To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Something functions both as a critique and
a reworking of the notion of ethnography.
It works as an attempt to understand,
translate, and interpret as much as possible,
insisting on the effort, at least, to translate
the discourse of otherness.
Black Holes of Fiction
Leon Rooke
Who Do You Love?. McClelland & Stewart $16.99
J.A. Hamilton
July Nights and Other Stories. Douglas &
Mclntyre $16.95
Reviewed by Elaine Auerbach
Both of these collections contain stories
focussing on changing human beings in a
sometimes hostile, sometimes benevolent
world.
Most of the twenty-six stories in Rooke's
eighth collection of short fiction have been
previously published and subsequently
revised for this edition. The variation in
voices is remarkable. "Want to Play House"
is a monologue delivered by a child in
which the amusing, harmless game suddenly
turns sinister. "Body Count" is a narrative
by a woman in a nursing home
concerned about the premature death of
infants along the road of her own mortality.
"Art," perhaps the most unusual of the
stories, records the voices of a couple who
are figures in a painting that is slowly disintegrating.
The majority of the stories are
not very long, yet most succeed in developing
raw and tender evocations of emotional
truth.
Two stories are especially compelling.
"Who Do You Love?" is a minimalist novel
in which time, place and character are
compactly drawn. The rich sensation of
movement, created through subtle shifts in
point of view, is palpable and slightly dizzying
in its effects. Rooke deftly modulates
from first to second person narration,
gradually drawing us into the significant
presence of events as commonplace as a
woman washing her hair in a sink and a
young boy falling off a bicycle and breaking
a tooth. Carefully selected and balanced
events recollected from a fluid memory
stream are kept in motion by the tantalizing
anticipation of the answer to the question
"who do you love?" A fatherless boy is
asked repeatedly by his mother whom he
loves best, her or the father who has, like
the boy's stolen nickel, "fallen between the
floor boards" into oblivion. Rooke often
uses "loveless" characters to show the
power of emotional polarities that circumscribe
desire and pleasure. The "fat
woman," who, in the guise of Ella Mae in
Rooke's novella of the same name, crisscrosses
the boundaries of appearance and
reality, resurfaces at the centre of this story,
represented by a nameless fat woman. The
narrator watches as she and her fat
boyfriend make love in a lighted window.
The poignancy of this scene—a fatherless
boy feeling the ache of lovelessness, observing
two social outcasts engaged in lovemaking—is
shrouded in mystery and revulsion
only because the youth cannot decode the
feeling, does not see himself as outcast and
can not love without remembering his own
loss. Elements of this story allude to bildungsromans
such as Dickens' A Tale of Two
Cities and Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. The
atmosphere of unfulfilled desire, of innocence
shrinking from experience of the
world, trapped yet continually tantalized,
never loses its mesmerizing power.
"Pretty Pictures," another minimalist
piece, is about story-telling. Here Rooke
clarifies why he sometimes grovels in ugliness
and consciously cultivates the unusual
and the bizarre. The cadences of the writing
are similar to those of "Who Do You
Love?," the intimacy of the narrator's voice
establishing a bond with the reader: "There
are pretty pictures and not-so-pretty pictures.
You know that. We would probably
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