On Earth as It Is

Lawrence Mathews is an associate professor of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

If a young Wallace Stevens were to have written fiction in Canada in
this decade, he might well have produced a volume like this one.
That’s the best I can do to suggest both the scope and distinctiveness
of Steven Heighton’s enterprise in On Earth as It Is, whose title
itself has a Stevens-like resonance. The 11 stories are varied in terms
of character, setting, and length, but the book’s coherence comes from
a clear-sighted romanticism whose strong elegiac tendency is balanced by
a celebration of life’s perishable sweetnesses.

Many characters die, or are about to die. Couples make love for the
last time (the premise of one of the longer stories). Relationships
(lovers, family) are recalled and re-(or de-)constructed. Names are
often theme-laden (Tris, Laurel, Downing, April), as are the
extra-Canadian settings (Patmos, Nepal). But Heighton, like Stevens,
knows that the worst poverty is to live in a world that is not physical.
Open this book to any page and you’ll find the minute particulars of
life on this planet rendered with imaginative accuracy, including (an
acid test, surely) the contents of a kitchen sink: “Me pulls the plug
... A spattered, sudsy jumble of cutlery breaks surface, bones on the
floor of a drained lake.”

If there’s a badly written sentence anywhere in this volume, I missed
it. (One would expect no less from a book “readied for the press” by
John Metcalf.) There is, however, one significant weakness, an
occasional ponderousness in the narration. Sometimes a thick piling-on
of detail tempts the reader to skip or skim paragraphs and pages; one or
two stories might have been omitted.

On the other hand, the book’s ambitious quality is best illustrated
by the near-novella “Translations of April,” a writer’s tribute to
a dead muse-figure. The necessary failure of their relationship provides
the context for a series of narrative meditations whose burden of high
seriousness blends seamlessly with the human situations being explored.
I hope that Heighton will continue to heed the command of its last word:
“Dance!”