‘7 Ways to Sunday’ by Lee Kvern

Reviewed by Brock Peters

As readers of Canadian fiction, we have become well accustomed to certain milestones that serve to allay our fears of having wandered too far from home. Stories of substance abuse, RCMP detachments, big-box supermarkets, and dysfunctional families crowd our literary landscape like the small towns in which they are almost inevitably set. In this regard, the sixteen stories in Lee Kvern’s new collection don’t venture far from what we might predict. What sets this collection apart is its emotional intensity and rawness, conveyed by prose that is at once lively and laden with rich description.

7 Ways to Sunday is Kvern’s first collection of stories, following on the heels of a 2010 novel, a 2005 novella, and a number of impressive literary prizes and journal appearances. Its characters find themselves battling demons numerous and diverse, ranging from more conventional tribulations like keeping vigil over a father’s deathbed (“The Night Doors 1984”), through a mother watching over her drug-addicted teen son (“High Ground”), all the way to parents struggling to deal with their third-grade son’s experimentation with identity construction (“Pioneer”). More than by the scenarios in which she places her characters, this collection is driven at its heart by Kvern’s energetic, astute emotional observations; in “The Night Doors” she writes, as the narrator observes her father’s passing, “There is no dignity or respect or pride or any of those things you see in a movie or read in a book where someone dies and it seems majestic, romantic. It isn’t. [It’s] only an animal fighting not to die.”

However, at times the experimental liveliness of Kvern’s prose can tend to collapse upon itself, becoming as tedious as it was previously dynamic. “And Atticus a veritable feast, a never-die light, a seemingly giant squid himself, multi-armed with graffiti cans of spray paint, his tubes of bright acrylics, an art happening wherever he happened to be,” writes Kvern in “Beautiful Monday.” Sentences like this one, which is missing a main verb, can certainly add an unconventional, fast-paced flavour to her prose, but are exhausting to read in succession.

Kvern’s emotional intensity, which at times lends her writing intense poignancy, is also prone to backfire. In the story “Snapshots (In Bed),” the narrator is bedridden and suffering from failing kidneys, diabetes, fractured hips, and heart failure. She recounts for us the deaths of five family members (three of whom fall victim to cancer), in addition to a near-fatal car crash of her own and a disastrous fall that leaves her youngest daughter, already intellectually disabled, with brain damage. Such emotional bludgeoning of the reader is perhaps reminiscent of the fourth part of Roberto Bolaño’s epic novel 2666. The difference is that Bolaño had an agenda that was readily discerned. No such purpose can be found in Kvern’s story, which reads like an author grappling with some very personal situations, almost too personal to be suitable for her readers. I will ally myself with Toronto’s Ray Robertson in claiming that though art (here, fiction) ought not be classified as entertainment, it still must be entertaining; as a reader, if I am to persevere through such a litany of sorrows I must feel confident that the author is leading me somewhere, rather than simply recounting for me mortality’s tendency to despair, of which I am well aware.

At 37 pages, the titular story is not only the longest in this collection, but also the collection’s strongest by a wide margin. The narrator, Miles, is a deadbeat father and husband working halfheartedly at a local co-op. He’s also notoriously unreliable, having become addicted to the diet pills he “happened upon” behind the pharmacy counter. Kvern plumbs the depths of his self-deception all the way to their natural conclusion as his daughter and wife leave him, and he loses his job as a result of (among other things) masturbating in the stockroom and setting the cardboard compactor on fire. Still he clings to hope, a despondent father with “the overt pride of a grade nine entrepreneur whose daughter wants to be a veterinarian,” and Kvern leaves us feeling satisfied. The mastery and polish of this story makes it seem almost as though it were written by an entirely different writer, and it brings the collection to a resounding conclusion.

Where 7 Ways to Sunday fails as a coherent short-story collection is in its consistency: consistency of quality, of coherent significance among all the emotional intensity, and of editorial attentiveness. Indeed, the editing of this volume at times seems rather slipshod. Basic problems like comma splices (or missing commas, as in “Lead,” where the narrator’s girlfriend works at Wal-Mart “stocking shelves along with the methheads for Jesus’ sake”), consistency of formatting (at the beginning of the same story, bracketed asides are formatted both correctly and incorrectly in the course of the same sentence), and the stranding of dependent clauses serve to eject the reader right out of the fictional dream. Over time, such errors make even good stories difficult to enjoy. The back copy itself displays inaccuracies when it claims that the collection has thirteen stories (there are sixteen, unless stories under six pages don’t count), and that the child in “Pioneer” is in the second grade (he’s in the third).

It’s hard to finally evaluate 7 Ways to Sunday. Lee Kvern writes with a passion that is most welcome in Canadian fiction, and there are several stories in this collection that are well worth the read. Her willingness to deal with the grit and substance of real life is admirable. But too often the reader is left feeling like nobody is steering the ship, as though we’re watching a home movie that simply records the tribulations of life rather than analyzing or synthesizing them in a meaningful and entertaining way.

Enfield & Wizenty | 208 pages |  $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1926531854