Best Canadian Stories 03

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

This year’s edition of Best Canadian Stories includes works by Elyse
Friedman, Dave Margoshes, Lisa Moore, Russell Smith, Hugh Graham, Leon
Rooke, David Helwig, Mike Barnes, and Elisabeth Harvor.

“One Whole Hour (or Even More) with Proust and Novocaine,” by
Elizabeth Harvor, is a sensitive and amusing story about a 13-year-old
girl who is curious about sex. In Hugh Graham’s “That’s All There
Is,” a lonely, sheltered adolescent who attends a private Catholic
boys’ school is befriended by a black girl who invites him to a dance
hall where the music is “intoxicated and violent.”

In “Truth,” by Elyse Friedman, two strangers, Leslie and Martin,
meet at a Starbucks for coffee. The woman dislikes him from the start,
but needs a partner to take to a forthcoming wedding. Without a date,
she will attract pity from friends. The two have sex and confess their
mutual loneliness and fear of failure, ridicule, aging, death, and
disease. The reader may be excused for thinking that if these characters
reflect the Zeitgeist, our society’s in trouble.

David Helwig’s comic tale of a divorced couple sharing a bed and
reflecting that they are no longer young adds a welcome touch of humor.
Many of the other stories are depressing. Whatever happened to writers
like Adele Wiseman who could deal with a full range of human experience
and make it comic and uplifting?