Homecoming

Michael O. Nowlan was a teacher and writer in Oromocto, New Brunswick.

Homecoming is Veronica Ross’s third collection of short stories and it focuses on and gives broader dimension to the ordinary. The scene where a son or daughter leaves home after a fight with one or both parents is a common one. A division is created which may never heal. “Homecoming” reflects on this theme when Jay returns to his father’s sick bed and ultimately his funeral. The element of finality is evident because Jay “had done the right things. He could leave it all behind him now.” It may be difficult to explain, but Veronica Ross records “everything had to be proper” in which the complete scheme of life reaches some kind of fulfillment.

There is a similar life-confusion for Reg Griffiths who “will come home and find that his whole life has been turned upside down, that the little ordinary everyday things, which he had always taken for granted, had fled away, leaving emptiness, deadness.” “In Leicester County” is a snapshot account of the darker side of small-town events. It is here that Ross’s fiction sees. “Things were never as they appeared” because “there were secrets everywhere.”

In “The Eyes of the Whore,” Clifford Fox best alludes to what Ross’s fiction is all about when he discovers himself “in a world that seemed too large.” The narrative voice tries to define that world, but to know what the other side of the mirror reveals is impossible.

The stories in Homecoming establish this Halifax writer as one of the strong voices in this genre today. Her grasp of this narrative form is keen.