Collection is unified by its human depths
Reading A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage, the new collection of short stories from Victoria writer Bill Gaston, is a strange and unsettling experience. On the one hand, the collection almost reads like an anthology, an overview of the varied and often surprising state of contemporary short fiction. On the other, the stories have, at their core, a singular quality and worldview which render them unmistakably the product of the same mind and heart.
The stories of A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage draw on a variety of forms. For example, there’s uncomfortable domestic comedy, in the collection’s lead story, “Levitation,” which uses the events of a retirement party to illuminate — for the characters and the reader — the fractures in a marriage. And there’s the mythic, in “Protectors,” which reveals the unacknowledged forces — human and otherwise — which “promote our wakefulness,” even at our expense (“That’s so interesting, and beyond irony: your Protector might kill you”). Stylistic approaches range from the second-person address of “Drilling A Hole In Your Boat” to the parsed, dialogue-only movement of “The Return of Count Flatula” to the relatively straightforward narrative of the family gathering drama of “Carla’s Dead Wife.”
Despite the breadth of the storytelling on display, the stories are unified by their human depths. The stories hang on internal conflict, resolved through an often abstract sense of culpability and shift in direction. In “The Church of Manna, Revelator,” for example, Joel’s road trip to spend the entirety of his inheritance from his uncle ends in a nowhere town and a church service which pushes him beyond his previous understanding of himself. Similarly, in the collection’s final story, “Drilling a Hole in Your Boat,” the gradual revelation of “your” plans for a final boat trip with “your” wife builds to a stark emotional honesty. It’s enough to break one’s heart.
And that, perhaps, is the key to these stories and this collection: like few writers, Gaston is able to consistently balance stylistic pyrotechnics and surefootedness with an almost holy emotional acuity and inclusiveness. A Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage serves as a potent reminder that Gaston is one of the finest writers of the short story at work in this country today. And even that is likely selling him short. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Black Feathers.