Brett Josef Grubisic Reviews:

Jen Currin, Disembark, House of Anansi, 2024
Myriam Lacroix, How It Works Out, Doubleday Canada, 2024

In story collections by Jen Currin and Myriam Lacroix, relationships take pride of place. They’re bumpy, rocky, unpredictable and volatile; they endure despite the odds or flame out in a moment or subside as time inevitably passes; they even involve different species and planes of existence.
Nimble, irreverent storytellers, Currin and Lacroix deliver results that are delightful and artful and clever, books containing hours of inventive, guffaw-worthy fun.

Both collections are showcases for authors with something to say about infinite possibilities about the short story form and with points to raise (some jaded, some despairing, many of them plain funny in a blackly humorous kind of way) about what beings reveal via their pairings.  

In the case of Currin, I thought I was prepared. I’d read Hider/Seeker, Currin’s debut story collection, and expected spare and pensive accounts of urbanites on quests—seekers hopeful to find peace or a eureka that might help free them from the burdens of an unfortunate past or present. 

While the dozen stories of Disembark do display some continuity, they’re looser. A pleasing volubility replaces the former concision. The narrators appear freer, which can also mean less in control, and plights, while undeniable, range from impossible (dead romance, dead-end job) to fantastical. Comic wit animates them too, often so. 

Still, relationships are Currin’s forte. They are front and centre in ‘My Tumour,’ which traces a fragile and distant relationship between a sister and brother whose adult thoughts wind back to ‘the dreary house, the smell of mildew and gin, their mother’s slurred stories dragging the day out until it blurred into evening.’ Interplay within a newly formed family informs ‘Banshee,’ where the narrator and her wife Matilde—already knee-deep in a relationship slump—awaken to find a bald, wizened woman, ‘a little over five feet tall, a lumpy figure with large breasts in a black robe,’ humming in their apartment. She’s a banshee. Ordinarily a harbinger of death, this contemporary version avidly smokes marijuana and dresses in a leopard print minidress. As the world burns—‘it was hot and getting hotter’—the narrator reflects on apocalyptic news and respite from it. 

Set in Vancouver during ‘the era of answering machines,’ ‘Sister’ captures episodes from the tangled romance of Elise and Marin, which is tension-ridden and worsened when a friend—a source of jealousy—visits with her boyfriend. When the evening together goes off the rails and the friendship crumbles soon after, Marin seeks to help her girlfriend with one of the healing crystals Elise adores. Marin’s inability to locate it speaks volumes.

In ‘The Golden Triangle,’ Max recalls herself decades ago. She was 20 then and resided in Denver, where she felt unencumbered but also far less settled. ‘There’s always some compromise,’ she remarks. Max remembers Del, a free-spirited crush who moved to New York City following their youthful benders that starred romances, nightlife and intoxicants. Relatively comfortable in routine in the present day, Max and her partner witness what could have been via Del’s postcards, which reveal her enchantment with the constant rush of people and the bars open till all hours. 

‘Joey, When She Knew Him’ glances back at youth too, when Sid and Joey worked together at Pets ‘R Us and scrimped for hairspray and black eyeliner. Now going by Richard, Joey has success and status that has eluded Sid. Other pieces, such as ‘The Knife,’ ‘The Charismacist’ and ‘Dark and Rainy,’ revisit scenes from the past. They conclude with ambivalence: there’s a lesson of some kind to learn, but its exact nature is far from plain. 

In Disembark adulthood is a quandary too. Set ‘in these challenging times,’ ‘The Dean Regrets’ anatomizes the befuddled day of Laurel, an adjunct professor whose colleague advises her to ‘lie lie lie. And smile smile smile.’ Informed by a dean that ‘there’s going to be some job loss….I mean, work reduction,’ Laurel intuits that all the correct behaviour in the world is not going to secure her position. Near the start of the title story, Jolene’s mother offers her a cigarette on a ferry. She explains, ‘Sometimes people take it up here. It’s something to do.’ Jolene soon meets Tanvir Singh, Dean of Energetic Arts at New Harvard. He asks, ‘Do you remember how you got in the water?’ Turns out, the ferry is the Stygian sort, and Jolene has arrived in an afterlife after drowning. Her guides include her mother, who asks, ‘Honey, why did it get so bad after I left?’ Serious but quick and funny in an absurd way, ‘Disembark’ represents Currin’s essence: serious-minded and probing but not averse to a well-timed joke or a far-fetched scenario to examine in detail.

The gist of How It Works Out is a trick—and, whoa, it’s a captivating one—that starts at the dedication: ‘To Allison, I figured it out. I know how it works out.’ In the next eight stories, each one featuring Myriam and Allison, Lacroix’s protagonists are parents, celebrities, athletes, clowns, authors, entrepreneurs, cannibals, household pets and the subject of a true-crime movie.  

Coupledom is a through line in Lacroix’s collection, but whatever It might be (life, love, a romantic relationship never without hiccups, the story collection itself), It works out in ways the reader cannot begin to fathom. This is a good—and highly amusing—thing, a terrific premise.

For instance, ‘Love Bun,’ the second story, introduces Myriam, who is writing her thesis on trauma in the works of realist writers, and Allison, a call centre worker with hopes of being a pop musician. Out skating, Myriam hip checks a kid to protect Allison, whose index finger is nevertheless severed. Myriam eats it. Banned from UBC ‘for laziness and generally making other students uneasy,’ Myriam catches Allison in a nursery, where she’s chewed two toes off their infant. Other children (Kale, Framboise) are eyed as assets, flesh for the taking, and a boon to their relationship: ‘It was potent stuff. A few scrapings of a knee and we’d rise astral through the ceiling, make love all night among the constellations.’ The duo wind up buying a sheep farm. Lacroix is not a moralist. 

By ‘The Feature,’ the final story, Myriam and Allison are the subject of Vancouver-shot Love Bun, where FF (for ‘face de foetus’), an aspiring actress from small town Quebec, is cast as Myriam, ‘a mentally unwell lesbian’ who develops ‘an addiction to her lover’s flesh, a sort of gore-camp allegory for sapphic passion, or, as the synopsis put it, What girls get up to when the boys aren’t around.’ Naturally, FF’s relationship with Karla S., who’s playing Allison, gets complicated.

A page before ‘The Feature,’ ‘Anthropocene’ comes to a spectacular close. In it, Allison, a newly appointed Climate Ambassador at Glacier Air, a formerly bush league air conditioning company in Vancouver and now ‘one of the highest-grossing corporations in North America,’ has just been turfed by Myriam, the company’s obnoxious and acid-tongued CEO, who’s a ‘total slut for power’ and sexual submissive.  

Myriam meets Claire, Allison’s double, in ‘Love and the Dark,’ where attempts to become her ‘best self’ produce iffy results. Allison, a ‘minor celesbian’ in ‘The Sequel,’ tells a tale as old as time: although sick of the socially mediated narcissism of her partner Myriam (who eventually dies ‘a tragic death after eating a contaminated salad’ in Italy), Allison nevertheless agrees to a wedding/media tour that will help revive their fading stardom—attained a decade earlier with the publication of their bestselling book, How It Works Out: Building a Healthy Lesbian Relationship in the Patriarchy. 

Tired of being ‘the wrong-for-each-other couple’ in ‘How It Works Out’ Myriam and Allison trade arguments for long-distance running. Eventually an ‘entity, a large mass of muscle made up of two lady-shaped lobes,’ they attain a kind of perfection that’s predicated on demolishing their half-marathon competitors. In the objectively shortest and arguably oddest piece, ‘Mantis,’ Allison has a tail and Myriam calls a terrarium home; one’s a dog, the other’s an insect.

With gags and satiric impulses and a well-honed sense of ridiculousness, Lacroix could do stand-up. With Myriam and Allison, whether squabbling celebrities or pets stuck at home, she shows herself as a student of ‘sapphic passion.’ A funny one, yes, but an observant one as well.  

—Brett Josef Grubisic