House of Anansi, 2008
Read by Susan Briscoe
Many of the stories in The Withdrawal Method feature some version of a young male failing to achieve heroic status. Generally, the young man seems a nice-enough guy — a book store clerk, a daycare or social worker, the kind of guy who doesn’t like to fight; the disappointed party is a child or a woman with fairly reasonable expectations; and the required noble deed is perhaps no more demanding than not falling asleep on the job, not accelerating towards a child on the road, or not watching what you’re pretty sure is child porn. The moral inadequacy of these characters, therefore, raises uneasy questions – which Pasha does not attempt to answer – about the male psyche and our socially constructed expectations of men.
The first story, “The Slough”, which claims some degree of autobiographical status by identifying its narrator as Pasha, nevertheless maintains an emotional distance from the reader with the narrator’s unlikely belief that his girlfriend is about to lose her entire skin at once. It then makes a couple of turns back upon itself to veer a little closer towards the pathos of a young woman dying of melanoma, though the narrator’s withdrawal also keeps the reader detached. Other stories frustrate a full engagement too. One, set at three points in the past linked by a failed invention, is too cursory with each to be satisfying. Another relies rather heavily on play-by-play accounts of basketball games to carry meaning. But many of these stories are expertly handled and offer other elements to vary the good-guy-being-not-that-good theme: the setting of “Being Like Bulls”, a near-future Niagara where the falls have dried up, is disturbingly credible, and the subtle shade of humour in “Pet Therapy” works well.
Pasha, however, is at his best with stories about children. He never falters with various children’s points of view, and his development of these uncontrived plots is seamless. “Pushing Oceans In and Pulling Oceans Out” is wonderfully written, and “Big City Girls” is completely convincing. These are strong stories that confront complex, irresolvable moral problems. Definitely worth reading.
