National Post (National Edition)
Colville’s paintings inspire artful new book
In 2014, when the Art Gallery of Ontario mounted a major exhibit of Alex Colville’s paintings, K.D. Miller was among the most impressed of the people who came to see them. She’s an author, otherwise known as Kathleen Daisy Miller, respected for her books of fiction. She spends much of her time thinking about stories.
As she looked at Colville’s work she saw a vivid connection to narrative. Studying “the eerie, chill-down-the-spine effect of many of his paintings,” she felt that each of them carried a message. Looking at them we imagine something memorable has just happened, or is just about to happen. The black horse galloping toward an oncoming train, his famous and his most reproduced work, demonstrates that effect. A child can imagine the terror beneath the image.
On the first page of her new collection, Late Breaking (Biblioasis), she acknowledges that this work was inspired by Colville’s paintings. And each story of the 10 is accompanied by a reproduction of a Colville. In the first, Kiss With Honda, painted in 1989, a woman is bending into a car window to kiss the man at the wheel. The story that follows is about a widower who suspects his wife Joan (killed years ago in an accident) had an affair with a man who drove a Honda. The narrative fits perfectly with the image.
But not all her stories connect so easily to the illustrations. Sometimes they connect more to each other. In the book’s last story we find the characters mourning someone who died in the next-tolast story.
Miller didn’t set out to have the stories interlock. “But then it occurred to me that the protagonist of one story simply must have been the longtime friend of the protagonist of another. The characters, in their way, let me in on a community that gradually formed under my hand.”
She writes of life in small-town Ontario or New Brunswick, the sort of town where you can imagine you know everybody and often see them on the street. Miller, born in Hamilton, Ont., now lives in Toronto.
An earlier collection, All Saints, won the Writers’ Trust prize for fiction in 2014. With Late Breaking, Miller has received wider recognition. It was on the Giller long list and remains one of five finalists for the Governor General’s Literary Awards’ fiction prize to be announced later this month.
Her recent fiction cautions the reader. At the age of 68, she’s said she hopes to remind the reader that “the elder heart can still break. It is as tender,
OUR HEARTS STAY YOUNG AND OPEN, RIGHT UP
UNTIL THE END.
brave and vulnerable as it ever was.” Falling in love is as exhilarating for people in their 60s (she argues) as it is for those in their 20s; and the failure of that love hurts them just as much, too. “Our hearts stay young and open, right up until the end.” In one of Miller’s stories a character, a fiction writer, creates a woman who takes her first lover at the age of 73.
One of her characters had a succession of six lovers in her life. “She would come to need her lover’s attention the way she needed air or water.” She’s emotionally paralyzed when her lover abandons her. “She was loved,” she reflects, “then not loved. Eliot was there, then gone.”
Her stories are sharp, memorable and sometimes harsh. She’s particularly good on sex, and the infinitely variable meanings of sex. Once I had read a few of her stories, nothing could stop me from reading the rest. Miller is obviously a careful, imaginative and deeply empathic author.