My Father Took a Cake to France

Dennis Denisoff teaches English at McGill University and is the author
of Dog Years.

Even before reading the back cover of Flood’s second collection of
short stories, I was aware that the title story had won the Journey
prize for fiction, and this worried me a bit. I could not help but
wonder whether the entire collection was riding on this one story. It
pleased me to discover that this was not the case. Virtually every piece
in the book maintains the literary standards that the author presented
in her first collection, The Animals in Their Elements (1987).

Flood has the unique ability to evoke an almost naive sincerity in the
voices and styles of her narrators. This achievement is notable because,
at the end of almost every piece, Flood reveals the strategic
machinations that she has been using to propel the reader to a
predetermined conclusion. When the narrator stops, partway through
“The Meaning of the Marriage,” claiming that “[t]hat is all I have
for the story’s opening. Next comes a story set in the same polished
kitchen that Mrs. Perren and her sister saw on the wedding morning,”
one really gets the sense that the narrator has no clear direction. It
is not until the end of the piece that one realizes how important the
missing sections (of the story and her life) really are.

The stories in this collection are all efficient, precise, and
controlled—maybe too much so, since even the apparently seedy,
disturbed environment of “Watching” comes across as scoured and
arranged. Flood’s obvious technical control does not fit all the
topics of her stories well, but, in the vast majority of cases, her use
of style to support theme is ingenious and dead-on.