Accountable Advances

Don Crosby is a journalist in Durham, Ontario.

This collection of short stories about the strange and subtle
undercurrents of everyday life in 1957 focuses on the repressed
sexuality in the days before the pill. In “Courting in 1957,” a
couple caught planning premarital sex during courtship is locked in the
girl’s bedroom by her seemingly progressive parents, who refuse to
release them until they carry out their plan. “The Nocturnal Jogger”
uses his nightly run in the neighborhood to cover an extramarital
affair, until police suspect him of a rash of midnight break-ins.

The pace of the collection is slow and the stories drawn out. Much of
the literary tension evolves out of how the characters’ schemes to
catch snippets of intimacy and the comedy that follows from hiding their
escapades and from the guilt they feel. Much like life itself in the
1950s, the stories are a comic romp filled with high-spirited burlesque
that leads to an anticlimactic ending.