Best Canadian Stories 2018

  BEST CANADIAN STORIES 2018

  BEST

  CANADIAN

  STORIES

  2018

  RUSSELL SMITH

  EDITOR

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ON

  Copyright © Biblioasis, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-1-77196-251-3 (Hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-77196-249-0 (Trade Paper)

  ISBN 978-1-77196-250-6 (eBook)

  ISSN 0703-9476

  Edited by Russell Smith

  Copy-edited by James Grainger

  Typeset by Ellie Hastings

  Cover Design by Chris Andrechek

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Introduction

  Russell Smith

  In December 2017 the New Yorker published a short story, clearly marked “fiction,” called “Cat Person,” by Kristen Roupenian. It was a clever and elegant little story, reminiscent in theme at least of Alice Munro. It’s in the third person. A young woman has a disappointing sexual encounter with an older man. She then tries to avoid the man, who is first crushed and then nasty. It ends with a string of texts from him that begin with pleading and end with insult. The last text—and the last line of the story—is “Whore.”

  It’s a good story because it’s honest: both characters are venal and desperate in one way or another, just as most of us are. The girl’s motivation is convincingly complicated and needy. But it is about more than those two individuals: it also describes a moment in a culture, a contemporary moment; it documents liberated sexuality and its discontents on a university campus; it exemplifies precarious labour; it illustrates power dynamics and a kind of generalized loneliness in an age of digitally-assisted sexual opportunity; and finally it situates all this in a real and textured college town and a Honda Civic with candy wrappers in the cup holders. This is what art does best: it situates the political in the body and the landscape. In this it rises above argument.

  The piece came out, of course, at the height of #metoo in the United Sates and Canada. It appeared at a time of multiple essays and confessional accounts of bad dates, in thousands of blogs and print magazines. Because of this simultaneity, it circulated very quickly online, and then a strange thing happened. People on the Internet started arguing with it. First they were angry with the man in the story and sympathetic to the woman, then there was a backlash and conservatives wrote that she was embarrassingly narcissistic and that this was typical of contemporary misandry… It became rapidly clear that many people who read this story around the world did not know that it was a piece of fiction. Because of the way they had received it—as a link in a tweet or an email, as part of the news/opinion flow—they had missed its label. It was being judged as another confessional essay, and in that genre the author’s moral failings are quite simply a flaw.

  My friend A. is an intersectionalist activist who campaigns for gay and trans rights. She does not read fiction because she imagines it will be too earnest for her. She told me that when her gay and trans friends recommend fiction to her it is sci-fi with strong female characters of colour in it. She said that sounds like church. Anyway, A. was sent a link to “Cat Person” and read it because she thought, like so many, that it was a true story, meant as some kind of feminist argument. She was a little startled by its confessions of narcissism, but strangely, she enjoyed it. She asked me if I had read it. I told her excitedly it was a piece of fiction.

  See, I said, what I mean about fiction? You might like it.

  Huh, she answered. It was true that she never imagined fiction reading like that. At least, she said, it wasn’t literary fiction. God save us from that.

  I explained with some alarm that it was in fact literary fiction; that this was exactly and typically what we meant by this phrase. In fact, I might have added, I wonder how excited the fans of “Cat Person” are going to be when they discover Alice Munro, who has been writing variations of that same story since about 1965. She won the Nobel Prize, which is, you know, pretty literary.

  Huh, said A. She is still not convinced, I think. I think she is still pretty sure that literary fiction must be a multi-generational family saga.

  We all read, now, dozens of news stories, personal stories, arguments and anecdotes every day on our screens, and whether they be Facebook updates or essays, they all claim to be true stories. Fiction has always been good at seeming like a true story too. Often it is. These things are hard to separate.

  Autobiographical fiction has always been written. Whole university courses teach “creative non-fiction” that encourage reporters to explore the novelist’s bag of tricks. “Autofiction,” a variant of memoir that takes the form of a novel and does not promise exact truth as a memoir would, has further confused our definitions.

  In light of these borrowings, many enlightened people claim that further taxonomy would be useless and unproductive. It absolutely doesn’t matter if a piece is true or not; it should be judged by the same esthetic or moral standards.

  I think that the “Cat Person” fallout shows us the limitations of such willful blindness. When an entire intellectual culture is immersed in the didactic, it loses its ability to see that which is not didactic. Art has a role that polemic does not. There is a value to being removed from one’s ideological position for a moment of escape into the nearly-real.

  Canada this past year has seen a number of scandals at universities where creative writing is taught, involving several cases of teachers accused of sexually harassing students. This led to a number of attacks on something called “Canlit,” a thing never defined but always held to be corrupt, racist, colonialist and violent to women. It turned out that what most essays meant by Canlit was the university system (both creative writing programs and academic study of literature as produced by English departments). Canadian literature itself—that is, the corpus—was not mentioned so much.

  When literature itself—as opposed to Twitter feeds or panel discussions—was criticized (and this was extremely rare), it was not hard to find evidence of dangerous sexism in it. Especially in the fiction of Margaret Atwood, who took the wrong side in an internecine political battle regarding the human-resources regulations surrounding a faculty firing.

  I remember reading one long blog post, written by a university instructor of geography who had taken a loud role in the controversy, analyzing characterization in Atwood’s 1988 novel Cat’s Eye. This essay triumphantly pointed out that the women in the story were unkind to each other.

  This novel, you will recall, is a bleak and melancholic book. In it, girls and women are indeed very unkind to each other. A couple of young women at an art college have
sex with a forlorn male professor. He behaves badly but he is also manipulated. He is in part a pawn in the battle between the girls. The geography instructor pointed out that Atwood’s professor was not sufficiently condemned, and the women were too complicit in his crimes to be believable. This demonstrated Atwood had never sufficiently understood or taken seriously the violence inflicted on women by their art teachers. Here was Atwood blaming the victims just as the patriarchy does. This was reflective generally of Atwood’s views about women, which were fundamentally unprogressive.

  The point was admittedly to prove that Atwood was a bad feminist rather than a bad writer, but I doubt this difference was comprehensible to this critic.

  I single out this marginal bit of writing because it is actually not so marginal—it is entirely typical of contemporary intellectual approaches to fiction. This post was widely praised by many intellectuals, including by some actual fiction writers who should have known better. It displayed an absolute lack of understanding of what fiction attempts to do and even a lack of interest in trying to understand what fiction might accomplish. This approach is the one that sees “Cat Person” as a conservative critique of young women or as a misandrist humiliation of men.

  Just today I read a short story by Zadie Smith, a satirical piece about a university environment. The narrator is reprimanded by her friend for enjoying an old movie about bad people. The narrator confesses, “I instinctively sympathize with the guilty. That’s my guilty secret.”

  She can say that—this is a piece of fiction.

  If fiction does anything at all, it enables us to sympathize with the guilty.

  My predecessor in editing this series, John Metcalf, once described listening to a group of English teachers attempting to explain a Hemingway short story as being like “watching a group of frowning chimps trying to extract a peanut from a medicine bottle.” This scene was from fifty years ago. I thought of exactly that line when reading the geography instructor trying to penetrate Atwood’s gimlet-eyed novel. Nothing has changed.

  Indeed, the way we communicate now has if anything deepened this misunderstanding of ways in which fiction can excite. The “Cat Person” incident demonstrated that, in a textual universe largely constituted of claim and counter-claim, a made-up story that represents human failings as complicated and possibly even alluring is hard for people to assimilate. People don’t really get what fiction is for.

  What is it for then?

  I can’t answer that exactly but I can give you the following stories.

  They are disparate in style and setting, but they are all about flawed and guilty people, and they are all blindingly honest about these imperfections. They are equally honest about the petty, the triumphant and the disastrous. They are not trying to convince you of the superiority or inferiority of one gender or another. You are reading them to imagine yourself in a real situation. There is nothing, I think, in any of these situations that one can disagree with. One cannot disagree with a situation.

  Here is an example of this terrible unflinchingness: in Deirdre Simon Dore’s story “Your Own Lucky Stars,” a boy’s foster mother rereads, while cleaning up his room, witty letters she wrote to him while he was in an institution. Her realization of what effect her letters had on the troubled boy comes just as the reader’s does, and just as the shocking truth of what has happened to the boy is revealed. This is a moment of pure collective guilt—and, miraculously, sympathy for the haunted protagonist. Here is the pain of guilt in all its complexity. It is a situation, not an argument. It all happens in silence, in an attic.

  Because of internet publishing, there were more stories available for me to read this year than there have been to my predecessors. I read all the online litmags as well as the print ones, and I solicited unpublished stories from writing communities. I have attempted to group here some representatives of a few different formal trends from these sources.

  Many small magazines, particularly online ones, which I find tend to appeal to younger writers, have been publishing very short pieces that straddle the line between poetry and prose. This preferred length may well reflect habits of communication that come from writing for social media and websites. The form demands economy and focus. There are two beautiful examples of it here: Tom Thor Buchanan’s “A Dozen Stomachs” (the first story, I think, to appear in this anthology written from the point of view of a human stomach) and Reg Johanson’s “a titan bearing many a legitimate grievance,” a prose poem whose disjointed and associative style miraculously sums up a life of error and love.

  The influence of technology on our writing must be acknowledged, which is why Lynn Coady’s “Someone Is Recording” is so timely. It consists in its entirety of one side of an email exchange. The larger story, clearly exploding in real space outside these emails, can be surmised.

  To further accept the technological creep into literature, I include here an extraordinary experiment: a story by Stephen Marche (“Twinkle, Twinkle”) that was written with the assistance of a story-generating algorithm. This is almost certainly the first AI story included in Best Canadian Stories. I have included with the story the author’s notes on its creation (and his resistance to the machinery), as I think its genesis is actually what the story is about. This is both story and meta-story.

  In recent years there has been much discussion of the rising status of genre fiction, especially since so many Canadian novelists have branched into thrillers and paranormal stories. However, fantasy and speculative fiction were hardly at all represented in short fiction in our journals last year. Canadian fiction still tends to focus on the domestic and the relational, and it is just as hard as it ever was to make this field of activity exciting.

  Enter Alicia Elliott, whose story “Tracks” takes a family situation—a tense funeral—and teasingly—like a vice slowly gripping—reveals the guilty secret that animates it, turns this domestic tension into a dark and beautiful drama. Here again a protagonist’s shame make her no less compelling a human—and the thrill of this story’s turn is that it hints at an eroticism that exists outside the page.

  The family is also the setting of Brad Hartle’s unease-stirring drama “For What You Are About To Do,” in which a well-intentioned father, sandwiched between a criminal son and criminal father of his own, must somehow assuage his stress. This is a highly topical story. My favourite lines in it: “Mom’s front window is broken and jagged. The boy gets to his feet and bolts for his car. As the recognition of what he’s done comes to me, so does the urge to hurt him.”

  Kathy Page’s delicate and heartbreaking “Inches” is one of only two stories here set in a previous decade, but it so finely prefigures the sexual revolution to come it is in a sense about the contemporary. Again, here the sadness of an individual family is the product of a vast societal transition; Page’s skill is in how she locates this so minutely in the personal.

  Has the Canadian short story evolved? I was excited to find so many stories, like this, about the larger mechanisms of society: about our contemporary workplaces and how they function (as important, I think, as how we function in them). In Michael Lapointe’s creepily convincing “Candidate,” a political consultant’s life story underpins—and in a sense explains—new forms of populist extremism. In Amy Jones’s mysterious “Gravity,” a bland call centre becomes the site of an awkward young man’s unexplained slips into an alternate reality.

  And in Bill Gaston’s gripping “Kiint,” there is no way we can understand what is really going on until we understand exactly how a fish farm in British Columbia operates. This too is a story about large political forces, but seen from inside a highly idiosyncratic individual body.

  There are three stories here about educational workplaces: the Lynn Coady I have mentioned, Shashi Bhat’s “Food for Nought,” in which a schoolteacher makes a mistake that makes her doubt her calling, and Liz Harmer’s “Never Prosper,” a brilliant dance around
the minds of brilliant people, complete with philosophy jokes. Honestly I have always wondered why we have had so much published fiction about the unemployed and illiterate in this highly educated nation. Surely most Canadians have spent at least half their lives in classrooms? I am actually surprised we don’t have a named genre for fiction that deals with graduate students pretending to be fishermen. I would rather publish stories that honestly show what a large section of the readership of this kind of book actually does for a living.

  A much more rare but still very Canadian kind of job—that of hockey enforcer—comes in for some heart-wrenching existential analysis by David Huebert in “Six Six Two Fifty,” in which a violent loser of a protagonist is as articulate as any philosophy prof. This man knows that, “There are few things as lovely as the sight of blood pooling on white ice. No red has ever seemed more red—like a rose blooming out of a snowbank.”

  And this ultimately is where we always return, regardless of subject or setting: to the extraordinary power of the surprising sentence.

  Alex Pugsley’s reminiscence of middle-class intrigue among the prominent families of Halifax in the 1970s, is spoken in an almost Proustian voice, whose nineteenth-century inflections enable him to pinpoint the exact commotions in inarticulate childhood. A story whose first paragraph contains a spoiler like “But the final ruination of the family was set in motion years before, on the day I met Cyrus Mair, when his father’s body was found floating in Halifax harbour, on this side of McNab’s Island, the first in a series of bizarre events that would conclude with a house fire on the snowiest night in a century”—well, you know this story will be told with a certain confidence.

  This is the confidence with which Lisa Moore recounts the dark events of “Vision”—a small town pervasively shaded with menace, a fish plant that burns down, a threatening stranger, all seen through the shade of a failed marriage—this confidence almost indescribable except through quoting her carefully fragmented perceptions—images like light broken by a prism. “A marriage is this: Put the glasses with the glasses, put the cups with the cups. Every morning you do this and I come down. The cups and the glasses.” Later, on driving: “The wiper with the rubber flange torn away from the metal arm so that the strip of rubber wiggles over the glass like a maddened eel. The metal arm scratching an arc in the glass.” The rhythm of those sentences is itself the scratching of an arc in glass.