Flood at the top of her game
Cynthia Flood should be better known among readers of CanLit. Her last collection, “Red Girl Rat Boy,” was shortlisted for BC’s Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.
She won the Journey Prize in 1990, and her work appears regularly in Best Canadian Stories.
Yet she has remained what’s called a writer’s writer, admired for her craft, though not a household name.
Her latest collection, “What Can You Do” cements her reputation as a gifted and observant storyteller.
Technically superb, demonstrating Flood’s grasp of subterranean emotion, these stories tread familiar territory. “Struggle,” about a disturbed woman’s activist past, mines the rivalries and chauvinism of far-left politics in 1970s Vancouver.
Others focus on quiet betrayals and traumas.
An older couple pitch a tent at a decrepit campsite they’d enjoyed years before. The dusty campground and MIA owner stand in for the decay and mysterious absences of their own lives.
Flood is impeccable with invoking the yawning gap between the archival past and the tenuous present.
Her stories feel like archeological digs, sifting down through accrued detail to reconstruct the wounded lives of her characters.
The collection’s strongest story is also a bit of an outlier. “Wing Nut” follows a mother as she grapples with the discovery of a pedophile at her son’s inner city school. The story suggests multiple readings, each more disturbing than the next, and resists easy closure.
And while her compressed prose may not be to the taste of all readers, “What Can You Do” finds Flood at the top of her game.
Trevor Corkum’s novel The Electric Boy is forthcoming from Doubleday Canada. Special to the Spectator