Harmless Victories

Boyd Holmes is a librarian in Toronto.

These stories—all plotless, poetic, and carefully crafted—faintly
echo those of Leon Rooke, Joseph Brodkey, and Raymond Carver. (Indeed,
in an apparent homage to Carver, the seven-page story “Exit Crow”
mentions him, by name, nine times.) But Harding’s stories are much
thinner than Carver’s; moreover, they’re pretentious and
overwrought: “I liked the easy regularity, living by weather and sea,
living by skin with the wind on the back of your neck, a dollop of green
sea coming up over the rail and running aft as she rolled. Coffee and
the smile of the boat as she worked on ahead, shoulders of waves
carrying her, surfing ten tons, a hundred feet of wood and steel ...
skin of your neck for the wind, skin of your feet for the feel of the
deck, skin of your sides as you press, wedge, fit into the boat to be
steady” (author’s ellipsis). In his 1939 review of the French
translation of the first version of Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair,
Jean-Paul Sartre complained that Nabokov “never writes without seeing
himself write, as others listen to themselves speak.” Such is the case
with Harding: his prose is excessively self-conscious, and thus tiresome
to read, a grind. His obvious love of English is admirable, but this
collection is as memorable as a good dessert.