Incidental Music.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

So much of what Carol Matthews writes about in her first collection of stories will be startlingly familiar to middle-aged readers. In the second part of the book particularly, “Autumn Leaves,” Matthews gets it all just right: the juggling of aged, infirm parents; the grown children, still a worry in their late 20s or 30s; encroaching senility. Relationship issues which rise and fall even in a marriage of 30 years are at the heart of this section. Tannis, a woman in her 40s and 50s, appears in all seven of the stories, set either in Vancouver or Montreal. Matthews has lived in them both, and her sense and feeling of place is remarkable. Tannis, her husband, Steven, her parents, and her two grown daughters are going through the sort of affirmations and denials that life brings to everyone, though perhaps in differing measures and at different times. In “Sweet Tooth,” the opening story of “Autumn Leaves,” Tannis is sitting in the dentist’s chair, bemoaning the imminent loss of a tooth. “She has to face facts,” she thinks, “teeth mark the times of our lives. From the moment of birth, teeth events are at the tip of the tongue. We celebrate the loss of our baby teeth, our milk teeth, and the arrival of our baby’s teeth. The advent of wisdom teeth completes the whole permanent set. Then they start falling out.” For Tannis, thoughts like these become more and more frequent. “Nobody had expected me to become so boring in middle age,” she thinks, “but here it is. Hormones. Passages. All the clichés coming home to roost in her empty nest, her emptying mouth.”

The book’s opening section, “Variations,” also consists of seven stories, connected, this time, less through central characters than by the epiphanic nature of their plots. Figuring strongly in these stories is the idea of mental illness, and some of them are set in Montreal’s notorious Allan Memorial Institute. These stories deal with passages of another kind, less with aging than with more acute changes in personalities.

Matthews makes her home now on Protection Island off the coast of Vancouver Island. She has been a hospital social worker, an educator, and a family counsellor. Her experiences have all been put to good use in this collection. These are special stories.