Short stories say much

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

To write unlikable characters yet make their story enjoyable seems like a difficult task. Yet Seymour Mayne manages to make several unpleasant men kind of charming in his new collection The Old Blue Couch and Other Stories (Ronald D. Frye and Co., 2012) and Sharon Abron Drache makes them interesting in her new collection, Barbara Klein-Muskrat: Then and Now (Inanna Publications and Education Inc., 2012).

The book and cover design by Sebastian Frye of The Old Blue Couch and Other Stories is worth noting. It is one of the most attractive publications the Jewish Independent has come across. Frye makes you want to pick up this collection and read it, while Mayne’s writing encourages you to keep turning the pages.

The title story is about a man who is very possessive of his “old blue couch.” Acquiring it by happenstance when helping a friend move, the man imagines a whole back story to the couch’s life before it “met” him, and he is loathe to dispose of it, even though it sheds sand and is detested by his wife. Eventually, the couch is banished to the garage for the winter months, taking a place on the house’s porch come Victoria Day. When it is stolen, the man curses the thieves, with some effect. Whatever metaphors one may read into the story, it is, at its simplest level, about a man who values this possession over most anything else, including his wife and his own enjoyment of what else life has to offer.

A more uplifting story is “The Story of My Aunt’s Comforter,” in which a family hand-me-down that can no longer be used is adapted to new purposes that literally bring comfort to another generation. The other stories in the collection have another possessive man thinking that a fellow shul-goer may have stolen his tallit, a social group that forms out of a man’s (then many men’s) pride for their first name, a man who just ups and leaves his wife (to Vancouver) and a Kiddush club whose members refuse to drink responsibly yet are facilitated by the rabbi when a potential whiskey shortage threatens the club’s survival. There is only one story about a woman, an Israeli who is searching for something that she cannot define, though she expresses discontent with the political situation there when she visits Canada, where she once lived briefly, asking her cousin to take her to churches so that she can photograph them; she thought she had exhausted the synagogues of interest, but finds out differently.

So, while it is hard to empathize with his (male) characters, Mayne’s understanding of their essence and motivations, as well as his folksy style and sense of humor, make The Old Blue Couch and Other Stories engaging and, yes, charming.

Barbara Klein-Muskrat: Then and Now is also engaging but in a completely different style. A satire of the publishing industry and some of its players, including herself, Drache has written a baker’s dozen of stories, comprised of many chapters that mimic a memoir and a couple of letters from Barbara to her brother in Israel, bookended by a prologue and final chapter of Barbara meeting with a huge fan of her work.

Featured prominently in the stories and letters are the recurring unlikable characters of Barbara’s former husband, Ian; his new wife, Yolande, who was once dear friends with Barbara; and Mordechai Richler, whose writing Barbara adores. Making one-off appearances are a self-absorbed and selfish writer of “Literature” (capital L), with whom Barbara falls in love after Ian, and a few really horrid-sounding men at a singles Chanukah party, including an unappealing older man to whom Barbara is attracted. Barbara herself is not always easy to like, and she can sound a tad whiney and bitter as she tries to reconcile herself to her divorcée status, which takes some 10 years of legalities to achieve.

Reading Barbara Klein-Muskrat: Then and Now, one can’t help but think of the resemblances between Barbara and her creator. Drache is a published author and well-known book reviewer, she too lived in Ottawa for many years and is divorced, albeit with four, not two, children. There is a lot in this collection to which older women, especially those who have had a difficult marriage, and those struggling to make a living in the publishing industry can relate, and Drache is an accomplished writer. She ably intertwines life’s humorous, absurd, sad and tender moments, as well as interjecting the occasional metaphysical presence in good Yiddish folktale fashion. Barbara/Drache has much worthwhile to impart.

^TOP