A Day Does Not Go By

Christina Pike is a member of the Evaluation Division, Department of
Education, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador.

There are 27 stories packed into this 200-page collection. Johnston’s
short short stories tend to be more experimental; as experiments, they
are interesting but not always satisfying.

Johnston’s play with archetypes is also hit and miss. Stories such as
“The Hero Comes Home,” “We Can’t Go on Like This,” “The
Saint,” and “The Underdog” are clever and amusing explorations of
the roles of heroes, prophets, and underdogs as constructions. In each
story, the archetype is placed in everyday situations and the contrast
between fictional type and realistic people is explored. This strategy
is taken into more mundane roles in “Drowning,” which centres on a
man whose job is drowning and a woman whose job is to lose her mind and
fade into nothing in a nursing home. The two end up having sex during
his break and then he reveals that his job is actually just to pretend
that he is drowning, while she says that her job is to sleep with
delusional men. It’s a fun story that toys with character types and
roles (and thereby reveals something about identity in fiction and real
life), but it’s not significant or especially rewarding.

In “Some Words, She Said” and “The Reporter and the Reporter,”
Johnston takes risks with implicit suggestion, but ends up producing
stories that are too obscure. More successful are “Nothing Like
This,” which focuses on a couple in marriage counseling and their
occasionally invisible child, and “Here, and Now,” in which a man in
a hospital waiting room awaits news of his wife’s condition. Both of
these excellent stories show that Johnston can weave together intricate
and meaningful narratives.