Norman Levine (1)

About halfway through this collection I scribbled in my notebook, "maybe Canadian writers excel at the short story simply b/c the gloom of Canlit is most easily digested in small lumps."

That's not entirely fair to Canlit or to Norman Levine, but it does illustrate one problem with this collection, the unrelieved gloom that hangs over many of the stories. It isn't the stories themselves that begin to bury you, it's the fact that they're served up one after another, piled up like so much late show more February snow.

The arrangement of the stories doesn't help. They're grouped more or less chronologically as an overview of Levine's career. Levine's continual use of first-person narrators, the autobiographical basis of his writing, and the surface simplicity of his prose combine poorly with this arrangement; you stop reading the stories as independent, self-contained stories, and they begin to blur together like chapters of a novel that actually doesn't exist. (Note that the Amazon.com description illustrates this very problem, ascribing all the stories to a single narrator.) The collection robs the stories of their individual impact.

Levine's stories need to be approached slowly and singly. This is an excellent collection, but it is one to dip into occasionally, not to read en masse. show less