World Body: Selected Stories, 4

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This is the fourth and last volume of Clark Blaise’s Selected Stories.
The previous books focused on three of Blaise’s characteristic
locales: Southern Stories (2000), mainly about Florida, Pittsburgh
Stories (2001), and Montreal Stories (2003), set in places where Blaise
has lived for several years, first as a child, then as an adolescent,
later as a young adult. World Body presents us with Blaise’s
“take” on the contemporary global village. Stories may take place in
India, Israel, Japan, Poland, even Toronto; all these settings are well
differentiated in detail but disturbingly similar in essence. Their
human denizens share a similar, almost repetitive social and behavioural
malaise.

All 10 stories from If I Were Me (1997) are reprinted. Five others
first appeared in Man and His World (1992), and three are published in
book form for the first time. The If I Were Me stories (plus one of the
new ones) have Gerald Lander as protagonist. He is presented, perhaps
rather self-consciously, as a postmodern Everyman, a “typical young
man of the early ’60s” who, though he may consider meaninglessness
unimaginable, seems to attract it and even to revel in its bizarre
manifestations. If your tastes are more traditional, you may feel that
“stereo-typical” is the more accurate adjective, and find yourself
ticking off the contemporary clichés as they are introduced
relentlessly, so it would seem, on every page. One did not think
absurdity had undone so many.

For myself, the now well-known “Meditations on Starch” from Man and
His World and one of the new contributions, “The Sociology of Love,”
are easily the best in the collection. In both, Blaise brilliantly
explores the complexities and frustrations of Westerners working,
living, and loving in the Far East, or Asiatics adapting (or failing to
adapt) to the ways of the West. These stories, which deserve to become
classics, catch a human dimension lacking in the Lander stories.
Throughout the book, however, Blaise’s supreme skill as a writer is
abundantly evident.