sewn paper
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Short Stories; FIC 029000
March 2005
192 pages
ISBN-10 0-88984-271-X
EAN-13 9780889842717
$18.95
Lines of Truth and Conversation
Joan Alexander`Joan Alexander is one of those writers who can
find humour in dark places, can sympathize with
her characters even when they are behaving
foolishly, perhaps because they are behaving
foolishly. She understands pain and loss
and longing, but she writes with clarity
and directness. She doesn't sentimentalize,
and she doesn't shy away. Surely, she is a
writer to watch, which is to say, a writer
to read, a writer who rewards reading.'
-- Kim Jernigan, editor of The New Quarterly
Joan Alexander's stories are intelligent and sure-footed investigations of the darker sides of urban life. They begin with familiar situations -- the failure of a business, the death of a loved one, an affair that never gets physical -- but they chart the rough terrain of emotional trauma with unsettling precision.
Many of the stories in Lines of Truth and Conversation deal in the pangs and pumellings of loss in all its guises, but Alexander has a gift for bittersweet humour, and even her most harrowing stories are lightened by a sense of the comic continuity of life.
Alexander's writing reaches its gritty peak in the novella `Five Months', in which a woman responds -- sometimes bravely, sometimes obsessively -- to the failing health of her father-in-law, who is dying of cancer. Full of feeling but free from sentimentality, this is a tale of family politics, strained relationships, disintegration and love:
`In his coffin, Pa looked cleaned-up and shaven, waxen and smooth, shroud-covered, completely changed in a day, with a little plastic baggie tucked in next to him that Davey saw first. In the baggie was some sand, twist-tied and labelled: Dirt from Israel. Five months from beginning to end. Look how fast a person disappears.'
At her best, Alexander writes with a brash, comic, and socially sensitive touch that recalls Carol Shields. This isn't hip, trendy, urban writing. It is unflinching, vivid, and frequently domestic.
`Lines of Truth and Conversation is among the most daring, most original,
and most wholly successful works of fiction I have read in a long while.
Each story in this collection is powerful and quirky and moving in its own
right. But the ultimate beauty of the book, for me, is to be found in its
overall architecture -- how the stories slowly, inexorably fuse into a
unified thematic whole. This is a book that will last.'
-- Tim O'Brien, author of In the Lake of the Woods and Tomcat in Love.
`Joan Alexander's stories have an unbridled urgency and wit, all the usual
restraints loosed to leave only the immediate, uncensored impression. At
once eccentric and precisely observed, they seem to hum with the energy of
everything in life that is unreasonable and can't quite be contained.'
-- Nino Ricci, author of Lives of the Saints
`Joan Alexander's character-driven short fiction is peopled with overly
possessive daughters-in-law, social-climbing rabbis, reluctant mothers
and New Age hairdressers. Her poignant, stylish and witty stories are
worthy of a Robert Altman film, or even Woody Allen at his most acerbic. ...
`I can't think of a fictional equivalent, and that's because her work is
fresh, original and quirky enough to defy categorization. I cannot find
any traces of Alice Munro, Carol Shields or Margaret Atwood here. In
other words, Lines of Truth and Conversation is a stellar debut. Her
stories are readable, her characters are finely honed and her wry sense
of humour gives her too-realistic portraits the levity that all serious
fiction requires.'
-- Patricia Robertson, the Globe & Mail
`A Hanukkah party becomes the bitter sweet setting for a stolen kiss. A midlife
crisis manifests itself when a married woman falls for the man busy posturing -- in
more ways than one -- on the neighbouring mat in her yoga class. A trio of connected
characters struggle to come to grips with the beating death of an acquaintance/friend.
The closing of a small bookstore, forced out of business by the newest mega-bookstore
(with the brilliantly facetious name of Wonderment), becomes a metaphor for a
larger sense of dislocation. Indeed, riding Wonderment's escalator, the protagonist
"panicked, and felt tragedy, the way she did on highways and roller coasters
and sometimes even in department stores." '
-- Heather Birrell, Quill & Quire, March 2005
`The trauma faced by many of the protagonists in this anthology is extreme.
What makes this author's writing powerful is the presentation of these deep-rooted
complexities within her storytelling. Joan Alexander understands human suffering
and, talented writer that she is, expresses it magnificently.'
-- Atara Beck, Jewish Tribune
