Broken Accidents

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

“My Decisions,” the first tale in Broken Accidents, provides a
paradigm for the rest in this odd little book. Phlip Arima writes a kind
of surreal phantasmal fiction in which a particular logic of narration
pulls each story toward a neatly eccentric conclusion, and “My
Decisions” demonstrates the method, with an extra edge that also makes
it the most powerful story in the book.

Like many of the stories, it is a first-person narrative, and that
person is oddly both innocent and all-too-implicated in an
all-too-late-capitalist psychic economy. Its opening sentence lays out
the logic of what will follow: “Today I put my parents down.” How
the narrator explains this event, and exonerates himself as a good son
in doing this, is the burden of the narration.

Many other stories, including the odd sequence of “Delevations”
stretched across the tales in a vertical series of bits, have equally
equable and frightening narrators. As well, there are a number of
dialogues; all appear to begin in an identifiably mundane setting, but
soon diverge into pure, often somewhat paranoid, weirdness.

Broken Accidents is probably best taken in small doses. There is much
to admire in Arima’s apparently plain prose and the way it leads the
reader off the usual narrative pathways. Yet this reader began to feel a
certain sameness after a while, and nothing had quite the same impact as
that first story.