How Did You Sleep?

`The author, while creating a work that is by times whimsical, by times dark, has succumbed to neither sentimentality nor predictability. The story which unfolds is presented to us almost entirely in image and metaphor: a risky undertaking but one that, in the end, leaves the reader satisfied. What has been accomplished here is really quite remarkable.'   -- Jane Urquhart

`Glennon, however, is an inspired and skillful writer. His rhythm is nearly flawless, and I ended up wishing he had written these as prose poems. ``Chrome'' is one story that is beautifully realized: a man awakes to find that everything has a sheen of chrome. The narrator's fascination leads him inward and away from people, towards (ironically) the almost hyper-delicious nature of the visual and sensual. Sometimes the surface of things has its compensations.'   -- Andrew Lesk, Canadian Literature

`Paul Glennon is a rare bird. You would never guess it from his photo on the final page of this debut collection. He stands quite ordinarily under a snowy spruce tree in what could easily be Ottawa, his home since 1975. Contextually Canadianized, he squarely faces the camera, quietly earnest and unthreatening. It's a perfectly expected portrait of a fledgling Canuck writer - and perfectly misleading. This bird's song is complex, refreshingly impudent and previously unknown.

`In One Hand, a man tries to piece together the final weeks of a friend's life from the scribbled notes he has left in an edition of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. The friend, having by his own admission not `an artistic bone in [his] body,' borrows da Vinci's technique of using left-hand, mirror-image writing, in hopes that the left-hand/right-brain neural connection might stimulate his creative side. As his left-hand notes produce involuntary palindromes, anagrams and increasingly mysterious poetry, his right-hand, analytical prose tries to make sense of the psychical Pandora's box he's opened. The final left-hand note offers two riddles that explain the friend's untimely death.

`The Museum of the Decay of Our Love describes a scholar's visit to a Central American history museum. The tale hovers dreamlike between dry events and the inner sparks they ignite. The museum's inert displays, steeped in the mythology of conquest and revolution, become interior metaphors for the man's own failed ambition in love. What feels initially too schematic evolves into a subtle probing of how external things morph into symbols as they enter the mind. The award-winning title story offers a bracing and revealing reconception of a very mundane sort of domestic squabbling. Other tales amuse with their satirical quirks, or wrest attention with deft observation.

`In Self-Loathing Stymies Council,we meet Mayor Nolan Plunge, a grandstanding windbag who bleats to council that self-loathing is `a Nessus's shirt' he wears daily. In Chrome,we're treated to a fluid metallic world evoked with keen imagination and riveting detail.

`Glennon's charms have much to do with his originality, a willingness to veer from the safer formal path. Some stories feel overly glib or disappointingly contrived, and his repeated authorial winking is sometimes too obvious. But the eccentric and penetrating psyche at work here should not be missed.'

    Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.