Raw Material

Susan Manningham teaches sociology at Queen’s University in Kingston.

In these stories, the nuclear-family landscape is rendered unfamiliar
through the author’s wry, postmodern fictions. Her comic and absurdist
vision disrupts our normal categories of understanding and perception to
expose both the violence and the apathy of the modern world. Her prose
is a collage of clichés, television ads, media jargon, and inverted
reality presented in a normal, if disjointed, voice. This does not make
for easy reading, but it accurately reflects Farrant’s belief that
contemporary society can be rendered only in fragments.

Farrant, it has been suggested, follows in the tradition of Donald
Barthelme, the American postmodern novelist and short-story writer.
Certainly, both seem wedded to emphatic self-referentiality, profound
relativism and uncertainty, extreme irony, and a tendency toward
fragmentation, but Farrant’s voice is very much her own. Her stories
resonate with the unexpected and the incongruous. A woman keeps in a
cage her raw material for story writing—her husband; another tends a
husband who has retired permanently to the walk-in bedroom closet,
soothing him with memorized jingles from television commercials. Through
the contradictions and paradoxes of her narrative line and her emphasis
on the discontinuity of time and space, Farrant reveals far more of the
complexity of our brave new world and its inhabitants than many a writer
whose style is initially more familiar and comforting.