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Heather Birrell Mad Hope. Coach $18.95
Lynn Crosbie Life Is About Losing Everything. Anansi $24.95
Anakana Schofield Malarky. Biblioasis $19.95
Reviewed by Lorraine York
These three books span generic categories, from Heather Birrell's short stories, to Anakana Schofield's novel, to Lynn Crosbies ficto-memoir. But what they all meditate upon, in some fashion or other, is, in Crosbies words, the art of "losing everything." And they are all, willingly or not, inheritors of that paean to loss: Cohens Beautiful Losers, not only in the thematic sense, but in the ways in which they-to differing degrees-play fast and loose with more recognizable, canonized literary treatments of loss.
This is least the case with Birrell's eleven stories in Mad Hope. Technically speaking, these are tightly focused miniatures: taut, controlled, economical. They almost all revolve around a traumatic incident of some kind: a neighbourhood child murdered, a student pleading with her teacher to help her arrange an abortion, the murder of a gay teenager. As studies of human relationships under duress, they present themselves with a remarkable clarity. We see these characters living beyond the ending, as it were: carrying trauma into the everyday, or at least wondering how to do so, or struggling not to. The obvious drawback to this fictional structure is that the traumatic incident itself comes to seem a predictable given. But when looked at as experimentation, as a multi-faceted study of human beings in radically wrenched, bizarrely altered situations, these stories begin to look more edgy than their initial, miniature gem-like quality would suggest. At times, the writing, like the traumatic central incidents, loses surprise: "What Jerome said delighted Geraldine absolutely-its insouciance and lack of logic." So far so very, very good. But Birrell takes us too far into explication: "Every now and then, she thought, you bumped into somebody who showed you a different way of living, a fierce commitment to a life that you could never claim as your own. What would the future hold for them both? There was no way of knowing." True enough. But in this story of a middle-aged white woman's meeting with a black teenager in a cancer clinic,...