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Two collections of short stories that have recently come my way, different as they are when one begins to compare them story by story, are even more so when one considers the net effect of each book as a single unit. No doubt this phenomenon has at least something to do with the circumstances of their publication. The one, Stewart Moore's The Slow Tide of Nightfall, has been assembled by the author's widow and represents the extent of her late husband's work within the genre; the other, Ian Roy's People Leaving, is a first book by a twenty-nine-year-old. Much as one might wish to receive a coherent last testament in the work of Moore, it is Roy's collection that maintains the clearer focus.

Stewart Moore's background is rich in variety including, among other things, experience in social work and a distinguished teaching career in that discipline at the University of Windsor, which may partially explain the singular nature of his fiction. Though certain groups of stories in Moore's collection more or less fit together, it is difficult to aptly characterize the content of the work as a whole except in terms of its overall refusal to coalesce. Let's just say, to begin, that the stories are "original," which can be good or bad, or (usually) both. Take, as a brief example, the book's opener, "The Last Halloween." A father yells at his son and, as a result, the son denies his father what would have been their last Halloween outing together. The son, as adult and narrator, now tells the story as an expression of his remorse for, in effect, punishing his father more than he deserved. While this story is very short and simple, and probably not one of Moore's best, it does hint at a tendency toward the marginally strange, the slightly off-centre. The reader is, in fact, likely to have been better prepared for quite a different plot, one in which the scolding father ends off by forbidding his son to go out for Halloween.

The story that follows, "Zinty Tinty," is similar to its forerunner, both in its originality and in that it takes as its subject a son's efforts to come to grips with guilt suffered over disappointing his father. When father visits the site of the house that son Dane is building, he establishes what will serve as the story's controlling image: "On the rafters there he wrote his predictions, what Dane would become: his father's way of shouting from the housetops his confidence in him" (10-11). Though the symbolism seems a bit heavy-handed (Would anyone actually write predictions on rafters?), it is characteristic of the fresh creativity that runs through all Moore's work. The father's "predictions"are in fact ambitions, and as is on average the case with parental ambitions, they are only partially fulfilled.

Then the life Dane wanted for himself collided with the vision his father had for so many years nurtured for him. In that collision Dane veered off and it was never the same again. It was as if Dane had abandoned his father, and all that he had accomplished was forgotten, was nothing. (19)

Dane has a successful stint in the military, as his father predicts, but subsequently prefers to resume building houses rather than strive towards his father's ultimate lower middle-class dream that his son will become a lawyer.

There is a lot going on in this story, including an irony subtly embedded in the plot: it is really Dane's father who inadvertently sets his son on the road to carpentry rather than the one that will lead to law school, for it is his father's decision to leave home that inspires Dane to build a house for his mother, the same house in which, ironically, his father goes on to document his wishes. The implications of these facts, along with the story's other dimensions and nuances, are explored by a means that may come as close as anything to constituting a stylistic hallmark in Moore's stories - highly analytical third-person narration of the sort represented in the passage quoted above, and here:

So many forces warred within Dane. His parents' fighting had a devastating impact on him. He sometimes wondered if it was that childhood experience which led him, even if unconsciously, to choose a mate who too willingly helped him repeat the strifes of his parental home. Further, his parents' conflicting aspirations for him confused and tore him: mother for security and routine and father for risk and adventure. He did have thoughts of going to university, or moving out on his own, away from his parents. Perhaps he overestimated his importance to them, to his own and their detriment. But when he saw the chance to build the house he wanted, and to provide a home for his separated mother at the same time, he did not hesitate. (20)

Though some readers might consider these passages not worth reading, let alone quoting, they do show, for better or for worse, the peculiar tenor of Moore's writing: it is concerned at least as much with analysis of character and action as it is with depiction of these same elements. For my part, I see this intelligent analytical narrative as enriching the stories more often than it detracts from them, and, in any case, I find myself unable to imagine some Platonic realm in which these same stories would exist without it. As well, it is the presence of this narrative style in more than one, but not all, of the stories that tends to provide at least some measure of unity in a collection that derives its overall effect from the shifting degrees of linkage and disjunction between its various pieces.

Discursive as the book is, it is probably fair to say that it is easier to make clear connections within the subject matter of the work as a whole than it is to follow, let alone reconcile, its changes in tone - especially in cases where the tone appears to alternate arbitrarily between seriousness and humour. About two thirds of the collection is given over to stories that, like the first two pieces, explore relationships between fathers and sons through a notably dignified and psychologically deep narrative discourse. However, the third story, "Rosie," while continuing the father and son theme, stands apart in both tone and style from what the reader has seen thus far, as is clearly visible in its opening sentences.

Back through the wife-lost hours of it, he went down into the thickened night. He had wakened heavily wet, struggling from some now grim now fair scene and her in it cooing shrieking lashing and then heavy breathing gasping, and always caring alter caring for his whimtokens of need . . . . (22)

In this light piece, the widowed father embarks upon a brief journey to see his married son, during which he will make every possible effort not to reach his destination - by walking in the wrong direction, boarding the wrong bus, and getting into pointless (but very funny) protracted conversations. Finally, when in spite of all he reaches his son's house, he turns away from the door without ringing the bell. While "Rosie's" subject links the story to "The Last Halloween" and "Zinty Tinty," the attitude in which it is told would suggest a closer alliance with the volume's concluding pieces, "It Could Be the Ocean" and "Mona."

Whether it could possibly ever have been part of Moore's intention or not, the amusing "Rosie" creates a certain mood, and sets up certain expectations, which, at least initially, the next story does nothing to dislodge. For "Flight 210" opens with an equally absurd and potentially humourous situation. Just as the father in "Rosie" makes various unsuccessful efforts to thwart his own stated intentions, so Marla, in "Flight 210," will apparently do her utmost to ruin her marriage in the face of her husband's equally determined efforts to maintain it. However, in this case the potential for humour is only briefly exploited.

At first she drank vodka. "It'll leave me breathless," she slurred. Like choosing a lion for a house pet, he [her husband] thought, because its soft-padded feet would be noiseless across the kitchen floor. (39)

Marla's drinking becomes much less an object of amusement as the story progresses and comes to involve the child Toddy (though his name harks back to his mother's drinking in a way that, unfortunately, may continue to be viewed as amusing).The narrator then offers a compelling analysis of a situation that might otherwise seem purely absurd. Marla, according to the narrator, treats what could be a good marriage as hopeless for the simple reason that her previous marriage was indeed hopeless. Her husband Channing, on the other hand, stays in the marriage with Marla well past the point of normal human endurance because his parents' marriage did not work out and he is determined to do better.

And now, although they lived together, they each lived in a different marriage: she in her first marriage and he his parents' marriage. (43)

This incisive comment by the narrator signals a change in tone. We are now no longer dealing with the kind of parody of human action seen earlier in "Rosie," but rather with a situation that, while it may still seem absurd, has psychologically credible motivation behind it: humanity is absurd in precisely the way described, and the reader grieves for the characters accordingly.

In other words, not only is there an inconsistency of tone as one follows from one story to the next, but also, in this case, an inconsistency within a particular story. This inconsistency appears more striking when one views the collection as a whole and finds that the initial stages of "Flight 210" have more in common in tone with the otherwise-unrelated preceding story ("Rosie") than they do with the three subsequent stories exploring the relationship between Channing and Toddy after Channing and Marla's marriage finally ends. For the latter stories are nothing if not sentimental, and while this may not be a defect in itself, an audience reading the book sequentially may find the sentimentality slightly disorienting in light of what precedes it.

Although the Channing and Toddy stories are powerful, there are other problems with them. "Long Lake," for example, is a beautiful piece of writing that has as its only apparent ambition to provide a detailed description of father and son playing together at the lake. Though it could not really be said to stand on its own as a story, it is linked with what follows by an intriguing string of metaphors: "Now, these years later, the father is the ripple, the fish, and the far shore" (66). Elsewhere, the connection between these stories (which are set at distinctly different points in the history of the father and son relationship) is more clumsily handled and the generally perceptive and sensitive narrator sounds like a tired social worker dutifully including the cliches of popular, "self-help" psychology in an overdue report.

Channing has been remarried for two years, ending a fifteen year stretch of batching it for the two of them.Todd has returned from military service and is living at home again. Yet their relationship "beyond compare," as a neighbour put it, has a flaw, a strange reluctance of either of them to share their concerns or worries with
the other. Their very closeness exposes their sensitivities and seems a barrier to sharing pain. They share laughter and hopes, this father
and son, but are painfully reticent about fears and sadness, screening and shaping them to protect each other. (88)

For that matter, there is a sense in which the majority of the pieces in The Slow Tide of Nightfall, with their unrelenting analysis, could be viewed as "case studies of fictional characters" rather than as "stories." However, it is fair to note, once again, that Moore's field was indeed social work, and reasonable to view any idiosyncrasies in the collection that may result from this experience as an inseparable part of the uniqueness of the author's perspective, voice, style, and overall conception of the task of writing fiction.

While The Slow Tide of Nightfall stands as a brief but impressive encapsulation of Moore's accomplishments within the genre of short fiction, young Ottawa writer Ian Roy, in the stories that make up People Leaving, has produced work that one hopes will represent just the beginning of a prolific career. Drawn from a necessarily limited number of years, this collection, like Moore's, is distinguished in part, no doubt, by circumstance. Whereas Moore's collection, through the sporadic repetition of characters, encourages the reader to engage in a somewhat unfruitful search for unity, Roy achieves a sharp thematic focus that is both unselfconscious and integral to the work. One gets the sense that the stories were written by someone who was in every sense the same person on each occasion: the pieces hang together in a number of ways, three of which immediately come to mind.

First, and most obviously, Roy's stories are connected by the image of "people leaving": they all deal with transition and/or separation in one form or another. Second, the stories are all very much the same type of modernist, realist fiction, in which Roy proves, each time, that there is yet life. Third, the stories are all concerned with the exposing, and exploding, of stereotypes, and it is this purpose that, more than anything, drives each piece and unifies the collection. People "leave" when stereotypes no longer hold and cliches fail to provide sustenance.

It is perhaps unfortunate that Roy's collection begins with the story "Dancing," where the author initially does such a good job of creating a narrator who speaks and lives in stereotypes that the "non-reviewing" reader, who has the option of bailing out at any point, may choose to do so two sentences into the second paragraph.

It was supposed to be a Christmas party. But with my husband, Geoff, and his buddies organizing it, it turned out to be just another night out at their regular haunting ground, The Crossroads Bar and Grill. (13)

But the narrative takes a different turn when the narrator-wife ends up dancing with an older man, and by means of this dancing ends up in a morally precarious position, which the conclusion represents her effort to sort out.

He's probably just a lonely old guy. His wife's probably dead and his family's long gone. And he just needed to talk to someone. So I was helping him. Doing a good deed. And that makes it okay. It does. I'm sure it does. (20)

From an unpromising start, an interesting story has unfolded, and Roy has skilfully created the illusion that it has done so in spite of the narrator, whereas in reality much of the interest is in observing that rather "limited" viewpoint wrestling with the significance of the events described.

Though Roy's collection begins with the device of the unreliable narrator, the author has other means of showing that situations are not as simple as they may initially appear, and cannot be reduced to, or contained by, any single perspective. In the case of two stories, the dictum stated by the title is called into question - but at the same time not fully invalidated. In "God Loves a Broken Heart," the protagonist, on the brink of middle age, inhabits a small world principally populated by her demanding mother ("She looked like someone's grandmother, which, to her chagrin, she wasn't" (39)) and cheating, cliche-spouting husband ("Lordy, lordy, look who's forty" (45)). While Claudia's driving of her husband's truck into the familial home is an emotionally logical ending to the story, it is not one that has any necessary bearing on the title. Similarly, in "Choose the Woman," while a writer's exhortation to his son to choose wife and family over pursuit of an uncertain literary career might be seen as validated by his own subsequent suicide, the story concludes with the narrator-son imagining his father "wishing, maybe, that he had chosen the woman instead, or his writing, or really, anything else at all" (29), suggesting, possibly, that his father's problem was that he was plagued by doubt over the choices he had made, not that he had made "wrong" choices.

If we define "cliche" as applying to ideas as well as expressions, then the cliches that Roy seems most concerned to call into question, though he seldom if ever uses these exact phrases, are those of the "happily married" and the "happy family." In the title story, a disgruntled husband encounters a woman in a bar and fabricates a story in which his still-living family are killed in a car crash. He describes his wife as having been "nice, kind, loving," "a great mom," and "a great wife" (84). In "Drinking," a man at the brink of his marriage's dissolution is given one last moment of hope when he observes his wife from outside their apartment.

I looked across the street and saw Liz up in our kitchen window. She was doing the dishes and gazing up at the moon. I wondered - if I was seeing her for the first time, would I think she was the kind of woman I'd want to marry? Was she the kind of woman that could make me happy? The more I looked, the more I thought, yes, yes she is. (102)

The outcome of the plot suggests that the ideal embodied in the above vision will not stand up under closer scrutiny, and that, as in the somewhat more ambiguous "It's About Us," where the optimism implied in such ideals ("He really was a wonderful man, so full of love for them both" (166)) is also called into question by other elements of the story, human dynamics are too problematic and too complex to be relegated to conventional expressions and ways of seeing.

These stereotyped ways of experiencing the world are shown by Roy as nurturing of self-delusion and a communal unwillingness to look beyond the surface, as in "The Sad Dark Eyes of a Dead Dog," where a violent confrontation between suburban children over the disposal of a dog's body appears to parallel more latent hostilities in the marriages and other relationships between their adult counterparts. It is only the children who seem able to acknowledge, let alone deal with, the problem of the dead dog.

In short, Roy's stories demonstrate time and time again that cliched models of what life is and how it should be lived don't do justice to life itself. All the stories deal with relationships, and while the ones unmentioned thus far do not necessarily deal with marriage, there is at least one that can be seen to question, by implication, widely-held perceptions of that institution. "A Beautiful Day for a Funeral" hauntingly shows a young woman playing perfectly the part of the bride at her wedding rehearsal ("She had appeared warm and loving towards the young groom - whispering into his ear and then giggling, and placing small kisses on his cheek....(107)) but failing to show for the wedding. "Everything as It Should Be," on the other hand, does not allude to marriage but still manages to measure the doomed relationship shown in the story against an unrealistic ideal by means of the title. Finally, while "Everything as It Should Be" is perhaps the best rival for "People Leaving" as title of Roy's collection, "The Nature of Maps" might also have served the purpose. In the context of the latter story, maps are the inevitably incomplete guides by which we live; "a flattened representation of the earth"(147) is shown to miss the essentials. Marty, a geography graduate, has learned from studying maps that the spot where he and his girlfriend are walking one night was once the site of a cemetery, but they have not told him that the setting also conceals a mugger, nor do they tell him what effect a chance encounter may have on his relationship.

To sum up, Roy gives the impression of having on some level known where his stories were headed as a volume, whereas Moore appears not to have had that privilege. This observation no doubt has to do both with the posthumous nature of Moore's collection, and with its status as a life's work in the genre. While Roy's book may signal that a part of the author's literary career is now complete, Moore's signifies an end that is all too arbitrary. However, short story collections are largely read for the merit of individual stories, and by that criterion both of the books reviewed are highly recommended.