Reviewed by André Forget (originally published May 29, 2013)
It would easy to write off Dora Dueck’s new collection of short stories as a well-executed but rather predictable example of Mennonite literature and be done with it. The stories deal for the most part with middle-aged Mennonite women facing the mundane challenges of domestic life–illness, regret, children, marriage, and so forth–and while the writing itself is strong and engaging, they tend to end by reaffirming the fairly conventional tropes of hope in the face of uncertainty, patience as real love, and literature as therapy. But however tempting it might be to criticize these stories for what they are not (exciting, gripping, innovative), or to ghettoize them as “MennoLit,” it is probably more interesting to consider the ways in which they do play with some broader themes and explore questions of wider importance.
The collection’s title, What You Get At Home, might at first seem to gesture towards the comfort of domestic familiarity, but in fact the “home” of the title is, for Dueck, rarely an uncomplicated one; rather, it is always unstable, easily thrown out of balance, attained rather than given, but still important, worth striving for. Moreover, for many of Dueck’s characters the notion of home is further complicated by the challenges of migration. Almost all of the stories involve immigrant characters of one kind or another, and even those that don’t still deal explicitly with some kind of displacement or unhoming.
And so the title is a question as well as a statement, one that requires readers to consider not only what it is that you get at home but also what it is that “home” itself names. In this way, the collection trades on the same agonistic notion of home which haunts so many Canadian immigrant memoirs, an anxiety further compounded by the domestic spaces so many of Dueck’s stories occupy. How is one to be a homemaker if one never feels entirely at home? What You Get At Home might be unapologetic Mennolit, but these fascinations–with home, domesticity, and belonging–are as old and Canadian as Settlers of the Marsh.
This is not to suggest that the explicitly Mennonite character of these stories does not sometimes become frustrating. Dueck tends to both assume too much and too little about what her audience knows of Mennonite history and culture; while not a Mennonite myself, I’ve had enough contact with Mennonites to find the didactic lessons on twentieth century Mennonite migrations repetitive and rather indulgent.
At the same time, many of the stories really don’t provide enough information for readers unfamiliar with Mennonite culture and religion to properly make sense of them. This is especially true in stories such as “Crucifix on the Road to Gnadenheim,” which, while it serves as a wonderful exploration of inter-ethnic and inter-religious marriage played out in a patriarchal Mennonite colony in Paraguay, trades on the tension between the Catholic tradition of icon veneration and the traditional Mennonite distrust of representative images. While this is not necessarily a problem if one considers each story on its own, viewing the collection as a whole leaves one with a sense of confusion about who the intended audience is; any reader familiar with the Mennonite theology of iconoclasm would probably not need the extensive Mennonite migrations of the twentieth century explained to them. The result is that the collection tends to come off as being at once overly pedantic and strangely obscure.
In many ways, however, this uncertainty about audience simply reflects the struggle facing any writer who wants to write both for and about a minority community: how to communicate a complex social world with specific rules, rituals, and history in the space of a short story? Unsurprisingly, Dueck is strongest when she gives herself more time and space to explore her characters and their journeys.
What You Get At Home is divided into two parts, the first a conventional assortment of independent narratives that share thematic characteristics but fundamentally stand alone, and the second a string of interconnected narratives told from the perspective of Liese, a Mennonite woman who migrates from Paraguay to Manitoba in her early twenties. Some of the stories from the first part are excellent–“Helping Isaac,” for example, gives us an historian trying to help an elderly Russian man piece together the circumstances surrounding the death of his mother who was killed by the Soviets in the early 1930s, and the more lighthearted “An Advance on an Uncertain Future” is about two young students who go on an unusual first date to see Barack Obama give a speech–but one cannot help feeling that the Liese stories are where Dueck has really focused her energies.
The fact that other stories in the first section (“My Name Is Magdalena,” “In The Village Of Women”) cover the same ground–Mennonite women who migrate to Canada with maddening equanimity and unfailing virtue, live patiently domestic lives, and later find themselves in middle age considering what they have learned–weakens the effect. When one finally encounters Liese and her struggle to understand what it means to be at home, the earlier stories begin to seem more like sketches, insufficiently-realized attempts at this fuller narrative. The Liese stories give Dueck the time to stop telling and start showing, and many of the earlier pieces suffer in contrast.
Dueck is a competent writer, and What You Get At Home asks questions that have a relevance beyond the circumscribed world of Mennonite literature. The work is at its strongest–and, I think, most insightful–when it dwells on the question of how to relate to one’s past when that past is clearly divided between different nations and cultures. It isn’t a question that Dueck or anyone else can or should try to answer, but in the story that gives the collection its name we see what is at stake. For Dueck, home is finally constituted by the names we give it and the stories we tell about it, and, as for so many other Canadians who write about immigration, these are stories that are never entirely finished, for the simple reason that home itself is never finally settled.
Turnstone | 176 pages | $19.00 | paper | ISBN # 978-0888014047
‘What You Get At Home’ by Dora Dueck
Book Reviews
It would easy to write off Dora Dueck’s new collection of short stories as a well-executed but rather predictable example of Mennonite literature and be done with it. The stories deal for the most part with middle-aged Mennonite women facing the mundane challenges of domestic life–illness, regret, children, marriage, and so forth–and while the writing itself is strong and engaging, they tend to end by reaffirming the fairly conventional tropes of hope in the face of uncertainty, patience as real love, and literature as therapy. But however tempting it might be to criticize these stories for what they are not (exciting, gripping, innovative), or to ghettoize them as “MennoLit,” it is probably more interesting to consider the ways in which they do play with some broader themes and explore questions of wider importance.
The collection’s title, What You Get At Home, might at first seem to gesture towards the comfort of domestic familiarity, but in fact the “home” of the title is, for Dueck, rarely an uncomplicated one; rather, it is always unstable, easily thrown out of balance, attained rather than given, but still important, worth striving for. Moreover, for many of Dueck’s characters the notion of home is further complicated by the challenges of migration. Almost all of the stories involve immigrant characters of one kind or another, and even those that don’t still deal explicitly with some kind of displacement or unhoming.
And so the title is a question as well as a statement, one that requires readers to consider not only what it is that you get at home but also what it is that “home” itself names. In this way, the collection trades on the same agonistic notion of home which haunts so many Canadian immigrant memoirs, an anxiety further compounded by the domestic spaces so many of Dueck’s stories occupy. How is one to be a homemaker if one never feels entirely at home? What You Get At Home might be unapologetic Mennolit, but these fascinations–with home, domesticity, and belonging–are as old and Canadian as Settlers of the Marsh.
This is not to suggest that the explicitly Mennonite character of these stories does not sometimes become frustrating. Dueck tends to both assume too much and too little about what her audience knows of Mennonite history and culture; while not a Mennonite myself, I’ve had enough contact with Mennonites to find the didactic lessons on twentieth century Mennonite migrations repetitive and rather indulgent.
At the same time, many of the stories really don’t provide enough information for readers unfamiliar with Mennonite culture and religion to properly make sense of them. This is especially true in stories such as “Crucifix on the Road to Gnadenheim,” which, while it serves as a wonderful exploration of inter-ethnic and inter-religious marriage played out in a patriarchal Mennonite colony in Paraguay, trades on the tension between the Catholic tradition of icon veneration and the traditional Mennonite distrust of representative images. While this is not necessarily a problem if one considers each story on its own, viewing the collection as a whole leaves one with a sense of confusion about who the intended audience is; any reader familiar with the Mennonite theology of iconoclasm would probably not need the extensive Mennonite migrations of the twentieth century explained to them. The result is that the collection tends to come off as being at once overly pedantic and strangely obscure.
In many ways, however, this uncertainty about audience simply reflects the struggle facing any writer who wants to write both for and about a minority community: how to communicate a complex social world with specific rules, rituals, and history in the space of a short story? Unsurprisingly, Dueck is strongest when she gives herself more time and space to explore her characters and their journeys.
What You Get At Home is divided into two parts, the first a conventional assortment of independent narratives that share thematic characteristics but fundamentally stand alone, and the second a string of interconnected narratives told from the perspective of Liese, a Mennonite woman who migrates from Paraguay to Manitoba in her early twenties. Some of the stories from the first part are excellent–“Helping Isaac,” for example, gives us an historian trying to help an elderly Russian man piece together the circumstances surrounding the death of his mother who was killed by the Soviets in the early 1930s, and the more lighthearted “An Advance on an Uncertain Future” is about two young students who go on an unusual first date to see Barack Obama give a speech–but one cannot help feeling that the Liese stories are where Dueck has really focused her energies.
The fact that other stories in the first section (“My Name Is Magdalena,” “In The Village Of Women”) cover the same ground–Mennonite women who migrate to Canada with maddening equanimity and unfailing virtue, live patiently domestic lives, and later find themselves in middle age considering what they have learned–weakens the effect. When one finally encounters Liese and her struggle to understand what it means to be at home, the earlier stories begin to seem more like sketches, insufficiently-realized attempts at this fuller narrative. The Liese stories give Dueck the time to stop telling and start showing, and many of the earlier pieces suffer in contrast.
Dueck is a competent writer, and What You Get At Home asks questions that have a relevance beyond the circumscribed world of Mennonite literature. The work is at its strongest–and, I think, most insightful–when it dwells on the question of how to relate to one’s past when that past is clearly divided between different nations and cultures. It isn’t a question that Dueck or anyone else can or should try to answer, but in the story that gives the collection its name we see what is at stake. For Dueck, home is finally constituted by the names we give it and the stories we tell about it, and, as for so many other Canadians who write about immigration, these are stories that are never entirely finished, for the simple reason that home itself is never finally settled.
Turnstone | 176 pages | $19.00 | paper | ISBN # 978-0888014047