Eyehill
Description
$19.95
ISBN 0-86492-379-1
DDC C813'.6
Author
Publisher
Year
Contributor
M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.
Review
A dusty dot of a prairie town, the Eyehill of Saskatchewan-born author
Kelly Cooper’s debut book of 17 intricately interwoven stories sports
“no bank, no hospital, no high school,” and only the burning
memories of “where the grain elevator used to stand.”
The stories are a triumph of structure, characterization, language, and
dialogue. Protagonist Rhea Jardine recounts her life and the lives of
those around her—good and bad, fortunate and unfortunate—as she
grows from the kid whose mother left her, to the adolescent selling
“racks of rosaries” at God’s Odds New Age store, to an adult
returning home to face more memories than she means to encounter.
Throughout, Cooper packages universal themes of love and hate, greed
and despair, hopes and dreams into the observable behaviours and
personalities of memorable characters with nicknames like school bus
driver What Say Warzecka and salesman uncle Brittanica Bill. With a
knack for the telling phrase, she records “the random comments of the
elderly”: a 60-year-old cook answering a question with the question
“Is a frog’s ass watertight?” or a widow cackling that she
wouldn’t have another husband even “if his pockets were lined with
gold and his arse-hole studded with diamonds.” Her characters are an
ensemble cast of townsfolk in a place where gossip is the order of the
day and everyone knows everyone else’s business, where a cuckolded
husband is demeaned as much for not taking revenge as for being
hoodwinked, where a hotel chambermaid supplements her tips by providing
“services” to travelling businessmen.
Cooper’s captivating portrayal of life in a prairie town deserves
widespread recognition, for both the individuality of its style and the
significance of its substance.