Birthmarks

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Roscoe’s characters are without exception dismally marked; some of the
marks, as the title story suggests, are indeed part of lives fated since
birth; but most have been deeply incised by the uncommon wear and tear
of lives spent on the underside of disadvantaged existence.

These sad and sorry individuals are runaways, throwaways, whores, and
junkies. To them, life’s losers, aspiration extends only as far as
tonight’s hit, tonight’s lover. They have lost or discarded all
meaningful contact with lovers, friends, and family.

Some of the stories—those narrated by a character called Richard,
Ricky, or Rick—present the loosely connected account of the
narrator’s inevitable descent, as he drops progressively lower in the
sordid hierarchy of the street. Even when the reader is invited to share
the consciousness of such a person, or, even worse, that of a homicidal
arsonist, this collection of society’s misfits and discards is
frightfully believable and—even worse—understandable. The collected
stories are divided into four discrete sections of uneven length,
comprising 19 pieces in all; some have appeared earlier elsewhere, in
“mutilated form.”