This Ain't No Healing Town: Toronto Stories

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson Polytechnical University.

For a collection of short stories of which most impart no sense of place
or geography, the subtitle “Toronto Stories” must have been inspired
by irony, or by the same logic that gives Torontonians pride that their
city can play Anytown, USA, in so many movies; or perhaps Toronto is
just a state of mind, where “no healing” takes place. In any case,
the themes that permeate this collection are the universal ones of death
and sex. The selection includes pieces by such well-known authors as
Morley Callaghan, Timothy Findley, and Margaret Atwood, as well as by
lesser-known writers, and the stories flow subtly from one into the
next, linked indirectly by common themes. There is a bleakness in many
of the stories, from the undercurrents of violence in Atwood’s
“Marrying the Hangman,” through the madness of the witch hunt in
Diane Keating’s “Salem Letters,” the stillborn baby of Margaret
Gibson’s “Making It,” the bloody conclusion of Elizabeth
Ukrainetz’s “Pig Baby,” and the suicides of Atwood’s “The Sin
Eater” and Barbara Gowdy’s “We So Seldom Look on Love” (and the
necrophilia of the latter story), to the violence in Yugoslavia in N.J.
Dodic’s “The Madness of History.” On a slightly lighter note (and
also making significant use of the Toronto setting) are stories such as
Austin Clarke’s “Doing Right,” an amusing and evocative rendering
of Toronto’s West Indian community, and Katherine Govier’s “The
Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery,” a whimsical tale of a
photographer forced to doctor family history, but both still end with
defeat. As the title implies, there is “no healing” in these
stories, and on the whole this collection is a disturbing but
thought-provoking one.