Through Any Window

Eve Challoner Pella is a MPP constituency assistant and a past Executive
Committee member of the PTA in Toronto.

Patricia Stone’s stories manage to be intellectually stimulating
without being “intellectual.” What they are not is light reading.
Stone’s predominantly female characters exist in a joyless world of
unfulfilled expectations, tentatively formed relationships built upon
half-truths, false perceptions, and acute loneliness. Even the quirky
humor of “Push Face” and “The Fiat” does not relieve the
prevailing sense of tension and alienation.

In “The For-Sale Sign,” Sheila, who has devoted her life to hearth
and home, has a “swift ... view of herself, of her life, as a lie.”
She becomes crippled by anxiety attacks when a for-sale sign appears on
her neighbors’ lawn; what she does not realize is that her neighbors
are part of her anchorage. In “The Vacancy,” Leona compares herself
to an inebriate vagrant, Mrs. MacNab, when she needs to feel
“anchored.” Her survival technique collapses, however, when she
realizes that, like Mrs. MacNab, she “might always live without
refuge.”

Stone examines her characters’ angst in a style that approximates
clinical detachment. She does not provide solutions. Her characters wail
in terror at the maelstrom, but find no salvation. One can only wonder
how this author’s vision will develop in future works.