To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
agree which is which." Who has not been
driven to avoid painful memory pictures by
diverting the mind with more pleasurable,
pretty scenes? Infidelity is one of the notso-pretty
pictures, and the narrator, in an
attempt to evade what is very disturbing,
takes refuge in a memory of a happy
moment in his son's childhood, claiming it
as his own. We live "reconstructed" lives all
of the time, Rooke perceives, because the
"one true picture, the one picture drawn
from real life.. .is not a picture that will do
any of us any good." Echoes of Emily
Dickinson's injunction to "Tell all the truth
but tell it slant, Success in Circuit lies" is
one of the paths to what "does good," and
fiction, firmly grounded in an awareness of
the circuitous paths of memory, lies at the
heart of this effort. The pain of infidelity,
for example, is realized not by story alone,
but by the narrator's manipulations of
other pictures. Perhaps the effect which
beauty and love have on our lives, Rooke
suggests, comes by way of intimately
acknowledging their opposites.
Not all of the works in this book are
memorable. "Drivers," essentially a familial
contest of wills revolving around who drives
whose car, is a yawn of a tale.
"Cornfields," "LR loves GL" and "Admiral
of the Fleet"—which are some of the
lengthier pieces—do not inspire or encourage
a second reading. Portions of the
"Extracts from the Proceedings of the
Annual Meeting of the Huron Street
Benevolent Society" seem better suited for
the stage. Though clearly a display of
Rooke's talent at creating dialogic voices,
these extracts fool with the cant of postmodernism.
Despite these shortcomings,
Rooke always expresses an ironic tension
built on contraries and excess. In a world of
mixed signals, where some become lost
waiting for everything to fall into place,
Rooke keeps up the exuberant call. "The
world," cries out the narrator in
"Sweethearts," "doesn't belong to those you
thought it belonged to, and never did."
J. A. Hamilton, in the fourteen stories
which comprise her first collection, portrays
characters on the brink of acknowledging
how much they have permitted the
world to belong to "others" and, consequently,
how much they have been controlled
and repressed by that world. The
voices in Hamilton's stories are possessed
by figures of authority—paternal, maternal,
social, and psychic—and this possession
sometimes leaves a didactic aftertaste, especially
in the wake of so many wrecked relationships.
(Every story, with the exception
of two—"Too Young Boys" and "Blood"—
places some form of abuse or infidelity as a
significant part of the narrative.) Hamilton
writes from the position of a New Age
Pandora who is all too aware of the pain
and suffering that women, men and especially
children must endure. "Cimarron" is
told from the point of view of Ines, who
with her husband Alberto and orphaned
grandchild, Carmelita, are fleeing Mexico
to escape the soldiers who have murdered
her son and his wife. Though Hamilton
displays a skill for descriptive detail, the
narrative voice is not convincing and the
story reads like a fleshed out version of a
statistic. Ines is much too detached to sustain
our compassion. Though Hamilton is
scrupulous and detailed in her diction (a
result perhaps of her practice as a poet—
her book of poems, Body Rain, was a finalist
for the Pat Lowther Award, and she can
use imagery to carry emotions in a split
second of timing) the language itself, as a
technique, sometimes becomes the focus of
the piece rather than the voice. "Gumboot
Sadie," for example, contains an array of
carefully crafted colloquialisms and vocabulary
specific to living on the range. Yet
there are instances in which the diction is
too baroque, such as in the episode where
Gladys, the narrator, pushes similes as far
as they can go in her description of the foster
children and social workers at the
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