‘Light Lifting’ and ‘This Cake is for the Party’

Reviewed by Corey Redekop

At this point, any review of Sarah Selecky’s or Alexander MacLeod’s recent work could be argued as superfluous. Their fame, for the moment, is secure. Two collections of short stories, each acclaimed to a degree that would make most authors collapse under the weight of their envy. Each a Giller finalist. Each now shortlisted for Commonwealth Best First Book, winner still to be determined. Each taking a comfortable roost inside national and regional bestseller lists. Selecky earns comparisons to Alice Munro. MacLeod escapes the sizable shadow of CanLit heavyweight and father Alistair to carve his own small niche in the canon. These are truly auspicious beginnings for any literary career.

Taken side by side, weighing each collection against the other as we would combatants in a field of battle, Selecky’s This Cake is for the Party and MacLeod’s Light Lifting showcase sizeable talents, displaying unique voices and mastery of craft. They each contain stories of memories captured in time, stories that tell of personal moments and hint at larger ramifications beyond the last sentence. Yet of the two, This Cake holds together better as a whole, but Light Lifting hints at a slightly broader range. It is doubtful anyone would mistake a Selecky story for a MacLeod, but MacLeod could, in the future, pull off a reasonable Selecky.

This Cake is for the Party is a solid, at times superb, dissection of characters on the cusp of revelations, sometimes small, sometimes momentous. These are stories of loss: of innocence, love, possessions, life. Selecky positions her stories on moments of crisis, external and internal, leavening the darkness with sly flashes of wit and an appreciation of subtlety.

‘Paul Farenbacher’s Yard Sale’ is a prime example. The story centers on Meredith, a woman attending a sale of her neighbour’s belongings after his death. In twenty short pages, as she watches people dicker over a recliner, Selecky encapsulates years of her memories, putting entire histories in place for Meredith, Paul, his son Trevor, his ex-wife Margaret, and Margaret’s new husband Bruce.

Short stories often force of necessity an economy of language; there exists limited space to reveal all that the author wishes. In one telling piece of dialogue, Selecky captures the overt tension that exists between three characters in three very minimal lines:

She’ll come back, says Bruce. Don’t worry.

Do I look worried? Trevor says.

Trev, says Margaret.

In sixteen short words, we see Trevor’s belligerence toward his father-in-law, we witness Margaret’s playing referee, and we understand a family dynamic that informs the remainder of the story. Selecky plays off this economy in other areas, showing that she is not afraid to go broad, as in Meredith’s remembrances of Paul’s funeral:

A collection of Paul’s old cronies was there, from all his years of work—the cookware men, the detergent and spray disinfectant men, the Blu-Green algae man (who were actually mostly women)—huddled under the dripping canvas awning out front, a cluster of khaki overcoats under a cloud of smoke that condensed into fog. The sixty-year-old’s version of extreme sport: smoking at a funeral sponsored by lung cancer. The risk! The bravado!

Selecky’s stories all wield disarming warmth, the better to withstand the intensely personal revelations of her characters. ‘One Thousand Wax Buddhas’ skips back and forth as we see a candlemaker watch his wife succumb to mental illness. In ‘Where Are You Coming From, Sweetheart?’ a young girl experiments with kissing a stranger in the back of a bus—“His irises were the yellow of canned pineapple. The pull of his jacket made the stretched sound of twisting balloons”—a rebellion against her overly-religious father. ‘Go-Manchura’—for my money the most memorable, melancholy narrative from either collection, one that still haunts me weeks later—follows a woman desperately trying to sell her friends on a new line of health food products during a dinner, willing herself to ignore their obvious lack of interest.

Selecky harbours deep affection for her characters, combined with effortless grace; there is truly not a weak link to be found. She has a keen ear for understated dialogue, and a gift for unusual description, always a plus: “a round, hollow sound comes from Flip, who is trying to hide his laugh in his wineglass. It sounds like the fossilized call of a loon.” The stories, taken together, do suffer a certain degree of sameness in their rhythms, an overall softness that may disguise Selecky’s very real skill in construction. But should it be a mark against an author to have a distinctive voice at all? At one point in the story ‘Prognosis,’ a character exclaims, “I can’t explain it, but we should celebrate.” The same can be said for This Cake is for the Party.

Light Lifting is of a different sort. Alexander MacLeod’s stories are less elliptical in nature, more muscular. MacLeod experiments with tone, capturing a greater range of voices. Some of his stories are rambling, some made up almost entirely of sharp, jagged three-word sentences that scratch the reader. If This Cake is akin to savouring a glass of wine after dinner, Light Lifting is like alternating shots with bottles of beer. Choosing between them comes down to personal choice, not overall quality. A convincing case for their differences could be made with a comparison of the first sentence of each collection’s opening story:

This Cake is for the Party­, ‘Throwing Cotton’: This past New Year’s Eve, sitting on the loveseat in front of our little tabletop Christmas Tree, I poured us both a glass of sparkling wine and told Sanderson: I think I’m ready to do it.

Light Lifting, ‘Miracle Mile’: This was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear.

MacLeod marks his territory from the first story, ‘Miracle Mile,’ about two runners preparing for a race. This is a story of obsession, of yearning, battling against the constraints of the human body to achieve transcendence through form and speed. MacLeod revels in details, enjoying how the reader might squirm at the thought of “dangerous cortisone injections in those big needles, the ones they fire right into that band of tough connective tissue at the bottom of your foot,” or of how certain fanatic runners “gobble big spoonfuls of straight baking soda before a race even though they know it gives you this brutal, bloody diarrhea an hour later.”

Or consider ‘Wonder About Parents,’ an alternately funny/touching story of young parents and the travails of raising a child in a medically-obsessed culture. MacLeod alternates his story—written in punchy, incomplete sentences to mirror the fractured and hectic life of his characters—with outtakes of medical trivia, especially the historical significance of head lice:

Partial list of substances people have put on their heads to kill lice: rendered dog fat, glasses of human spit, mercury, arsenic, cedar oil, garlic paste and oregano, Ching-Hao, pyrethrum, ground poppies, borax, Vaseline, honey, frankincense, vinegar, bull semen, salt and pepper, mustard, mayonnaise, wormwood, cat urine, beet juice, tobacco, lard, kerosene, gasoline, turpentine, eucalyptus, snake venom.

MacLeod keeps this from becoming a gimmick, instead using it to layer a story of people just barely keeping themselves afloat, allowing the story to end on a devastatingly touching note of hope.

For MacLeod, the details are what drive his characters, the details shape how they function. In ‘The Number Three,’ MacLeod opens his story of a widower trying to face another day with a paragraph of finely drawn particulars that serves to emphasize the unclassifiable sadness that infuses his every moment:

The single fried egg might be life’s loneliest meal. He listens to the sizzle of unfertilized yolk and waits another second before lifting away from the heat. The timing is important. He wants the skin starting to harden but everything else still shaky and runny inside. It quivers on his spatula before sliding onto the plate slimy and wet, like a living thing. Half a shake of salt, a full shake of pepper and good to go. This is supper. The toaster pops and he looks over. Watches the filament cooling, turning black again. He butters and dips and mops. The room is almost silent. Only the occasional gurgling coming from deep inside the fridge. A single fried egg, he thinks: enough food for one person, as long as they aren’t hungry.

But while MacLeod may be more boldly experimental than Selecky in his approach, Light Lifting lacks the total immersive cohesion of This Cake. ‘Good Kids’ is a nostalgia-tinged story of brothers with a strange friend in the boy who lived across the street, but there’s an artificiality to the construction, a falseness of dialogue that rubs up against the very fine depiction of a young boy’s dawning recognition of maturity. ‘Light Lifting’ is a genial and often funny story of one summer in the life of a few house builders, but its ending of sudden violence doesn’t jibe completely with what came before.

These are quibbles, however, minor ruts in an otherwise smoothly paved road. Both Light Lifting and This Cake is for the Party are arresting compendiums of astonishingly fine writing by two authors who seem destined for further success. Some people may not care for such collections, preferring the breadth and heftiness of novels, but when it comes to short stories, both Salecky and MacLeod prove that in the right hands, “it’s the light lifting that does the real damage.”