Candid shots
AUTHOR EVA CROCKER’S DEBUT COLLECTION IS A REFRESHING CHANGE FROM SELF- IMPORTANT SHORT FICTION
Some people speak vociferously in private conversation for the purpose of public conference. I hate these people. Eavesdropping is far better edification for waiting- room rascals like me. I don’t care much that you’re proud to be World’s Best Parent taking a sick day for your kid, but please do continue whispering vehemently about that idiot down the hall. ( Ugh. Idiot.)
I am shameless, I guess, poor character alone making me just about perfect for Eva Crocker’s debut short story collection, Barrelling Forward. Some incivility and – here’s hoping – half- decent taste guarantee I’ ll enjoy it. Spoiler for the checkout line listeners among us: I did, mostly.
Barrelling Forward’s stories are spliced, set and presented effortlessly, well- suited for waiting rooms before 5 p. m. on a weekday, where their entertainment can eclipse any temptation to eavesdrop with a similar brand of nosy romp: 14 portraits of dilettante banality, fleeting peeks into privacy laid bluntly in Crocker’s sparse prose. Housefly POV offers readers a little voyeuristic gander at the best and worst of things l eft unsaid between f riends, parents and partners; sweet indulgence for a peeping tom. Don’t gift Barrelling Forward to the stiff- lip crowd seeking arty symbolism, but a hard-to- buyfor Hemingway hound will find something comforting in Crocker’s clipped cadence. Short fiction seems constantly seeking to outdo itself – a pretentious little battle tallying profundity by page – but Barrelling Forward sidesteps that melee entirely, opting for a straightforward, secret’s- out approach, made accessible by its stories’ breadth and scope.
If Barrelling Forward is its author’s promise for propulsion or pace, that title is something of a lie: Crocker’s aren’t stories driven by any great tension or suspense, and they don’t dwell in the fog of intense, brooding fiction begging for contemplation – but I suspect they weren’t written to do either, so don’t mind saying it plainly here. Crocker crafts her characters with a day’s mundane intimacy: sex and lottery tickets, slacks and scalloped potatoes in a pan.
It’s easy language fixed carefully, each word measured and placed precisely to land its point: the author handles short fiction deftly, a story of several pages as compelling as its doubly girthed neighbour. Sightings – a fourpage wonder that splits Barrelling Forward down the middle – might well prove Crocker a master of literary thrift. She delivers detail in deadpan, nonchalant musings amid sexier prose, but in each finds some sliver of a thing that tells you more or less everything you might need to know about a character: bad taste in business cards ( better for knickknacks and novelties); expensive habits and a cheap French accent.
Barrelling Forward isn’t strictly debut, bits of Crocker’s collection having already found ovation in previous publication: the book was shortlisted for RBC’s Fresh Fish Award l ast year, and i ts second- last story won Newfoundland and Labrador’s Cuffer Prize under a different title in 2013.
Crocker writes more at the volume of our i diot- i n- apartment- 201 cl i nic gossip t han neighbouring Mom of the Year, but here and there she adds enough detail to join the latter’s loud ranks. This is a published work, after all, so garnering an audience is rather the point and that being the purpose makes it harder to hate Crocker when she chooses descriptive heft over steadily scant form. Tempering the collection’s subtler, whisper- toned stories, Crocker delivers key details like a sucker- punch – slipped a little passively to startle – but her blows land more pleasantly than their simile.
It’s a big small book, stories in a thin spine spanning swaths of geography, topics that correspond accordingly to their occupants and setting. There’s a hope for any short fiction that in each story is something for someone; as only one someone I can say my bit’s been counted, but it did take a little digging to get there. Barrelling Forward challenges it- self with some awkward sequencing, the book’s blueprints bleeding over without a broader theme to band them, and Crocker’s candid approach might not be enough to propel casual readers right through.
Suggesting Alice Munro is both high and lazy praise – an easy way to say well- set short fiction and a pretty future for Crocker in CanLit – but there’s a quality to this Newfoundland author’s work that fans of the Nobel Prize winner will recognize, if they’ re willing to displace age, place and decoration accordingly. Where Munro so remarkably captures rural banality, Crocker taps a similarly enthralling mundanity in Quebec’s urban bustle and Eastern Canada’s could- be- anywhere suburban sprawls.
Bold, yes, barrelling less so, this debut collection is a feat regardless. Sometimes the ordinary needs no embellishment, and Crocker’s brazen style wouldn’t offer t hat kindness either way – her talent best laid bare–but the collection seeming to want better tether in its whole. And that’s the thing about eavesdropping, really: whatever morsel the man next to me slips unaware, I gobble it up knowing my manner- less meal lacks the fair context it probably deserves. Barrelling Forward should be consumed with that in mind and so might be best read in serial, stories within offering their finest entertainment in the absence of otherwise mismatched company.
IT’S A BIG SMALL BOOK, STORIES IN A THIN SPINE SPANNING SWATHS OF GEOGRAPHY