Fiction Review
The Old Blue Couch and Other Stories
by Seymour Mayne
Toronto ON: Ronald P. Frye, 2012
119pp. $15
Reading Seymour Mayne’s collection of short stories, The Old Blue Couch, brought forth images of discarded and forgotten couches, clothing, and books you can see lining Toronto streets daily. In Mayne’s collection, each of these items has its own story and fabricated history, drawing his narrators into false promises of renewal, longevity, and immortality. Showcasing the everyday lives of material items from the points of view of their admirers, Mayne’s work gathers a rummage sale of memories together and collapses them each into shadow boxes filled with nostalgia and an anxious anticipation of the future.
The collection’s title piece introduces us to a husband and his old blue couch. The couch serves to remind the protagonist of the potential unknown life of domestic items used and abused. The narrator believes that a “bond of pain [has] stitched [he and the couch] together in a new fraternity,” and the couch becomes the narrator’s new family while he begins to slowly ostracize his own. His couch, he is convinced, has survived wars, immigration, and displacement and has been owned by great leaders and artists; however, what makes the couch, and this story, eerily reminiscent of our contemporary moment is the narrator’s refusal to let the worn out couch go. It’s clearly in need of restoration or, according to his wife, a funeral, and yet the narrator holds onto the couch despite its nefarious power over him. The narrator’s attachment to the couch becomes a metaphor for a political nation that requires change, and a citizen’s refusal to see what harm tattered policies bestow upon others. He holds onto the couch at the expense of his wife, friends, and sanity turning this story of domestic bliss into a cautionary tale about the perils of refusing to live in the everyday moment.
Such refusals mark the collection overall, leaving each protagonist caught between their own delusions of grandeur and superiority, and the generations of selflessness they have been raise by. The majority of the narratives weave together intricate threads of Jewish history and religious tensions between Christianity and Judaism. Both “Goldberg’s Tallit” and “Seymours International” negotiate personal desires for glory and power alongside religious doctrines that profess humbleness and altruism. In “Goldberg’s Tallit” we meet the narrator on Yom Kippur morning (The Day of Atonement); while he is supposed to be concentrating on prayer, forgiveness, fasting, and renewal he is completely overcome with feelings of accusation and hatred for his fellow neighbor, Sheldon Goldberg. Convinced Goldberg has switched his own prayershawl with the narrator’s, a wild tale is woven where the narrator’s paranoia and selfishness begins to reveal the fact that not only is the narrator simply going through the motions of faith—doing his “bodily errand” as he says—but he is also a hypocrite, succumbing to stealing on the holiest day the year. Similarly, “Seymours International” introduces readers to a group of men bonded by their namesake: Seymour. When a non-Jewish Seymour shows up amidst the group he is embraced and becomes an honorary member, regardless of his Christian upbringing. The group’s mission, however, is anything but charitable. Rather, Seymours International becomes a corporation based entirely upon ensuring that Seymour, as a name, continues to live on in the generations to come. Calamity ensues when the Christian Seymour decides that he is a prophet—a Jewish one nonetheless—and he chooses another name. These two stories reveal what happens when devout people lose the plot of their own religious devotions, choosing instead selfish power over compassion for others.
The only tale with a palpable female presence, “Carmella from Tel Aviv” introduces us to Carmella, a young woman disenchanted with Israeli politics and with the malicious treatment of the Palestinians. This is the most political and well-written story of the collection. In it Carmella has come to Canada to take pictures of synagogues and churches, desperately seeking to hold onto something that she cannot seem to find in Israel. Her cousin Morty, who is completely weary of Carmella and her politics, is tasked with taking care of the girl on her Canadian travels. Believing his cousin to be a “self-hating” Jewish woman who doesn’t understand the necessity of elitism in Israel, he dismisses her political sympathies for the Palestinians, and, most importantly, her belief that Israel has “sinned” and continues to sin daily. Unsympathetic to her whims, Morty is convinced Carmella could easily abandon her Jewish faith and become Christian, something he sees as a weakness. Drawing together Mayne’s concentration on unsympathetic male characters Morty comes to represent all of the men in the book; he cannot see the hypocrisy of his own actions in connection to the doctrines of his religion and thus judges Carmella blindly, without thought or introspection. As Morty and all of the men in The Old Blue Couch prove—whether their attachment is to material items like a comforter, or a bottle of scotch, or to faith and churches and synagogues—there needs to be an honest sustenance to attachments and devotions or they become frivolous.
Beautifully bound and presented, The Old Blue Couch provides us with a rare snapshot of unlikable characters. In this collection it is not a case of good people making bad decisions in a moment of crisis; rather, this collection provides us with clear images of bad people doing hypocritical things under the guise of an almost possessive and materialistic understanding of faith.
