‘Canary’ by Nancy Jo Cullen

Reviewed by Richard Cumyn from uncorrected galley proof

Consider your most embarrassing moment, suffered because of your family or not. Go on, dredge up that ineradicable instant of humiliation when you were a child, adolescent or young adult, it doesn’t matter what happened, when or where. Nancy Jo Cullen has you beat. The denizens of Canary, her first book of fiction, have soared, crashed, relocated, compromised, given up and started over more often than most of us. Good fiction—and this collection is very good—concentrates the extraordinary in any given life. Overdone, the result can be mere eccentricity, a pitfall Cullen avoids. We have encountered her people in our lives. They stand frozen on street corners, unsure of their next move. They pretend their spouse isn’t cheating on them. They say inappropriate things to your kids. They get high with their siblings at their mother’s eighty-third birthday party. They purport to reject vanity while submitting to an excruciating wax-job. Gay or straight, old or young, these people have unique and often quirky problems, but they also seem next-door familiar.

Cullen has published three collections of poetry, won the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging Gay Writer and been shortlisted for several other awards. A creative writing class could use several of the eleven stories in Canary as models for directed practice: write a story that takes place in an hour (“Happy Birthday,” “Bet Your Boots”); that begins, “The first time I saw…” (“This Cold War”); that is set inside a small enclosed space (“Passenger”); as if a stranger is giving you the encapsulated version of her life (“This Cold War”). Canary has some killer opening sentences: “I was in love with the kleptomaniac but he was a good dresser” (“Regina”) and from “Big Fat Beautiful You”: “When we arrived at the funeral home, Caroline had to sign a paper that they were going to set fire to the right guy.”

Her heart leaning toward her teenage characters, especially the misfits, Cullen writes family dynamics exceedingly well. Bethany in “Bet Your Boots” drifts outside away from the trying, often ridiculous adults at a family gathering and has her first sexual encounter, with an older cousin. In “Canary” Kyle sits on his bed and “chews on the denim at his knee” while his overly familiar mother Judi changes her clothes in front of him. When he asks, “Can I go now?” we want to flee the scene with him. Judi, helicopter mom personified, accompanies Kyle and his girlfriend on their date, to dinner and a movie. Judi might be an extreme stereotype, but Cullen gives us access to the woman’s psyche, and we shift from an outsider’s judgmental perspective to a more empathetic understanding of her foibles.

Bethany, still abuzz from her splendour on the grass with cousin JD, daydreams about what she will wear the next time she sees the boy, while her newly installed stepfather Warren, a longtime family friend, tries in vain to get her to see him as her parent. Cullen is so attuned to the adolescent mind that even the middle-aged narrator of “Ashes,” a story about her twelve-year-old self wondering which will blow up first, nearby Mount St. Helen’s or her parents’ marriage, sounds strikingly youthful.

Like “Ashes,” many of the stories in Canary are about lesbian and gay characters. Cullen presents them in every state: closeted, ambiguous and fully out; single and in same-sex and opposite-sex marriages; happy together, indifferent and on the outs. She sets an ample and varied table in this regard, with no overt social or political agenda. Her single concern appears to be the faithful portrayal of people at intensely pivotal moments. In “This Cold War” a woman vents bitterness over the loss of a short-lived romance with Jane Shaw, a free spirit who goes on to lead an exotic life overseas and never returns. The story’s only weakness might be its ending, which feels artificial, equating the absent Jane with a disappeared stray cat: “But he wasn’t affectionate; he bit me when I tried to pet him, and he peed in my favourite pink suede flats.”

“The 14^th Week in Ordinary Time” takes its title from the liturgical calendar. This is an uneventful time when “summer vacations have begun, parishioners are distracted by travel plans or excited children and Sunday mass is abbreviated.” George sells rosaries and other Catholic devotional items, likes to watch Dancing with the Stars and prays to the virgin martyr Maria Goretti to help him fight his desire to have sex with men. To his wife, a lounge singer looking to put the upheaval of her past behind her, “George seemed to have plenty of nothing crazy going on and Kelly was ready for a little of that.” When their blissful abstinence is threatened by Kelly’s desire to have a baby, George’s solution to the physical problem of consummation becomes one of the funniest sex scenes I’ve read since Terry Southern’s Candy.

The line between faithful representation of everyday speech and tired-out phrasing is a delicate one for fiction to tread. Authentic expression and language originality have to be tuned to fit the story. Your average truck-stop waitress won’t use the language the way Susan Sontag did, but if a cliché is present and the context doesn’t require it, it mars the prose. In his Globe and Mail review of Canary, Jeet Heer defends Cullen’s use of such expressions as, “I wasn’t going to touch that with a ten-foot pole,” “you could knock him over with a feather,” “crying over spilt milk” and several others, suggesting that she was “using clichés in the same manner as Joyce in Dubliners, not lazily but as a way of accurately defining the cultural scripts her subjects follow.” These may be cultural markers, but they are lifeless, uttered by characters who express themselves for the most part in a fresh way, free of clunkers like these. It was laziness to leave them in. They distract from prose that is otherwise naturally fitted to the demands of the narrative.

The book’s occasional spot of stylistic cellulite notwithstanding, the best of the bunch might be “Eddie Truman,” a hospital story that succeeds because of the precision of its detail and its avoidance of sentimentality. Daisy Clark, almost forty, a first-time mother, is postpartum, depressed and alone. “I can’t tell you much about your dad,” she admits to her as-yet unnamed newborn while they recover from the delivery. “He’s a bit of a dick.”

The biological father is married to someone else and has teenage children. Daisy has to decide whether or not to keep her child. She chose not to have an abortion mainly because her belittling mother suggested she should terminate the pregnancy. When a nurse asks if she wants to see her baby, Daisy knows the correct answer should be yes. “Baby Clark’s eyes were bruised and black, like he’d gone fourteen rounds in the ring; well, at least he was in pain, too,” she thinks. Her adjectives betray her cynicism. Her hospital gown is “stupid,” “flimsy” and “crappy,” the blanket on her bed, “ridiculous” and “fake.”

Daisy’s roommate in the hospital is Sandy, an impossibly peppy mother of premature twins. Sandy is annoyingly intrusive, asking indelicate questions and making pronouncements about acceptable names for boys. Not until Sandy becomes an agent of pathos does Daisy begin to rise from her egocentric funk. The story’s climax is handled deftly without melodrama, although Sandy does change back rather quickly from grief to evangelical optimism. As in several of the collection’s longer pieces, there is plenty here to satisfy, the narrative arc running high and long. Considering the book as a whole, its thematic shape is similarly robust, with a wide, compassionate embrace.

Biblioasis | 128 pages |  $18.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927428146