Hider/Seeker by Jen Currin
ELIZABETH HOLLIDAY
The debut collection of short fiction from Jen Currin, Hider/Seeker offers an assortment of stories that are at once deeply magical and viscerally realistic. Winding ghosts and monsters through stories of sex, family, love, addiction, and abuse, Currin deftly explores the balance between certainty and the unknown.
There is naturalism to the scenarios Currin presents, as if we are in the head of someone processing the most commonplace but emotionally impactful of human experiences: chronic loneliness, a breakup, a maybe-getting-back-together. The familiarity is reassuring, but there are supernatural beings at the fringes of all these stories. When they make their way to the centre of the narrative, they emerge so naturally you almost forget their supernatural nature.
Currin expertly weaves these touches of the uncanny into the dominant theme of hiding from and seeking the self. The stories are riddled with fruitless attempts to find answers through some kind of connection, with lovers, with substances, even with strangers. But connection is an imperfect answer to these characters’ quandaries. The central character of “The Charlatan,” trying to recover from a bigoted interaction by “look[ing] at each stranger’s face as if [they] knew them,” contradicts themself in the very fact that this intimacy is imagined.
The book’s characters usually have no idea what they’re looking for, and seldom, if ever, find it. Rather, many of them seem stuck in patterns of understanding that prevent them from connecting with themselves or others. This lack of self-knowledge is unsettling in its familiarity, and renders the frequent references to meditation retreats, temples, and classes ironic. The potential of a full-circle journey is only dangled in the collection’s second and last stories. And yet, the hiding and seeking continue, while the finding remains elusive.
The author’s considerable skill for portraying human relationships allows her to approach a wide variety of interpersonal struggles, noticeable in standout stories like “Third Beach.” It’s a poignant look at an on-again-off-again relationship that doesn’t know what to call itself. The story’s closing line, “[s]he has no sweater so she wraps her arms around herself,” invokes a romantic gesture while turning it into one of self-sufficiency and distance.
Currin’s aptitude for stylistic variety makes this collection a great choice for a diverse mix of readers. From the first-person disillusionment of “The Charlatan” to the fairy tale that is “The Sisters and the Ash,” her imagery is precise and coy. Hider/Seeker invites us to reckon with how few answers lie in the mundane and the magical, and what it means to keep searching anyway.