The Gridlock Mechanism

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

“This is a post-modern story” begins the first piece in Raglon’s
collection. And, of course, that statement itself makes it so. But the
claim asserts more than textual reflexivity, with every piece in this
book focusing on an individual’s acknowledgment of her or his (usually
her) seemingly insignificant and ungrounded position in society, and the
ensuing struggle to come to terms with the anxieties that this
acknowledgment fosters. Raglon’s well-crafted stories demonstrate that
it is much more difficult, if not impossible, to accept a postmodern
reality than it is to believe that one exists.

The author challenges herself to offer some possible means of
alleviating postmodern anxieties. As the title of the collection
suggests, however, solutions are hard to come by. The title story, for
example, ends with the protagonist stuck in a physical and emotional
traffic jam. “Hugging the Maine Coast” similarly ends with the
protagonist’s door-slamming return to her stale partnership. “The
Road to Port Renfrew” and “You” are infused with a similar
negativity.

Two of the five remaining stories, “Lotus Land” and “Babies from
Cabbages,” end troublingly on a modernist note of hope, symbolized
primarily by happy children and nature. One gets the sense, in reading
Raglon’s writing, that the author ultimately believes that one can
escape the effects of late capitalism by focusing on conventional family
values and the promise of youth. The beautifully written
“Dreamwalk,” though more ambiguous than “Lotus Land” and
“Babies from Cabbages,” is more convincing in its optimism because
it does not succumb to conventional imagery. The description of a woman
walking into the sunset is, paradoxically, one of the most original
passages in the collection, though Raglon does not push it far enough if
it was intended to be a generic subversion.

Often echoing Audrey Thomas’s works in their concern with women’s
issues and their tenuous concluding optimism, Raglon’s stories are
less successful in convincing the reader that gridlock is either
inevitable, as most of the stories imply, or escapable, as most of the
remaining others do.