Choose Me

Geoff Hamilton, a former columnist for the Queen’s Journal, is a
freelance editor and writer living in Thunder Bay.

Evelyn Lau’s seventh book is a collection of stories dealing with
romantic relationships between young women and older men. Although each
of the stories introduces a new couple, there is a pattern: after first
falling for the alluring patriarchs (often married or otherwise
prohibited), the women grow very tired and very critical of them.

In the first story, “Family,” twentysomething Zoe house-sits for
Douglas, the older, married man she is seeing. In her time alone, Zoe
contemplates her attraction to her forbidden lover and speculates about
the state of his marriage. When the family returns, the pair stay up
late and engage in some covert lovemaking. When are interrupted (though
not discovered) by Ellen, the obtruding wife, Zoe is struck not by moral
qualms but by the suspicion that she wants to play the role of child
rather than wife. The other young women in the collection are tormented
by a similar lingering adolescent angst. The nature of love is the
obsessive question; the suspicion that it is nothing more than a doomed
father/daughter pas de deux.

Lau’s exploration of the pitfalls of intergenerational relationships
grows a little monotonous by the end, but at her best she is a genuine
storyteller with a strong sense of dramatic timing. “The Outing,”
which deals with a trip made by a businessman and a prostitute to a
swinger’s club, is remarkable for its deft ascent to climax, the
climax being, as so often in Lau, a mix of awe and revulsion. Less
successful, but more representative, is “Blue Skies,” in which a
subtly vicious, creepily vapid young woman allows her older, failing
lover to kill himself. Here as elsewhere, juvenile pathos seems to
belong to the implied author as much as to the protagonist. A wider,
wiser purview, one sympathetic even to the calamity of wrinkled skin and
the trials of dealing with callous youth, would make for better reading.