Aquarium

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

This finely crafted collection of stories won for its Toronto-based
author the 1999 Danuta Gleed award. Barnes’s strengths in the 14
stories (many of which previously appeared in literary journals) lie in
the clarity of his vision, particularly in his ability to make small
details representative of larger truths.

Most of the stories have to do with relationships. In the title story,
two people with lupus meet at a support group and start an affair—a
relationship stimulated by their shared interest in tropical fish. In
“Hymen’s Fool,” a middle-aged woman is asked to be the maid of
honor at the wedding of a young colleague. “It was the tension that
did it,” she thinks when the bride-to-be begins to have the inevitable
doubts. “Turning yourself into a guided missile, coil by spring by
hard metal casing, when every sign told you that the target wasn’t
worth hitting, wasn’t worth aiming the whole arsenal at, anyway.”

A few stories exhibit the author’s poetic sensibility (his poetry
collection, Calm Jazz Sea, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert
Memorial Award in 1996). “The Leaf Man” is a one-page prose poem, at
once stark and evanescent: “The angle of his porkpie hat is a
constant. His clothes the colour of mushrooms, pants, windbreaker. His
face … looked like one of those dried apple faces, cracking as it
shrank.”

Mike Barnes is a writer to watch. His first short-story collection is
highly recommended.