Stephen Meisel Reviews:

Allison Graves, Soft Serve, Breakwater Books Limited, 2023
Jennifer Falkner, Above Discovery, Invisible Publishing, 2023

Sometimes, it’s easy to mistake melancholy for ennui. Boredom and sadness often show up at the party wearing the same shirt. Catch them on a good night and they may finish each other’s sentences.

If you need an introduction to the unwitting pair, Allison Graves’s debut story collection, Soft Serve, may help break the ice. Although a few branch out into Ontario and New York City, most of the stories in Soft Serve centre around middle-class Newfoundlanders and their relationship troubles. As it turns out, Newfoundland isn’t just a place where, as one character puts it, ‘The people [are] nicer and more understanding,’ and the houses are ‘connected like a bunch of handshakes.’ Soft Serve shows these often romanticized islanders as struggling, questioning—wanting more out of life or maybe (can you blame them?) out of the people they’ve chosen to spend their lives with. The airy deceit of failed marriages and relationships on the brink abound. Secrets are kept but usually with a reservation that stifles dramatics. Instead, Graves often chooses understatement and negative space in style and narrative as her technique of choice. She has no trouble giving us a cutting observation when she wants, as in ‘Bad Ending,’ where she writes: ‘She was sensitive and obsessive: a bad combination.’ But most of the time, she opts for restraint. It’s a good thing she does. It’s hard to imagine stories like ‘Swiffer Wetjet’ and ‘My Friend, My Parrot,’ wonderful examples of pacing and economy, with any more detail.

The stories themselves rarely end in revelation, if only because, most of the time, closure and love just don’t mix. We witness many characters either returning to everyday life questionably altered or wondering if they’ll ever change. The ones that do transform may not do so positively, or it may be in the face of forces beyond their control, like with the unchecked desire of others in ‘Winter Salad’ or the difficulties of age in ‘Staying Alive.’ The more stable variables are how Graves’s protagonists reach out into the world, ready to get their fingers pinched by an insensitive lover or an ignorant parent. There’s a lot they want to say to their friends or teachers, many of whom are even more flawed, but they spend most of their time avoiding it. The characters in Soft Serve revolve around each other like the same pole of different magnets, keeping an invisible void at the centre that repels them from broaching the unspeakable. Sometimes, as in the case of the earlier story ‘Eat Me,’ it’s even both. The most common denominator for them all is their acute sense of middle-class suffering, whether it’s the young women who occupy most of the stories or the older couples who fill another handful. As with a predecessor, Mary Gaitskill, who Graves references in ‘Shallow Water,’ you’re left so moved by the mysteries you forget about the commonalities. We all suffer. We all love. We all try to move beyond.

If Soft Serve is focused on that eternal problem of minuscule scale—the one-on-one relationship—then Jennifer Falkner’s Above Discovery, another debut story collection, could be said to place these same types of conflicts against larger set pieces. Falkner’s speculative stories are preoccupied with catastrophe, often within grand naturalistic settings, such as Mt. Sinai or the Yukon. Their characters struggle against big, swaying shifts in history and the ensuing struggle to handle them. The narrators often play the part of everyday intellectuals in the form of artists, academics or scientists. Very few pieces take place in present-day Canada, set instead in historical periods like ancient Greece, the Klondike Gold Rush or Elizabethan England. Some of the stories take us into the near future, where climate change and global conflict have altered the natural world but have left those permanent human issues of desire and relationships untouched.

If there is a science in some of the more science fiction-oriented pieces, it’s the twins of biology and ecology. Animals pop up everywhere, in dreams and abandoned houses, either as plot devices or metaphors, sometimes both. Just as common are the flora of Falkner’s stories, and occasionally, as in one of the standouts, ‘Sometimes a Tree,’ this biological bent, our questionable global future, exploitative relationships and Falkner’s terse but poetic style merge to make for some engrossing results. Even though the division between nature, history and society is just as blurry as depicted, it’s still remarkable how often these stories use climate and ecology to bring us further into their characters to exacerbate the hopelessness. As the narrator of the story ‘Nineteen Above Discovery,’ says: ‘It seems impossible that there is a fortune under all that muck. Or that the two of us could even extract it if there is.’

In Above Discovery, platonic and romantic love aren’t at the forefront. If they become the focal points, the dynamic is rarely conventional, and it’s never a question of boredom interfering with a plain life. A story like ‘Columbina’ may be a tale of that common trope of codependent friendship, as we’ve seen in Soft Serve, but what happens when one of those characters is a marionette, quite literally animated by the opposite party? We may know the Pygmalion story all too well, but how would we deal with its inverse, as in ‘The Stonecutter’s Masterpiece,’ where a real live woman is turning to stone and demands that a sculptor turn her into a work of art? These types of twists populate Above Discovery in abundance. When done right, they set in motion a subtle reversal that gives these stories their unique atmosphere.

And while love in Above Discovery certainly won’t save anyone from impending doom or material uncertainty, that doesn’t mean we should avoid it altogether. Falkner’s characters rarely have time for socializing in the typical sense. Still, they manage to scrape together their own meaningful lives, even when they may be more interested in surviving the cold to stake a claim or touring in Shakespeare’s theatre company than patching things up with a flakey ex. ‘Lion in the Desert,’ for instance, is a romance set within the context of an archeological dig. War and politics—those grand, sweeping forces—render any kind of optimistic outcome impossible, but the characters fight for themselves anyway. By the end, the desert becomes an otherworldly location where history and fate commingle. 

However, it would be false to say that every story in the collection is a conflict of nature vs. humanity. There are plenty of memorable relationships throughout, just as there are memorable characters. ‘The Anchoress’ shows one of Falkner’s more contemplative protagonists, a religious ascetic who may be having visions of her own:

She prays for her mother’s soul as she was instructed to do. She wonders if her father is still living. She prays for his as well, in case he is not. She prays for the villagers, that they may be preserved from sickness, that all their babes are delivered safe and well. She prays for the crops. As she prays, she can see, tucked under the warm soil, the barley seeds splitting, unfurling, sending roots deeper into the earth.

Whether she actually heals the pilgrims who make their way to her church is anybody’s guess, much less her own. And the anchoress isn’t the only character who lingers in the mind. How many depictions of Shakespeare show the playwright as a beleaguered head writer, parrying insults and witticisms from his troupe? 

What’s more, many of these characters boast their own philosophies, some of which, as in ‘A Complicated Kind of Falling,’ become unexpectedly poignant meditations on the role of the artist:

No matter how perfect the scene or fast-paced the patter, [audiences] want more. They want better. Better than anyone can possibly give. But the player is infinitely worse. For he is greedy enough to want to be the only one to give it to them.

True words, indeed. Leave it to these two debut collections, which have set the standard high, to give us the scenes we crave. Whether it’s Newfoundland ennui or pilgrimages to Mt. Sinai, we’re sure to want more.

—Stephen Meisel