great art can do: make us feel more fiercely alive. To see past book reviews and to comment, go to edmontonjournal.com/ books