Rapid Transits and Other Stories

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Holley Rubinsky of Kaslo, British Columbia, is the inaugural winner of
the McClelland and Stewart $10,000 Journey Prize for the title story of
Rapid Transits. Her first collection of fiction ranges over a wide
variety of emotions and moods, from the disgusting and obscene to the
lyrical and tender. Most of the stories deal with women caught in events
where violence lurks below the surface.

The first three stories feature a young-middle-aged woman who has found
a rural refuge with an elderly male friend, an unlikely patron who dies
partway through the trilogy. The woman narrator stands, “holding down
this corner of the earth,” leaving the fast lane to the reader or
passerby.

Most of Rubinsky’s women are physically unattractive, some heavy and
square-set, another “as big as a beached whale.” My favorite story
here is “Capricorn Women,” a powerful piece about four generations
of women from Sudbury. Nell has returned home because her grandmother is
dying. She broods over a murky memory of sibling rivalry twenty-five
years earlier: did she or did she not open a window and encourage her
retarded six-year-old brother to jump to his death? And why is Nell’s
fourteen-year-old daughter so cruelly critical of her?

These 11 stories are not easy pieces. Reading Rubinsky is sometimes
unpleasant, sometimes exhilarating, and rarely boring. She is nearly
always honest. This is a strong new voice in Canadian fiction.