Nightwood Editions, 2007
Read by Laura Roberts
“Dirty pool halls, greasy restaurants, suburban skateboarder showdowns, and dangerous drug dens—some things in life just aren’t very subtle,” begins the back cover blurb for Christian McPherson’s collection of short stories, Six Ways to Sunday. True enough, these stories are about the gritty parts of Canadian cities that most of us like to avoid in our day-to-day lives, but often crave in our fictional outings. The problem is that for all their promises of stark realism, these people and places don’t quite ring true.
Maybe it’s McPherson’s dialogue, which often seems to academically eschew contractions, as though urban dwellers never use slang or improperly form sentences. One bit that comes off sounding particularly odd is the exchange between an anxious Anglo, carting a body from Ottawa into Gatineau, and the French-speaking cop who ought to bust him. I found myself wondering why the francophone cop suddenly begins inserting “dem” and “dere” towards the end of his previously perfectly bilingual speech, or adding a questioning “yes?” to the end of all his statements.
Peculiar speech patterns aside, the stories are entertaining and keep the reader turning pages to find out what happens next. McPherson often twists a seemingly predictable ending or cuts the story off just before the denouement can occur, jolting the jaded reader out of her fictional expectations. Recurring characters like the Squid and Two Seconds become more likeable the more we see of them, but McPherson thwarts us there, too, steering us away from this younger crowd with dreams towards the older, married set of characters whose dreams have long been deferred. Nevertheless, things end on a positive—though slightly cheesy—note with a joke about silver linings, as some of our protagonists make their escape from the artistic meat grinder of metropolitan Canada.
So although these stories don’t quite crack my jaded city heart in any new places, they’re worth definitely reading for the naïvely sincere Squid and his shit luck with women in “The Pineapple Thai Village” and “Lucifer’s Tavern,” not to mention the guy who picks up a clown at the Beer Store in “Clown Face.”
