Sophie has given herself the fortieth birthday gift of a six-week drawing course in Paris. “The Other Canadian” opens as she gazes around a tiny attic room, trying to get over the constant din of traffic in the boulevard below. During her stay she will once visit a sidewalk café, an emblem of her lifelong dream of studying art in the City of Lights, and be served bad wine by a rude waiter. She will look at the Seine and see the creek behind her suburban home, and meet Miles, a young Montreal artist who will remind her of her husband. Images and moments run through Alice Zorn’s stories, smearing together the foreign and familiar; past and present; what we expect, what we wish for, what we get.
There is a young woman recalling a brutal childhood and a young man building a home for himself, whose pasts collide in a startling moment over a kitchen table. An artist who paints nudes, exploring the details of healthy bodies as his own is being eaten by disease. A nurse ethically tormented by the theft of morphine by a colleague she is desperate to befriend. Throughout, Zorn maintains a strongly consistent voice. She speaks from the perspectives of both genders and various “orientations”, with the confused uncertainty of the young and the resigned wisdom of the aged. She depicts the assurance of the connected and the frailty of isolation not merely with empathy, but as if she had been each of these people. The result is like the performance of a musician who plays jazz and bluegrass and European folksongs, all in an identifiable and personal style.
These unifying threads are not limited to tone: the central character in “Black Peter 1990” reappears as a minor one in “Glass on Glass”; the troubled son of a dying woman in “That Good Night” is the same painter, now dying himself, in “Nude on Velvet”. So our vision of a part of these lives in one story brings an altered and enlarged perspective to our reading of the next. Her characters, disparate as they are, wear similar clothes: all are in some way shaped by their attachment to, or participation in, history, or art, architecture or archeology.
Underneath runs a steady and unnerving hum – like “hangover guilt” – there is a pervasive sense that something important has been forgotten or that, ill-remembered, an unfortunate action has been taken or unfortunately not taken. This melding of familiarity and uneasiness effectively binds the stories together and engages the reader.
There is little in any of these stories that should be ignored or discarded; details come to us as they do in life, not strictly necessary to our understanding, but in some way enriching to it. We enter these small worlds and the lives of these others as we do our own: everything noticed, even peripherally, has its effect. A tree may be passed unremarked, but still it casts a shadow.
Neil MacRae is a poet and musician recently moved to Montreal.
