Fifty Stories and a Piece of Advice

Terry Goldie is an associate professor of English at York University and
author of Fear and Temptation.

Arnason is a writer who is very aware of his genre. Some might say that he is too aware of it. He writes in a manner completely oriented towards the short story. The absence of adjectives or physical description and a general avoidance of character development would make it very difficult to sustain a longer narrative.

Most of Arnason’s stories depend on quirks of style and voice. At times he plays with plot, but for the most part he is almost obsessively concerned with who is telling the story and how. The blurb on the back of this collection makes reference to the “post-modern” nature of much of Arnason, and this is an accurate assessment. However, like a number of other writers who could be so described, there is a constant danger that Arnason will become so entranced by process that he will forget what he is processing.

This happens a number of times in this collection. “Binary Lovers” and “A German Lunatic on Top of the CPR Building” are good examples. Both are full of ideas about point of view and about the use of non-fictional material in fiction and about the value of science and of literary criticism, but the basic stories, about seduction and the war mentality, are very quickly lost and forgotten.

Like other post-modernists, Arnason is concerned that his reader think about what fiction means. He constantly refers to “truth” in a very self-conscious manner, as in the narrator’s comments in “Morning Letter”: “I warn you that I intend to lie to you, that I am incapable of telling you the truth, even when I know it.” The speaker is usually called Arnason or David, even when he seems quite different from the author, again confusing our old pre-modern assurances.

In general, Arnason’s chosen voice in his more straightforward pieces tends to be a crude, simple, even simplistic, rural prairie tone, something like that affected by Ken Mitchell’s stories of Saskatchewan. I find Arnason most compelling, however, when he gets away from either these Manitoba good-ol’-boys or the post-modernist innovations. This is in “The Sunfish” and “The Event.” Both seem to have been taken from the folklore of Manitoba’s Icelandic communities. I have no idea whether they are actually from oral tradition but they have a lovely feel of the community. And at the end of “The Sunfish,” Arnason’s narrator is able to play with the meaning of truth in an enjoyable and meaningful way — not simply as a post-modernist intrusion.

The title of the book refers to the opening story, a quite unsatisfactory combination of post-modernist snippet-theory and that simple rural diction. A better representation of Arnason’s talents lies in the jacket illustration, which shows the Icelandic fisherman confronting the sunfish. An accurate judgment on the book must combine title and cover, but Arnason’s talent is best represented by the picture. I hope in future Arnason will give us more sunfish, more stories — and less advice.