Capital Tales

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

Reading Capital Tales is like sparring with a skilled prizefighter. Again and again in this collection of 19 tales, Fawcett aims for the head with acuity and precision. All the tales revolve in one way or another around the numerous connotations of the word “capital.” The collection opens with “The Pigs Treat the Goats Real Fine,” a contemporary fable about a bachelor businessman who hires a couple so that the wife may bear his child but backs out of the deal when his investment is born hydrocephalic. In the three tales that follow, the heads of no fewer than five men and a grizzly bear are respectively kicked in, punched in, lopped off, sliced off, and shot off. The violence is breathless, sometimes comically grotesque, sometimes pathetically disturbing, helping to stretch the tales to their limits, perhaps to break through to a “real” world desensitized to its own violent excesses.

Many similar tales follow, yet skillfully mixed in with them are tales of varied pace — the quiet, the playful, and the introspective, including several quasi-autobiographical accounts of a boy whose illusions about life and love in a capitalist society are sometimes softly, sometimes painfully peeled away. A dialogue between the narrator and a resurrected and flatulent Thomas Carlyle about capital and capitalism is the delightful and provocative conclusion to this collection.

A sense of honesty underlies the telling of all these postmodern tales. Fawcett plays with his own techniques, often popping outside the narrative to discuss with his readers the progress of a tale. These techniques prepare the reader to accept, with no sense of irony, the narrator’s comments about himself as a writer that might in some other contexts be considered pretentious: “The Apocalypse hasn’t come, and it can’t so long as I continue to work with the idea that a writer can’t be a Great Writer until he knows his world with complete intimacy, and that the job of Literature is to keep the world going.”

Fawcett knows his world. Though these are tales of violence and of crippling ideologies out of control, they are also tales of hope.