The Girl with the Full Figure is Your Daughter
By Oscar Martens
Turnstone, 152 pages, $16.95
A gradual shift of responsibility occurs in every family: Grown children face the knowledge that mum and dad need increasingly more attention than they give, or in some families, far more than they ever gave.
B.C. writer Oscar Martens offers a stark case in point with the title story of this debut collection. Tailed around a chaotic apartment by her ornery father, a woman does her round of reverse parenting. If dad isn't stark naked when she arrives, he usually is by the time she's put the groceries away. Cleaning up mouldy dishes and soiled underwear, she orders him to get dressed and keep his distance. Heading home on a crosstown bus, she avoids strangers' eyes. "Everybody is looking at me because they all know how dirty and useless I am." Gradually, family demons are revealed.
In Glue,a husband breaks into his ex-wife's home and renders every loose object immovable with industrial adhesive. Drawers are glued shut, plates bonded to tabletops, disks to drives, a cassette to the innards of the VCR. Later that day, he teaches his teenage son the finer points of ironing shirts, then sends him home to mother, and the glued-up household, with these parting words. "I did some things to your house. Sorry." Left alone with his guilt, he broods, "I've . . . lost a war to a woman who can't even iron."
It's not easy to make a fictional character both baffling and convincing. This story does it, and feels like a glimpse into a very real and dangerously conflicted personality. Elegy uses a teenager's body concealed in brush by a highway as a narrative lens trained on the drivers who pass it. Kari's corpse becomes our protagonist, and its relationship to the living a gruesome commentary on how rarely proximity translates into connection. The greatest intimacy here is that of the insects and birds scavenging on Kari's body. Death is a release from all that's human. "Kari's retinas face the northeast quarter of the sky," obstructed "only by the phone lines that run along the road."
At their best, these stories are formally innovative, disquieting and darkly incisive. Others feel like impulsive experiments that fizzle. In one, Carl is dumped by his girlfriend and dreams of being Karl, a German U-boat captain. It's a germ of an idea that fails to sprout. The same goes for a tale of antagonistic students sharing an apartment. Each is named for his place of origin: Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Winnipeg. Sidebars in small print describe the students' dreams. The whole feels like an ill-conceived burlesque of multiculturalism.
Then Genetic Attraction examines abusive love with hard-hitting precision. A cold-hearted mother and needy adult son are captured in the final, searing stages of their estranged relationship. Fuelled by sharp characterizations, the emotional punch of this one lingers on in the mind.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.
