A Collection of Short Stories by Percy Janes

Beverly Rasporich is a professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro and Magic Off Main:
The Art of Esther Warkov.

This collection of short stories by Percy Janes is part of the Seventh Wave Newfoundland Writers Series and includes stories previously published in Newfoundlanders and the Newfoundland Quarterly.

These stories are regional in character, setting, and appeal, with convincing renditions of Newfie dialect, local personalities and concerns. In terms of modern fiction writing, however, structurally, they are curiosities. “Curtain,” for example, is known in an abbreviated form as a standard Newfie joke. This is the one about the dying woman who has her daughter run up some new curtains as a death-bed wish, only to have her tight-wad husband walk in and exercise the punch line: “Look here May. Look here! If you dies, I’m not payin’ for them new curtains” (p. 10). In Janes’s extended version, the pathos of the dying woman is elaborated and is strangely at odds with the cosmic climax.

Other more obviously serious stories are vignettes of character and motivation that are not without interest, but that suddenly drop off, ending inconclusively. “The Naval Career of Peter Jensen, “ for example, offers an interesting profile of a recalcitrant seaman, a legend of sorts, who is unceremoniously dismissed in the fiction when the atomic bomb is dropped and he is discharged from the service.

Most of these stories are entertaining; some even reach toward more complicated plots, themes, and character studies such as the confrontation between two artists in “Encounter in England”; but none, I suspect, will fully satisfy a sophisticated reader of contemporary fiction. Janes’s stories seem almost to be a genre of their own. Possibly, they are rooted in oral folk forms, and are struggling to take shape as literature. In this sense, they may be of some academic interest to the serious student of folk culture and para-literary forms.