★★☆☆☆ Misery, Canadian style

The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories

Margaret Atwood (Editor), Robert Weaver (Editor)

I read The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories, (eds Margaret Atwood, Robert Weaver) because it is the textbook for a community college course I've registered for this winter called "Writing Short Stories". This is one of the worst short story collections I have ever read in my life.

I noticed early on that it appeared to be the same story over and over again. A man and a woman are trapped in a desperately unhappy marriage. Maybe something happens, or maybe not. It is evident that for Atwood and Weaver plot is entirely optional. Some of the stories had one, and some did not. There were rare exceptions to the desperately unhappy marriage storyline, in which the characters were miserable for other reasons.

You know that feeling of relief as you approach the end of a really bad book? I had that feeling 45 times in rapid succession as I worked my way through this dog. The book contains 47 stories. There were thus two stories I was able to read without longing for the end. The first was "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa", by W.P. Kinsella, which is the story behind the movie Field of Dreams. This is in fact quite a good story, and was unique in this volume in not being a portrayal of misery. The other story I quite liked was "Making It", by Margaret Gibson.

My problem with the book is not that the stories are all sad. I can love a sad story as much as anyone. My problem with the collection is the lack of variety. Surely not every good Canadian short story is a dreary portrayal of crushing misery.

In fact, I know they are not. William Gibson's Burning Chrome contains a bunch of good stories. Of course, Burning Chrome is science fiction, and Atwood and Weaver apparently scorn "genre literature". The only non-mainstream lit story in the collection is "Shoeless Joe Jackson." (Shoeless Joe comes back from the dead. That's fantasy in my book.) It is strange, considering that Atwood's most famous work, The Handmaid’s Tale, is science fiction. (She denies this, saying it is "Speculative Fiction" but not "Science Fiction", but that is only the universal human urge to see oneself as a unique snowflake. The Handmaid’s Tale is firmly within the social science fiction tradition of such works as Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.)

Do not read this book if you don't have to. If you're a writer and value my advice (and there is no reason on Earth you should), don't write like this.

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