All the Lonely People a trip through time
Barry Callaghan’s collection of stories reflects a restless, roving literary sensibility
The final words in All the Lonely People, Barry Callaghan’s magisterial collected short fiction, are “once upon a time.” This would at first appear an odd way to end a volume of close to 500 pages, one that comprises a careerspanning overview of the author’s work in this particular genre. But the invocation of an old-world fairy-tale formula tilts in the direction of memory and the past, which is appropriate for the current volume in general and the specific concerns contained in many individual stories.
The entries in this book — which reflect a restless, roving literary sensibility — range across a variety of approaches and techniques, from microfictions such as “Déjà Vu” and “Communion” to the long, looping sentences and paragraphs in “Crow Jane’s Blues,” a notquite-stream-of-consciousness tale that, among other things, highlights the author’s talent for crafting voice pieces: “I been down along the long hallway, pedalling on my tricycle with the bell on the handlebar that don’t work, just goes fhzz fhzz like my daddy’s old Ronson lighter that got no flint.”
That story opens with its eponymous character meandering through downtown Toronto and remarking on the city’s denizens: street hustlers and sex workers and bouncers at after-hours dive bars. This is also emblematic of the author, whose concerns focus largely on marginal characters. Callaghan writes about outcasts, be they societal or spiritual. A priest attends the mock confession of a sniper who relates the details of the 10 people he killed while deployed in Bosnia. A desolate husband can’t stop talking to his deceased wife, hoping that she will somehow respond. “All his talk, he felt, was wasted. He was alone. He was alone in a well of silence.”
Silence is anathema to the people in Callaghan’s fiction, as would appear appropriate for a writer so defiantly garrulous and voluble. Characters in these stories talk and talk and talk to fill the void, which is evocative of death — the final, ultimate silence that descends on us all. When they’re not talking, Callaghan’s characters can often be found singing or listening to music; there is a particular affinity in these stories for mid-20th century crooners such as Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. These themes are made explicit in “Silent Music,” in which a mute protagonist cleaning up after his mother’s death stumbles across a blank sheet of music paper. “There were no notes. No clefs. No sharps.”
There is quite a lot of death in this book, and quite a lot of violence. Callaghan approaches these things the way Flannery O’Connor did: as moments in which characters are confronted with their essential natures.
The figures in these stories find themselves at instants of decision or transition, which is where Callaghan seems most comfortable. “We’re all between trains,” says an old storyteller to a stranger he encounters in a station’s dingy waiting room; in Callaghan’s conception, this is not a simple truism but a definition of the human condition.
All the Lonely People opens with “Because Y Is a Crooked Letter,” one of Callaghan’s best stories (it originally appeared in the 1995 collection A Kiss Is Still a Kiss). The semi-autobiographical tale focuses on a random act of burglary and arson. Tthe story — about the ephemerality of the things we surround ourselves with and the essential unknowableness that undergirds the motivations of others — sets the tone for what is to come. And the final story, “Paul Valery’s Shoe,” from 2007’s Between Trains, offers a satisfying conclusion, laying out a kind of manifesto for Callaghan’s approach to the short story. “The hours pass and I try to peck out a line, a paragraph. I keep trying to look for the ending back in the beginning.” Maybe those final words aren’t so out of place after all.