The Education of Aubrey McKee
by Alex Pugsley
Biblioasis, 318 pages, $24.95
ISBN: 978-1-77196-583-5
It’s been a wait for fans of Alex Pugsley’s Aubrey McKee, the first of five autobiographical novels. In The Education of Aubrey McKee, the setting shifts from Halifax, where Aubrey grows up, to Toronto, where he attends university and has his first serious relationship. As he did in Halifax, Aubrey is attracted to clever and creative people, while being more of an intense observer of life.
Like the initial novel, this second one is comprised of connected parts, in this case, three of widely varying lengths. Aubrey begins his story by introducing the three characters he will focus on: “We arrived in the city from places far flung—Halifax, Selkirk, Napanee—and settled somewhere between Kipling and Kennedy. . . . Calvin Dover, Gudrun Peel, Quincy Tynes, and I were such worshipful believers. Everyone invented themselves. . . . With various destinies available, just who would we become?” And then he goes on to develop these characters and his relationship with them.
The first part, “The Calvin Dover Show,” is the shortest at 24 pages. Calvin has made it in television in California, and Aubrey says, “I loved Calvin Dover. He was absurd and gruff and brilliant and responsible for a large part of my adult brain. I was one of the writers on this sketch comedy series The Calvin Dover Show, which ran for one under-the-radar season on a Canadian cable network.” Calvin visits Toronto for the Fringe Festival and spends time with Aubrey in a crazed alcohol-fueled few hours. They had met at the U. of T. and remained friends. Clearly the three characters around whom Pugsley arranges the book are profoundly influential in Aubrey’s life.
As expected, the novel deploys the same blend of comedy and tragedy as does Aubrey McKee, but both extremes are more muted than they were in the first novel, perhaps to show that adult emotions are strong but do not completely overwhelm as they can for young people, at least in Aubrey’s group of friends and acquaintances. And no character can possibly be as remarkable as Cyrus Mair in the first novel.
The second part, “The Poet,” is about Gudrun, Aubrey’s longtime girlfriend, another remarkable person. Gudrun is working unsuccessfully on a Ph.D. in English and trying to write poetry. She struggles with some mental health issues. Aubrey is besotted with her, and he tries to do whatever he can to help her as she changes directions (and herself). This part has 29 chapters, each beginning with one of Gudrun’s poems or a note by her or some other bit of information like a recipe, and clocks in at over 200 pages. Aubrey is a graduate student in chemistry, and he will also change over the years they are together. The world the characters inhabit is full of popular culture, intellectual banter, and a drive to find themselves in a challenging world.
Pugsley stays away from a year-by-year exploration of Aubrey’s life. Instead, it’s people and events that shape the narrative, so the novel has much more the feel of autobiography as memory is capricious. Given the space devoted to Gudrun, it’s obvious how important she is to Aubrey. An she’s important as a character apart from Aubrey. Her background makes her success even more remarkable as she came from bad family circumstances and makes her way on her own because of her intelligence and work ethic. Unlike Aubrey she does not come from privilege.
The third section, “A Night with Quincy Tynes,” jumps into the future from the second, and also links to Aubrey’s youth in Halifax. Pugsley writes this section as a three-act play. Readers of the first novel will remember Tynes: “Some will remember him as Sneaky Tynes, friend of my drug-dealing youth, and when we last saw him, Sneaky Tynes was walking off with sixty-three joints, stolen from me, on the Wanderers Grounds in Halifax in 1979. Vagaries have been manifold since that day and I will fill them in as we move along, but now let’s get to the present dramatics. . . . Quincy Tynes is Black Nova Scotian, 48 years old, with an open face and broad shoulders, and if there is a hero in this period of my education, that hero is Quincy Tynes.” Quincy is a true friend to Aubrey.
While it’s not necessary to read Aubrey McKee before reading this book, I highly recommend it, and it’s wonderful. And it’s also about Aubrey’s education—how and why he reacts to the people and world around him. Pugsley is a genius at focusing on what matters in life—friends, love, self-development, creativity, and a large whack of kindness. He explores these topics in an erudite manner that moves between the basic grittiness of life and the heights of emotion.
Open Season: Stories
by Shaukat Ajmeri
Mawenzi House, 164 pages, $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-77415-155-6
Shaukat Ajmeri was born and educated in India and now makes Canada his home. He uses his experience to develop stories about cultural issues and the problems people face, focusing on class, gender, and caste. The details indicate a writer who has lived experience of some of the situations and an ability to imagine the others and present them in clear, direct prose.
Ajmeri opens the collection with a story about the power of reading, “The Reading Ritual,” which is set in both India and Canada. The story is narrated by Priya, who is invited to visit the new next-door neighbour, Sharda Devi. When Priya and her older sister take up the invitation, they are exposed to a new world of books. They have grown up in a family that discourages reading apart from schoolwork. Their aunt says, “Life is the best teacher . . . . Books only confuse the mind—fill you up with ideas and knowledge for which you have no use.” But Sharda Devi says, “Words want to be read, they long to be rescued by us. I buy books because I love words and the stories they tell, and by reading them I set them free.” The girls manage to convince their mother of the value of reading, to the extent that she too wants to do her “part in freeing the words.” But freedom becomes elusive for Priya who tries to avoid a predatory servant and avoids going to her neighbour’s house. And she stops reading because of the association. Ajmeri takes Priya to Canada and then back to India as an adult who finally visits Sharda Devi again, and books play a role. It’s a beautiful story about possibility and loss and recovery.
Cultural practices follow a family to Canada in “All Cut Up,” the title of which alludes to a devastating procedure done of girls—genital mutilation. In this story the family is in conflict over what should happen regarding Zari’s seven-year-old daughter. Zari and Abizer marry in Mumbai and move to Canada, where Zari experiences an unknown freedom. When her mother-in-law comes to live with them, she tries to make Zari stop working and adopt a more traditional role as wife. Zari refuses. Fortunately, Zari had made Abizer promise she could work. When the topic of khatna is raised, the lines are drawn, even though the cost of non-compliance with the traditional practice is the excommunication of the family. Zari stands her ground to protect her daughter. The story beautifully illustrates the collision of different ways of seeing the world.
The range of topics in this collection is wide. In “Saving Grace,” class and caste play a role. Salim, a ten-year-old boy, lives with his extended family in India. He boosts his allowance by helping himself to change in his father’s pocket. When Sugra Bi, a servant, asks for a loan because her husband is sick and in the hospital, Salim’s father refuses, saying the husband is “a liability. He drinks all day.” Salim wants to help, but has nowhere near enough money. The most memorable example of the difference between the family and the servant is that when she cannot come one day, Salim’s aunts have to wash the dishes themselves, and one comments, “How did that poor woman use freezing water without a complaint?”
All twelve of these stories offer insight into the human condition in varying conditions. Ajmeri is an astute observer of inequity and injustice, and his stories are sensitive and educational about many aspects of cultural struggles.
Window of Tolerance
by Susanna Cupido
Tidewater Press, 260 pages, $24.95
ISBN: 978-1-990160-36-3
Susanna Cupido’s debut novel, Window of Tolerance, illustrates what happens when people cannot stay in the optimal zone of emotional response. If stress becomes too great, people may respond by being overwhelmed or by shutting down. Being able to stay within the window is critical.
At the age of twenty-six, Marta struggles with debilitating depression, which she unfortunately attends to with substance abuse, of both alcohol and illicit drugs. The third person narrator’s perspective is limited to Marta’s, so the novel is developed from the perspective of a clinically depressed person who is floundering: “That was the thing about depression. It had taken the past first, and then it had taken the future, and then she had been left out at sea, stranded in the vanishing present.” After the loss of her job during covid when entertainment spaces were largely closed, Marta has to move back home to the apartment where her father, sister, and little nephew live, and the only room available is the laundry room. She is also grieving the death of her mother.
When the novel opens, Marta is nearing the end of her twenty-session allotment of group therapy. It does not go well. One of the other participants, Thomas, arrives with bare muddy feet, and appears to be having hallucinations. Marta tries to help Thomas by washing his feet and suggesting he talk to her. But Thomas is quite far gone into his own world. That doesn’t stop Marta from doggedly trying to find Thomas when he is kicked out of his apartment and disappears into street life. Most of the novel revolves around Marta’s efforts to track down Thomas, and as it’s winter in Halifax, anyone attempting to survive on the streets is suffering. The lack of care for the mentally ill, addicted, or poor is a blight on contemporary society, and Susanna Cupido shows the damage wrought. The situation of another regular at the therapy sessions is replayed across the country every day:
[Shaw’s] name was on the waitlist for a therapist, a psychiatrist, a pastoral counsellor—nobody ever called him back. . . . Sertraline thinned his thoughts, fluoxetine clotted them; he took lithium for suicidal ideation, propranolol for the tremors that lithium gave him, and valium for his anxiety about the propranolol. And every time the carousel of the counselling centre tried to wheel Shaw back out into the world, he hit another crisis and got sent right back. Shaw is Marta’s friend, and he’s one of the therapy group who manages to hold down a job.
Marta also has a job as a night janitor at the university, at least for a while, but her commitment to locating Thomas disrupts her job performance, and she gets fired. She is taken in by Shaw after she leaves her family home. Along with her mission to find Thomas, she spends time trying to figure out what she is going to do with her life. Cupido doesn’t flinch from showing the harm Marta is doing to herself. The amount of vomiting that happens in this novel is remarkable—and of course disturbing.
Clearly there are no easy cures for depression. Marta grapples with what she sees as criticism from her sister, who is herself trying to be a responsible parent to a child she had at fifteen. Marta’s father is loving and caring to his daughters and his grandson. But even with a supportive family, Marta struggles. The experience of a depressed person feels realistic. Perhaps the most compelling part of the novel is that Cupido makes it clear that a person with depression is not just the disease but has many other attributes, kindness and generosity being paramount in Marta and in Shaw, at least to people other than themselves. It’s evident that the self-destructive behaviour has to stop, but it’s also evident why people succumb to the lure of blotting out their negative feelings.
It’s not surprising that the novel often seems disjointed. The characters are living extremely incoherent lives, and there’s no simple fix. But the message of the novel is that while it’s impossible to save everyone, some people may be able to get back into that window of tolerance.
I Left You Behind: Stories
by Nazneen Sheikh
Mawenzi House, 256 pages, $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-77415-180-8
Born in Pakistan, educated in Pakistan and Texas, and now residing in Toronto, Nazneen Sheikh has numerous publications, and her latest collection of short stories demonstrates the range of her experiences. The first ten stories in I Left You Behind are linked, and they could have been the basis for a novel. The next seven have different characters all experiencing the challenges of immigration in various ways.
The opening story, “The Girl on the Rock,” introduces a five-year-old girl who has a favourite rock she loves to sit on. She is a fascinating character: “At five she displays a resolute air. She goes to school and is a precocious reader.” Her father has been involved in the Free Kashmir movement, and he has bad news for his daughter. They have to move to a big city. Its benefit is its location by the sea, and when the tide is out, her rock appears. Her plan is to write stories about the rock and perhaps about “Resistance,” a word her father taught her.
The stories move forward in time from 1949 to 2022, dipping in and out of the girl’s life as she grows up. The second story solidifies the girl’s interest in stories when her aunt visits the family in Karachi and tells her a tale about an evil king. The girl’s response captures the magic of story-telling: “The story did two remarkable things. It transformed the story-teller and the listener. Suddenly the stuffy aunt became magical. This magic was the ability to captivate an audience that did not want the story to end. The girl experiences fear and wonder.” It’s clearly Sheikh’s goal to provide the same magic for her readers.
In “The Eyes of Texas,” the girl wins a scholarship for an exchange and spends her final year of high school in Texas, where she is introduced to the racism of 1961. The American family lives in a segregated neighbourhood, and they have a Black woman to do housework. “Her position was that of maid and household pet. . . . Jhonny Lee had stepped out of the pages of an unwritten American history book and had sparked her curiosity to learn more about this invisible race in the country she was waltzing through.” The waltz stops when she tries to have lunch with a Black student she meets at a another school during a debating competition. One of the teachers from her white school prevents her. The linked stories take the character through marriage, motherhood, and other experiences in Canada where she lives because of her husband’s job. Each slice of life is realistically depicted, with the possible exception of “Seeing Through Green,” in which the main character and her husband are at their summer house on land which was once indigenous. The indigenous people are like the Black people in the Texas story—invisible: “She felt that an entire race of people were [sic] hidden from sight. There was never a sighting even of a canoe on the water and she felt as though her husband spoke of another era or time.” He responds to her concern: “Don’t worry, the pow-wow is next weekend and you will see them all.” The woman realizes she lacks knowledge of the indigenous people, but this story seems forced, more a way to include indigenous issues than to develop character or theme.
Among the mostly unconnected stories, “The Last Martini” is gripping. Xavier is a bartender in an upscale Toronto hotel. He has worked there for decades after immigrating from Jamaica. He started at the bottom, and devotes himself to his job and his small house to the extent that he erases his past. Sheikh does a marvelous job of showing the limitations of Xavier’s life and how an unscrupulous man takes advantage of him. Race is part of the picture, just as it is “The Actress,” in which a woman and her husband adopt a mixed-race girl. Emotional coldness rules the actress’s life as she and her own mother have a dysfunctional relationship in which the daughter feels she is competing with her mother. Hence the adoption. The child is manly raised by her unemployed father, who loves her, but the narrator’s comment about her place in the family is telling: “The vivacious little girl was lively and intelligent, and her racial difference from her parents gave her the cachet of becoming an exotic accessory.” Sheikh excels at broken and unhealthy relationships and how they damage those in them.
I Left You Behind is likely to keep you up reading if you start at bedtime. Nazneen Sheikh is a polished and assured writer with much to offer readers about different experiences in the world for people who move and leave something or someone behind.
Hello, Horse: Stories
by Richard Kelly Kemick
Biblioasis, 236 pages, $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-77196-607-8
Richard Kelly Kemick’s first collection includes stories that have won prizes, and it’s easy to see why. The eleven stories in Hello, Horse are wide-ranging in subject and setting, showing the breadth of Kemick’s interests, while being written in deliriously incisive prose. Often using first person point of view, the stories delve into the utter perplexity of human beings.
The first story, “Perfection,” hurls readers into that perplexity. One technique that Kemick makes great use of is matching scenarios. The grandfather of the narrator’s girlfriend was a hangman for the Nuremberg executions; his mantra is “This world . . . is not fit for man or beast.” The beasts in question are racing dogs. The grandfather is obsessed with them. So is the granddaughter who starts to sabotage one of the dogs because “The perfect season, the perfect career. The perfect dog. It cannot happen.” She has adopted religious beliefs that teach is perfection is achieved, “heaven will cease to exist.” The story compares the faultiness of the Nuremberg gallows and the will to win of a dog named “God Speed.”
When a collection starts with such an amazing story, expectations are built. And Kemick continues to deliver. The problems plaguing young people and their search for meaning in life are common in several stories. In “Gravity,” a teenage couple are expecting a baby. They are utterly clueless about what that means for their lives. The future father, Danny, is more invested in hanging out with his friends and doing drugs although he does acknowledge things will change. His current activity is defacing election billboards and posters for the incumbent, Woodside. Kemick’s sly humour comes through clearly, “Forty-eight hours before the polls opened, our town newsletter broke that Gibbs was cheating on his wife with Olivia who runs Olivia and Paul’s Outdoor Paintball. It was the biggest story the newsletter ran since Sandra Schmirler came in ’95 to cut the ribbon for the rink.” Bad decisions are not confined to the young.
A laugh out loud story is “Sea Change,” in which the “British Columbia Teachers’ Union Pedagogical Conference” is taking place at a resort in Cuba. Anyone with even a faint passing acquaintance with so-called educational conferences will guffaw at the topics offered. The previous conference had simultaneous sessions that resulted in a PR nightmare when “Gamifying Your Classroom (sponsored by Ubisoft) was scheduled at the same time as Decolonizing the Report Card,” and to the surprise of no one paying attention, everyone went for the games. This year there are no simultaneous submissions which means that most people go to one and then head for the bar. Against the scheduling, two teachers contemplate having an affair.
Kemick deploys his meta-fictional chops in “The Unitarian Church’s Annual Young Writer’s Short Story Competition.” Dogs feature in this story as well, and they are obviously important to the author, whose photo online includes a beautiful dog. The narrator/writer is seven months pregnant, and her mother died two weeks ago. She decides to write about a dog breeder named Michelle, who “breeds Great Danes crossed with some sort of Himalayan hound. They stand as tall as young horses and have sagging jowls; their paws are large and round as human skulls. But Michelle also breeds rumours.” The story within the story shows the skill of the girl, likely Janny from “Gravity” as she refers to a fellow student who appears in the title story, “Hello, Horse.”
And just when I thought Kemick had reached the ends of his fictional world, he dazzled again with “Satellite,” a post-apocalyptic story that features children and hockey-playing nuns. Like many of the stories, violence, loss, and heartbreak play a huge role. Friendship is also critical, but it has limits and can be destroyed.
Hello, Horse is remarkable in its diversity and sheer word deployment. Lovers of the short story should get their hand on this collection as soon as possible. Don’t look for a pretty picture of the world. Look for a troubled and real view of human foibles and a mastery of language.