I can’t get over the appropriateness of the book’s title. The men in this book—and the book is mostly about men, a thing that is more rare in my reading than you might think—are often violent, sometimes intensely so. What keeps them from becoming clichés is that their violence and brutality often shocks them more than the reader. It’s not a callous, unthinking brutality. It’s a brutality laced with guilt and fear and shame, with the knowledge of having failed, without always knowing why or how. There were times when I felt I’d read these stories before. Given how many writers cut their teeth on the form, I know, as a writer, that it’s certainly quite difficult to feel like you’re creating anything new. With a few of these stories, particularly the ones about childhood, like “The Helmet”, I get a palpable sense of Sellyn struggling to overcome the sheer volume of finely-detailed short fiction. He’s not always successful, but usually he is.
A number of stories struck me as wholly unique and invigorating (at least, for Canadian short fiction; I don’t read so much from the US or the UK), but one in particular, “A Routine to These Things” struck a pretty heavy emotional chord somewhere inside my soul. I was reading this book last night on the Spadina streetcar heading north. The ambient temperature outside wasn’t that bad, really, but the wind chill was insane and so despite the lateness of the hour and our distance from the clubs and bars the cabin was crammed full of bundled, half-drunk travelers. I’m not claustrophobic, but I tried to convince myself that the crush of humanity, the closeness and confinement, had an impact on what happened. I had an anxiety attack reading a short story. My chest tightened, my attention wandered, I had trouble keeping my breathing steady and calm. I had to put the story aside, in fact, and finish it when I got home. Where it happened again, the privacy of my living room. The story is about a married couple who are trying to reconcile after a four-month trial separation. It’s written from the husband’s point of view, but somehow we’re able to sense the dichotomy of first causes; the husband knows why things soured, the wife believes she knows, but disagrees. With their sex-life waning (as it often does in long-term relationships, and they have a child so obviously that makes things difficult, if only for logistical reasons), they make the mistake of allowing one of their close friends to talk them into going to a swinger’s party. I’m not a swinger, have no interest in swinging at all, but even I know that to bring another person—two other people in this instance—into your marriage is not the way to solve problems. If it’s something that interests you, it’s something you should do only when the relationship is in a place of strength. Anything else is begging for trouble. And trouble is what happens. The husband never really wants to go through with it, but is cowed by his wife’s enthusiasm and their friend’s rush to thrust them into the world (at the party he imagines, maybe, that the friend is hostile towards him). The experience is a failure for him, a night of shame and guilt and tears, and he falls asleep near the pool, his entry into the swinging lifestyle unconsummated. We never find out for sure what the wife does with the creepy German man she’s paired up with, but the fact that she only emerges from her designated room in the morning speaks volumes. For the wife, the problems that follow, her eventually falling out of love, seem to stem from the husband’s jealousy, but it’s not a jealousy entirely without cause. He feels guilty and ashamed (there’s those two feelings again; they crop up like weeds in this book) for not stopping things before his wife went and slept with another man, and he feels like a fool for relying on her sense of disquiet, on hoping that she would be as nervous as he was and reconsider. He might have been able to put that aside, I think, had he not actually tried to stop it, minutes before partners were assigned, and been ignored. The heartbreak that follows is like a juggernaut, not in the least because he refuses to place all the blame on his wife for what happens, while she seems unwilling to accept any of it. What struck me about this story—almost literally struck me, right there on the streetcar—was not the plot or the subject matter. I’ve read stories like this before, although normally with the gender roles reversed. It was the prose that did it for me. It’s straightforward, simple and plain, but full of depth. Many writers, myself included, would have been hard-pressed to resist the temptation to go overboard, to give a manic edge to the melancholy, but the writing in this story is just as much about the need for restraint as the story itself is. I’m tempted to say that Sellyn’s prose is artless, but it isn’t; merely guileless, which is a far better thing.
Next: Lost Girls and Love Hotels, by Chatherine Hanrahan.
