Coady collection shows versatility
In Hellgoing, Lynn Coady’s powerful new short story collection, things that go unsaid are as important as those that are said.
Take the protagonist of Clear Skies, a woman writer who achieved early fame with a memoir detailing her horrific childhood — only we never learn the details of the abuse she suffered.
Or Body Condom, in which Kim tries to dissuade her boyfriend Hart from visiting the father who mistreated him. Hart makes excuses for his dad: “It was just two times. And both times drugs were involved. Never when he was straight.” As in Clear Skies, the reader is left to intuit the father’s misdeeds.
Coady, who was born in Cape Breton in 1970, and now lives in Edmonton, has already established a name for herself in Canadian literature. Her fourth novel, The Antagonist, about a hockey enforcer, was shortlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize.
This short story collection — Coady’s second — demonstrates that she is a versatile wordsmith. Many moments are laugh-out-loud funny. In Take This and Eat It, Sister Anita, an irreverent nun ministers to Catherine, a 14-year-old anorexic. Catherine insists she is fasting for God: “I want to be an empty vessel. I want to be filled with God.” When she adds that the Bible endorses fasting, Sister Anita admonishes her, “don’t read the Bible. … That’s what Protestants do and look at them.”
Other stories, such as Mr. Hope, about a girl’s ongoing relationship with a twisted teacher, are so dark and disturbing, the reader may need to stop for breaks. Here, too, Mr. Hope’s transgressions are implied. Shelly, the narrator, is now in her ‘20s and teaches sexual abuse prevention at the elementary school she attended.
“I was good … at being obedient,” Shelly recalls. She recalls, too, Mr. Hope’s inappropriate rants during history class, and uses suggestive language to describe his grotesque physique: “all belly, all outward thrust.”
Then Coady gives us stories, like An Otherworld, which are just plain interesting. Erin, an accident-prone woman and her partner Sean visit a resort for their destination wedding. The couple has a little secret: they’re into S&M.
Initially, this story’s chief appeal is its weirdness. But Coady does a writerly sleight of hand, turning it into something tender. The story turns out to be more about emotional than physical pain. Erin and Sean may get into weird stuff in their basement, but Sean understands Erin’s deepest, all-too-human needs: “Help me; get away from me; ow that hurt; come here.”
The short story is the perfect vehicle to explore small, almost imperceptible change. In the title story, a divorced woman returns to her family home following her mother’s death. Her brother, who “had been her enemy once … petty rivals, but the rivalry was immediate and ongoing,” now lives with their father. The woman is forced to see her brother — and herself — anew.
Throughout the collection, we see Coady play with language. Her choices for many of her characters’ names are deliberate, often pointed. Hart reaches deep inside himself to forgive his father; there is nothing hopeful about Mr. Hope. Coady also has a gift for surprising, satisfying similes. The protagonist of Wireless, an alcoholic travel writer, considers the name of her heroine, the novelist Jean Rhys: “The pricked sound … like eye-slits.”
Not every one of the nine stories in this collection succeeds equally. Dogs in Clothes, about a literary publicist who has difficulty asserting herself, is not interesting enough. Set during a writing retreat in the Prairies, Clear Skies does too much navel-gazing, perhaps because it’s a story about writing, written for other writers.
Yet it’s here that, through the voice of a fiction writer named Herb, Coady articulates the writer’s mission: “We have to live in this world. … We can’t close our eyes to … things, much as we want to. That’s what writers do. We face up.” Which is precisely what Coady does.
Monique Polak’s next novel for young adults, So Much It Hurts (Orca Book Publishers), will be released in September.