Compilation brings empathy, humour to everyday absurdities
Believable, recognizable characters deal with feelings of denial, loneliness and insecurity
Angie, in the titular story of Jessica Westhead’s new collection Things Not To Do, complains that people getting in the way of others is “unacceptable, always.” No excuses. Yet she, and most of the characters in Westhead’s world, continually get in the way of their own happiness.
Westhead brings empathy and humour to everyday absurdities with believable and recognizable characters. Every story involves denial in its many guises with protagonists trying to defuse it via modern day distractions. Some do it surreptitiously, nursing old hurts, while others go for the spectacular, with dreams of creating forms of escape they both participate in and profit from.
While there are a few shout-outs to male insecurity and loneliness (“The Lesson,” “Empathize or Die,” “Everyone Here Is So Friendly”), the female characters top the charts in both these departments. Low self-esteem and unresolved feelings push them into accepting unacceptable behaviour as they continually shortchange themselves.
Judy, an out-of-work voice actress (“Not Being Shy”) wants to create a doll that says encouraging things to timid children so they can bypass her predicament, while Shawna, whose husband is in a band and “surrounded by temptation” (“The Opener”), is haunted by “embarrassingly clichéd” raw feelings. Both women desperately seek validation amidst the wasteland of perceived perfection and self-hatred.
Brutal stuff. Yet Westhead extracts incessant internal struggles, highlights their ridiculousness and lets their implications simmer throughout her story lines, nudging readers to ask the questions her characters are unable to ask themselves.
Darlene and Kyle (“Baby Can’t You See”), Stan and Cathy (“A Little Story About Love”) and the separated couple who vacations together (“We Wish You Happiness, With All Your Friends Around”), all long for love but are tripped up by intimacy issues. Each — whether they’re together as a couple or not — would rather continue “along their own mediocre paths in life” than share what they really want and feel.
The disaffection of Westhead’s characters intensifies as stories unfold. Sometimes, their inner thoughts go overboard, distracting from the narrative and requiring backtracking to figure things out. Sure, Westhead mirrors the tangential nature of processing thoughts — which is distracting — but sometimes it’s overkill in the context of storytelling.
Characters who do possess awareness aren’t sure what to do with it. In the aptly titled “Real Life,” the narrator owns her disappointment and understands life is to be savoured, but she’s stuck. The female narrator in the collection’s closer “Escape to the Island,” flatly states, “We can’t control things. We think we can, but we can’t.” After introducing characters doing things best not done, Westhead thus ends by noting that awareness is a good starting point — but then you have to do something. Elizabeth Mitchell is a Toronto writer.