Let Me Be the One

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

Like the English playwright Alan Bennett, dubbed “the poet of
embarrassment” by one critic, Elisabeth Harvor is concerned with the
minor but often soul-destroying slights and humiliations that inform
daily existence. In “There Goes the Groom,” one of eight stories in
this collection, a teenager informs his soon-to-be-divorced mother, “I
consider you a total failure as a human being.” In other stories, an
insecure adolescent is dismissed as “the plain type” by her adored
brother, a woman perceives contempt and mockery in a cashier’s smile,
and a visiting poet experiences the ultimate classroom nightmare when
all but three students walk out on her.

Bennett’s characters make frequent use of self-deception to bypass
the psychic injuries wrought by embarrassment. The lonely and alienated
heroines who populate Harvor’s intricate and quietly devastating
stories are more likely to linger over their mortification, to anatomize
it with a tenacity bordering on masochism. Dreamy, passive,
hypersensitive, and painfully self-conscious, they simultaneously engage
our sympathies and try our patience. For them, as for Bennett’s
“Talking Heads,” life is lived most fully in the imagination,
however dark.