Wordy but worthy

TERRY GRIGGS’S THE DISCOVERY OF HONEY IS VERBOSE, BUT ULTIMATELY SATISFYING

The Discovery of Honey By Terry Griggs Biblioasis 192 pp; $14.95

Look, I like kids. I think those who know me would agree I’d be a half- decent mom, already prone to that role in a friend group and quick to play cradle for spare babies on offer. But secondhand observation — in especially good measure of late — has forged in me the opinion that most kids age according to a fairly predictable arch of insufferability. Early annoyances in utero aren’t actively their fault, after all; things peak in the newborn phase when plantlike-portability is convenient; toddlerhood is bearable in waning bursts but adolescence has fewer or none of those at all; adulthood betters gradually or at least doesn’t worsen, tolerated with hope that filial piety comes into play sometime sooner rather than later.

I’m massively under- qualified to oversimplify as I’ve done, so it’s probably time now for an apology and the point: Terry Griggs. You might know Griggs as the always-a-bridesmaid writer of Canada’s top literary honours. Her first short story collection, Quickening, was nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 1991; her 2002 novel Rogues’ Wedding made the Roger’s Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize shortlist, and her work is generally lauded as some of quirky Canadian fiction’s best stuff.

The Discovery of Honey, Griggs’s l atest, marks the Manitoulin Island- born author’s return to short fiction, a 13-story collection told in first person by Hero, whose narration begins shortly before conception. It’s a cavorting farce comedy of sorts, stories spanning subjects from teenage lust to straight- up incest, all told in sarcasm so dry it risks moral judgment. Characters recur and age in each story as they would in life — Hero’s philandering mother, nervy Aunt Viv, touchy- feely cousin Nile, for instance — big, flamboyant personalities hyper- amplified in the narrator’s small Northern Ontario hometown. Rollicking and rich with acrimony, The Discovery of Honey isn’t entirely as pleasant as its title might suggest, and is prone to scatological humour and bawdy banter throughout.

A cr ass coming-of-age story told in vignettes, The Discovery of Honey follows Hero from cradle to middling adulthood. Observing adults around her, each story has Hero learn something — for better or worse — about life and how it’s lived: in Joie de Viv, Hero’s aunt plays reckless host to the toddler’s first road trip; Far Cry is a frank, wry portrait of adolescence lived among adulterers; In Other Words begins innocently enough — Hero’s first job a teenage rite of passage — but circumstance and a little rogue sleuthing turn the gig into something of a murdermystery instead.

Terry Griggs loves words. I know this because the author has said so point-blank and also because she does so — as much as someone can love something by using it excessively, creatively and frequently enough to pay bills. But the thing is that words have a hard time standing alone. Words need vessels, at least in fiction: characters with mouths to make and deliver them to the book’s readers. Griggs’s approach to words seems to care less or not at all about those vessels, characters secondary to maximum verbosity. I bet it’s an exhausting way to write, but Griggs loves words in a way that can be contagious to the reader given the time. Here I caught on early and did what I could to keep up, but The Discovery of Honey follows much the same pattern of maturation described above. The collection’s eponymous story is its first and its best, the next few similarly fun, but things bottom out mid-book before rebounding a little with the narrator’s age. Closer, tenth to bat in Griggs’s collection, grates with an adolescent brassiness that’s clearly purposeful but tough on readers nonetheless.

Even still, these are lush, rioting stories — and romps each. It seems as though Griggs has had herself such a hoot writing the thing, taking every long way in language and sparing no cheeky joke between, that her book becomes a little difficult to knock — no matter how exhausted some stories left me, it was hard to help having a little fun alongside the jaunty author.

The Discovery of Honey has its problems, especially glaring in pubescence, but I suspect most of our own peaked around then too, so hope the ages on either side are good enough to forgive what came between. This is true in Griggs’s case, at least, her collection’s curtain call is worth a little slog in the thick.

THESE ARE LUSH, RIOTING STORIES — AND ROMPS EACH