Goodbye Harold, Good Luck

Blair Thompson was Adult Collections Co-ordinator at the North Vancouver District Library.

This collection of 13 stories by the well-known expatriate American, now British Columbia writer, will be greedily devoured by her female devotees. “Female” because there is not much here to engage the sympathies of men although, to be charitable, men don’t come off too badly as characters in Thomas’s stories. After one outing with Goodbye Harold, Good Luck, we suspect that most men would return to Mailer (although they should really bounce off Norman and end up with Raymond Carver instead).

Very little seems to happen in an Audrey Thomas story: interior monologues by women escaping punctured romances, or hankering to get away from oppressive husbands. Or mothers touring the Greek Islands with their nubile daughters and fretting as the child-woman begins to sever the mother-knot.

In “Breaking the Ice,” a divorced woman, bushed in a Gulf Islands cabin over Christmas, must make a go of kick-starting a relationship with a new man under the same roof as their respective teenage daughters. The potential lovers remain “potential,” sleeping nude together at the conclusion. Curious.

There are a couple of playful fantasies, including “The Princess and the Zucchini” which tries, none too successfully, to stand the conventions of “The Frog Prince” on their head. And in “Relics,” an American woman returns to the scene of her Scottish college days, reflecting upon a love affair with a married man, and regretting that she didn’t connect more sympathetically with her late landlady.

Thomas’s prose is quite accessible, even if some of her stories’ punchlines are not. Overall, her voice is quite clear as she articulates the concerns of the post-feminist woman, wife, and mother in an easy, small-screen sort of way.