PLANE INTO MOUNTAIN, WORDS INTO STORIES

Two new collections are equally consistent in style and subject, which leads to uneven results

Debut story collections often feel like an authorial declaration, a manifesto or artist’s statement announcing a writer’s preoccupations and vocal register. Collections that tilt toward playfulness or experimentation (for a recent example, see Spencer

Gordon’s Cosmo) tend to be rare, and in any event are discouraged by publishers who prefer tightly unified (preferably linked) groups of stories that more closely resemble the movement and progression of novels. While not precisely linked collections, new books by Vancouver’s Théodora Armstrong and Toronto’s Ayelet Tsabari are remarkable for their internal unities: of style, of place and of subject.

Armstrong’s setting of choice is British Columbia: Vancouver, Kamloops, the Sunshine

Coast. The stories in Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visi

bility (House of Anansi Press, 292 pp; $22.95) are marked by a sharp eye (Armstrong is also a photographer) and vividly described landscapes: In one story, the wind “crawled through the trees”; elsewhere, evergreens appear “fossilized in their stillness” and a valley is likened to “a dark green bowl turning on a table top.”

That last simile is from the title story, about an air traffic controller who is rattled when a water bomber collides into the side of a mountain on his watch. The story’s protagonist, Wes, trades emails with his friend Thom; a typical subject line from one of Thom’s emails reads, “The Useless Bungling of Wes’ Own Ineffectual Life.” The irony here is thick: Thom himself is a Ph.D. dropout, and Wes, a new father, feels completely lost as a result of his inability to prevent the catastrophe on the mountain.

The question flight controllers are instructed to ask pilots in mayday situations — “What are your intentions?” — could serve as a tag line for Armstrong’s book. Meant to reassure a pilot in distress, the procedural inquiry offers the veneer of control in a situation that may in fact preclude it. In “Fishtail,” a father stuck in traffic checks his rearview mirror and sees a truck skid out of control, bearing down on the car containing him, his wife, and their two young daughters. The incident holds a sense of sheer panic arising from imminent danger, but also from the fact that a quotidian moment has the capacity to turn suddenly threatening.

The game the two young girlfriends engage in at the opening of “Mosquito Creek,” in which one of them is blindfolded near a cliff edge while the other calls out directions to bring her close to the edge without going over, is an attempt to achieve mastery over the danger and unpredictability of life. The scene is the first of a series in which characters leap off the edges of things — cliffs, waterfalls — culminating in a troubled young man’s suicide by jumping off the Lions Gate Bridge. The matter of intentionality may be decisive, Armstrong suggests, or it may be a convenient lie we tell ourselves to obscure the unpalatable truth that we are powerless in the face of the world’s indifference.

Clocking in at just under 90 pages, “Mosquito Creek” is by far the longest story in the collection, but its meander- ing, repetitive aspect suggests that it would have been twice as effective at half the length. Similarly, “The Art of Eating,” about an egotistical chef who has fallen on hard times (imagine Gordon Ramsay forced to work the kitchen at Milestones), is too long to sustain its rather thin conceit, which involves the chef, Charlie, getting increasingly irate with a server and a metalhead dish boy, while sweating over the prospect of asking for a raise and worrying about his very pregnant wife back home. In addition to being overlong, “The Art of Eating” features a redemptive conclusion that is unearned and unconvincing.

By far the best stories in Armstrong’s collection are the shorter, tauter ones. “Rabbit,” about the effect of a young girl’s disappearance on another girl and her drifter brother, is strong, despite cleaving a bit too closely to the Raymond Carver template of minimalist dirty realism. “The Spider in the Jar” contains a truly unnerving scene involving two brothers exploring a cave, and “Thanks to Carin” places the relationship between two sisters under an ironic microscope.

But the collection’s standout is unquestionably “Whale Stories,” a brief, elliptical tale about a boy who digs a hole on the beach near his home hoping to capture some unsuspecting prey, only to discover that reality is much messier than what he is able to conjure in his imagination. Here, Armstrong’s themes of agency and inevitability are distilled to their essence and given another ironic twist, and her typically spare language is honed to a fine edge. In its brevity and complete lack of sentimental- ity, “Whale Stories” wields a greater impact than some of the collection’s more indulgent, bloated offerings.

Ayelet Tsabari is less of an ironist than Armstrong, but the stories in The Best Place on Earth (HarperCollins Canada, 234 pp., $24.99) are equally focused in setting and theme. Tsabari’s stories centre on the lives of Mizrahi Jews of Middle Eastern descent. Herself an Israeli with a Yemeni background, Tsabari is highly attuned to the subtle tensions that exist between Israel’s Mizrahi Jewish population and the more well-known Ashkenazi Jews. “The poetry they taught at school, the books he found in the school library, were mostly written by old Ashkenazi men,” muses Uri, a budding writer living in Tel Aviv during Operation Desert Storm. “He had never heard of a Yemeni or Iraqi poet or any Mizrahi poet for that matter.”

In an earlier story, Lily, a young girl of Yemeni descent, and Lana, whose family hails from Eastern Europe, argue about their divergent backgrounds. “My grandparents came from Yemen, so we are Arabs in a way, Arab Jews,” the former says. “No, that’s impossible,” her friend responds. “You’re either an Arab or a Jew.” Elsewhere, we are informed that Lily stopped referring to herself as a pacifist who does not support the Israeli army after her cousin began calling her “little Arafat.”

Questions of identity abound in Tsabari’s stories. Lily “feels like a stranger, a tourist” in Israel, and Uri dreams of being “taller and braver and Ashkenazi.” In another instance, a grandmother is aghast when she discovers that her daughter, now living in Toronto, has decided against having her newborn son circumcised. “You don’t think about it, you just do it,” says the grandmother. When asked why, she responds, “Because it’s what Jews do.”

The ethnic tensions among Jews — both Israeli and diasporic — are given heightened urgency by being placed against the backdrop of ongoing violence in the Middle East. The opening story, “Tikkun,” about the reunion of two ex-lovers in a Jerusalem café, is a potent examination of the quotidian devastation wreaked by continuous bombings in the city. And in “The Poets in the Kitchen Window,” Uri pens his verse during a routine of air raid sirens and the threat of chemical gas attacks.

Tsabari writes with a clear yet compassionate eye about characters attempting to wrest meaningful lives out of an environment that strongly opposes them. However, she too often allows herself to engage in overheated prose or questionable similes (in the title story, a Jerusalem evening is likened to “warm syrup drizzled over baklava,” and the treetops sway “like a coordinated dance troupe, their rustling leaves a thousand tiny jazz-hands”), and indulges a creeping sentimentality that, although it doesn’t entirely derail the collection, frequently undermines its effect. In this regard, Tsabari’s book evinces an inverse relationship to Armstrong’s: in the former the writing doesn’t quite live up to the material, whereas in the latter, the opposite is true.