Heather Birrell

“You’ll never succeed in pleasing everybody,” says Geraldine, a grieving widower waiting in a doctor’s office for a mammogram. She says this to Jerome, an insouciant teen who is waiting as well, in this case for his mother, who has had a mastectomy. Geraldine is not entirely certain herself whether her advice is something she still believes, or whether it is just something someone told her once. It doesn’t matter. Jerome is having none of it. “‘I got mad hope,’ Jerome said. ‘Mad hope.’” In the face of everything, perhaps only mad hope will do.

Heather Birrell’s stories are not all filled with mad hope but hope does burble up here and there, insistently. At her best, for example in her award winning “BriannaSusannaAlana”, the voices of young urban girls and women are precise and nuanced and full of life. Children, longing for children, loss of children, and loss of innocence feature prominently. In “Wanted Children”, depression following a miscarriage is compounded by a misguided exotic vacation that was intended to shake the couple out of their disappointment. In “Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning”, a young mother frets over her three children as recompense, perhaps, for losing her own mother at a young age. In “Frogs”, a physician who had been co-opted by the Ceaușescu progeny programme in Romania confronts his guilt and repentance teaching high school biology in Canada years later.

Few of these stories strike new narrative ground but they are all rich in their way. The three stories in the middle of the collection — “Dominoes”, “Bye Bye Flangle Nuts”, and “Dingbat” — tread the same ground and indeed involve the same set of incidents (death of the father and estrangement of the family) from different perspectives. They aren’t linked per se. Rather they feel more like three separate attempts at ferreting out some truth from those events. The iterations being both a sign perhaps of failure, as well as continuing hope that the author will finally get it right. And that probably is as mad of a hope as one could hope for. Gently recommended.… (more)