THE JOYLAND BLOG

For the past couple weeks, I have been wanting to blog about the Globe and Mail’s summer of the short story series — especially when I saw the Joyce Carol Oates “EdickinsonRepliLuxe” post — but with strike talk, I held off. [Does third party commentary count as scabbing now? bjd]

By now, everyone reading our Joyland blog has probably also noticed that the Globe is doing a bang-up job on their short story selections. They’re running one short story every Saturday until Labour Day. Their rationale? Summer is short. Their tactic is to post classics, such as Leo Tolstoy and Herman Melville, alongside work by contemporary writers like David Bezmozgis and Joyce Carol Oates.

I have a real soft spot for this particular Oates’ story. I read it last year when it came out in her collection Wild Nights: Stories about the last days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. Oates often gets at the obscene in a subdued way, so that you don’t feel pervy for reading it, but then of course in the end you do. She’s tricky that way. And “EdickinsonRepliLuxe” is possibly the best story from this collection. The story is about a husband and wife who purchase “a brilliantly rendered mannikin empowered by a computer program,” which in this case distills the essence of Emily Dickinson and puts it into a form or oversize doll that looks and moves like her. Husband and wife are entertained by Emily, bicker over her, compete for her attention, and, as you might expect, come to ends because of her.

For me, what “EdickinsonRepliLuxe” does is remind the reader of how much can be achieved in the short story form and exactly why it is so necessary to our larger canon. The story allows a writer a place to experiment. One would be hard-pressed to write a novel about an Emily Dickinson android, but a short story…this can be done! Am I forever changed for having now envisioned this long-dead poet in the role of an entertaining — if withdrawn — robot, a possible sex doll, a computer-generated scribbler? Yes.

Also in the Globe’s series is the well-timed reprint of “Tapka” from David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories. As you know, Bezmozgis’ film Victoria Day is currently playing in Canadian theatres, having made its debut at Sundance. Victoria Day is both written and directed by Bezmozgis, and fascinating in that it’s a movie that functions much like a short story: limited time frame (one week in 1988), limited number of characters (a handful of teens and their parents living in North York), exploring the emotions and fallout of a single event (the disappearance of a teenager after a Bob Dylan concert) to maximum impact. A coming of age story, the plot arc is very simple, but the emotions are complex.

There are a lot of lessons in the film for writers too, like the way the lead teen, Ben Spektor (Mark Rendall), will only speak to his Russian-Canadian parents in English. They question and converse with him in Russian, but consistently he answers in English. The boy’s subtle refusal to speak in Russian drops a barrier in the relationship. The only time his father (played by Sergiy Kotelenets) confronts him in English is when he is angry. Nice. Here, the use of English becomes an exclamation mark. It is easy to imagine these kinds of dynamics playing out on the page.

Victoria Day moves deliberately, almost in real time, and Bezmozgis uses almost all unknown actors, with the exception of Mark Rendall (Charlie Bartlett). In a stunning performance, Rendall carries the film’s emotionality on his face for the full 90 minutes. I didn’t feel the complete catharsis of the film upon viewing it — it is one of those movies you walk around with for days, weeks, afterward. What is more interesting to me than the film’s immediate impact is the way that scenes or moments from it continue to pop up in one’s consciousness, almost like a memory of something real, something that happened here. Remember that time we all went down to Ontario Place to search for that boy? Bezmozgis has found that sweet spot where one’s own experience of the film merges with the film to linger on, uncanny.

The Globe and Mail short story series is well-timed, but more than that, it does a service to writers. It tells publishers (and the public) that the short story is a viable form. Writers, of course, have always known this, but since most writers don’t fund their own collections the reinforcement can’t hurt.