Torque

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

J. Michael Yates has been writing for some decades. This collection of stories extends from 1960 to 1987. Yates is an idiosyncratic writer who works with abstractions in a surreal manner, taking figurative ideas, for instance, and treating them literally. We read, in “The Broadcaster,” of a radio host whose body shrinks away as he becomes nothing but a voice. In “Realia” a flood in a library reverses the processes of bookmaking as paper returns to pulp and the forests of book stacks become logs. These are delightful ideas and short forms are appropriate for this kind of intellectual playfulness (Yates evidently also writes plays and poetry). Finding the story to carry the idea is another matter. The best work here is short; it can rapidly come to seem too long when the story fails. Extended plot development demands a serious degree of intellectual control if the situation is to be taken beyond the playful and become significant. It is a high level and J. Michael Yates only fitfully reaches it.