Best Reads of 2023

Last year I spent a lot of time editing. This is because I was having not one, but two books published.

Editors are demanding and have every right to be, and it’s the author’s job to take their recommendations to heart. We accept on faith that an editor hired by the publisher to whip a manuscript into shape for publication knows their stuff. Which probably includes a thing or two about how many words are actually needed to say something. The author, on the other hand, has agonized over every word and might not take kindly to having some of them, or (more frequently the case) a lot of them, ripped out. A crucial but in the process is that the editor is coming to the manuscript with a fresh and objective outlook and can see things the author is blind to: such as redundancies, overlong constructions and witty turns of phrase that sound good read aloud but serve little purpose and only slow down the narrative.

Two manuscripts passed through the editing process in 2023, but only one got published. I worked on the edits for The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard through spring and early summer. The book was published on November 1, though copies were made available much earlier. Witness was supposed to be published in the spring, but delays pushed it to the fall. I worked on the edits from mid-summer into September. Then an illness at the publishing house, The Porcupine’s Quill, put a halt to the process. After a few weeks there was no clear timeline for moving the project forward and the folks at PQ decided reluctantly to cancel publication. I have now begun the process of searching for another publisher for that manuscript. However, I remain grateful to everyone at PQ for having faith in my writing and wish them nothing but good fortune.

Despite these and other activities, I did a lot of reading in 2023 and the books noted below provided a better than average distraction from the stimulating and sometimes arduous task of revisiting and rethinking my own prose.

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In The Gull Workshop, his second collection of short fiction, Harry Mathews offers up thirteen fiendishly inventive stories brimming with irreverence and comic energy. Mathews generally sets these tales of modern angst in a here-and-now that closely resembles the world as we know it, but often with a playful twist of weirdness that can catch the reader off guard or leave his characters scratching their head. A prime example is the title story, in which a small group of older men from the community have signed up for a “Gull Workshop,” even though they don’t know what it entails and are none the wiser after a lengthy discussion with their enigmatic facilitator on precisely that question. In “The Death of Arthur Rimbaud,” the renown French poet has without explanation turned up in a small community in rural Canada, where he’s renting a house and living on his own. The narrator reports this in breezy, matter-of-fact terms, even though some of the details, as he readily admits—such as Rimbaud’s birth date of 1854 making him over 150 years old—are “hard to swallow.” Other stories tackle obsessive behaviours. In “Brick,” Vince and Isabel (“Canadian snowbirds”) regularly winter in Florida, and all is going well until one morning Vince discovers a patio brick out of alignment at the edge of the property, repositioned in a way that can only mean one thing: human intervention. Over subsequent days and weeks, as the same brick is repeatedly tampered with, Vince engages in a battle of wills with his unseen tormentor. But Mathews is wily, and just when we think we’re reading a story about a man spiralling into madness over a triviality, he broadens the scope of the narrative to plausibly include a shooting at the airport in Fort Lauderdale and Vince’s Christian beliefs. Other stories take a sardonic perspective on family tensions (“Brother,” “Garabandal”) and knotty male-female relationships (“The Apocalypse Theme Park,” “What My Wife Says”). The collection ends with three delightfully ironic linked stories that skewer academia, among other things, in which our hapless hero, Hanrahan, confronts his intellectual limitations and lack of ambition while searching for a career and something that resembles meaning amidst life’s random chaos. Anyone who’s tried it knows that comic writing is much more difficult than writing for dramatic effect. Mathews carries it off with grace and confidence, seemingly without effort, again and again. And yet, he never seems to be showing off. The Gull Workshop—wise, insightful, wryly observant regarding humanity’s copious foibles and infinite capacity for misunderstanding—is classic Harry Mathews.

The characters in Anne Baldo’s captivating debut story collection, Morse Code for Romantics, are searching for connection, hoping for love, or even just a little human warmth, amidst the lonely tedium of aimless days and anxious nights. Many of Baldo’s characters are young and aware of a world of promise and opportunity that awaits them, but are unsure how to reach that world and attain that promise, or else they’re indifferent to its existence. Baldo sets her stories in a distinctly unpromising landscape: a desolate and backward version of small-town southern Ontario, a place scarred by neglect where rust and rot spread unhindered, where gardens are left to become tangled and chaotic. “We lived on a dead-end street,” Ophelia observes in “The Way to the Stars,” a statement that succinctly sums up the lives of many of the people we meet in these stories. Ophelia loves Tamás, but Tamás loves Molly. He has time for Ophelia too, but only after a bust-up with Molly, who, he knows, will always come back to him. “I existed for him in the voids between,” Ophelia reflects despairingly, “and what exists in voids is nothing.” The title story takes place at a wedding. Trevor and Livvy are tying the knot and Jordan, who narrates, slowly reveals why the mood is anything but celebratory: this is not a happy event but instead a forced union between two very young people who made a life-altering mistake. Baldo’s stories generate a strong sense of time passing, of opportunity slipping away, and are often steeped in melancholy. Lucy, in “Last Summer,” spends her break from university with friends Sadie and Rhea and boyfriend Arthur, binge drinking, drifting from party to party, from one encounter to the next, obsessed with cheap jewelry, lip gloss, nail polish and Everett, with whom she’s infatuated. Lucy's is a life of inconsequential distraction, but Anne Baldo’s prose digs beneath the veneer to reveal unexpected complexity in her characters’ yearnings and regrets. Baldo’s families are invariably broken, often beyond repair. Young Colt, in “Fish Dust,” is terrified of—and fascinated by—his estranged father and rough half-brothers. Jumping at a chance to go fishing with them, the experience teaches him what his mother already knows, that his father is a man who leaves only destruction and sorrow in his wake. And in “Wishers,” Demetria is searching for her lost daughter. Cora, a university student, has fallen under the sway of an older man, Hayes, a black-sheep son of privilege, and an addict. When she finally tracks the pair down at a fleabag motel, she is unable to persuade Cora to leave Hayes and so finds a way to make generosity her revenge. Throughout Morse Code for Romantics, Baldo’s prose shines. Her writing effectively evokes a world that is familiar and strange at the same time, pulling the reader into lives scarred by loss and loneliness. These are poignant, wise, memorable stories by a writer whose vision may be bleak, but it’s a vision that rings true on every page.

Rune Christiansen’s prize-winning novel (capably translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson) is a paean to solitude which suggests that, while loneliness might be widely regarded as an unfortunate aspect of the human condition, it can also be a choice, one that does not have to be sad or tragic. Lydia Erneman grows up in Northern Sweden, an only child living in intimate proximity to the natural world. Her parents provide for her physical and emotional needs, but even as a child she senses that their marriage is “a form of coexistence” sustained and strengthened by “distance,” “detachment” and “absence.” Lydia matures into a dual awareness, of her connectedness to all things and the separateness that enables her to objectively observe what goes on around her. Above all else, her childhood teaches her how to be alone. After graduation she becomes a veterinarian and takes a position in rural Norway. At this point her life becomes busy and purposeful. The hands-on nature of her veterinary practice suits her. The work is fulfilling and seems to satisfy her professionally and emotionally. Believing she is content in her solitude, she neither craves nor seeks human contact beyond professional colleagues and the farmers whose animals she treats. But Christiansen’s quietly powerful narrative demonstrates how events can propel us in unexpected directions, subverting our intentions and landing us in the midst of friendships and attachments we never saw coming. Subtly, inevitably, Christiansen draws us into Lydia’s apparently uneventful life in the manner of a film that ticks along scene by scene, building tension on the sly, as if behind the viewer’s back, until before we know it, we can’t pull our eyes away from the screen. Lydia’s emotional growth occurs while we’re distracted by Christiansen’s contemplative, melancholic prose, which evokes a Nordic landscape of fading light and muted passions. Lydia Erneman’s thoroughly unremarkable days encompass achievement and disappointment, love and loss, serenity and frustration, confusion and certainty. The events that occur in these pages rarely rise above the commonplace. But as we read, Lydia’s story gradually becomes riveting, and we emerge from it with a sense that life lived unobtrusively and on a small scale can be meaningful, impactful, joyous and profoundly worthwhile. The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life is a triumph of bare-bones, understated storytelling that celebrates the rhythms of ordinary life, those precious moments we spend recalling a childhood memory, listening to the wind in the trees, or sharing a cup of tea with a friend. This is a novel that transcends the quotidian lives depicted in its pages. Haunting, captivating, uplifting.

Tove Ditlevsen’s bleak, emotionally disturbing stories zero in on moments of excruciating tension and vulnerability in the lives of ordinary people. The preponderance of Ditlevsen’s subject matter derives from the push-pull of domestic relationships, the power struggle of the male-female dynamic after long periods of co-habitation, or the breakdown of a connection that one presumes was at one time affectionate. In “The Umbrella,” Helga’s husband, resentful of her delight over acquiring a new umbrella, destroys the instrument as she looks on, an act that, in the bitter aftermath, Helga calmly accepts as she reflects that “everything was the way it was supposed to be.” “The Cat” relates a fraught tale of a couple who come into conflict when a stray cat joins the household, upsetting the domestic power balance and giving the wife the upper hand. “A Fine Business” describes a pregnant couple’s viewing of a house they want to buy, and the young mother-to-be’s guilt and sadness when her husband joins forces with the real estate agent to negotiate the price down, exploiting the female seller’s desperate need. In “Two Women” Britta, suffering from a case of frayed nerves brought on by her overbearing husband’s criticisms, seeks to restore her equilibrium at the beauty parlour. But when she sees the young hairdresser is upset, and then pries an admission from the girl that her husband has left her, Britta is not sympathetic but instead resentful that she must now share someone else’s burden of misery. In most of these stories it is the female partner who must cope with a moody, domineering husband. But in “The Trouble with Happiness,” it is the wife/mother’s judgmental presence that sets a tone of powerful negativity in the domestic setting, cancelling out all lightness and joy. Her husband copes by retreating, becoming a passive nonentity in his own home, and the daughter, who narrates, is counting down the days until her eighteenth birthday, when she will be free to live wherever and with whomever she wants. Conflict in Ditlevsen’s fiction sometimes arises suddenly and can be unexpected and unintentional. A mistimed smile or sidelong glance, or a casual remark, seems hurtful to the person on the receiving end, who then begins to see the other person differently. But more often than not she writes of people who have grown weary of each other and situations where love has withered and the relationship endures more because of inertia than anything else. Not for all tastes, but Tove Ditlevsen’s stories and novels, reminiscent of the work of British author Anna Kavan, deserve a place in any discussion of psychological realism in 20th-century European literature.

In Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, her masterful second collection of short fiction published in 1974 (Lives of Girls and Women is widely considered a novel), Alice Munro’s art takes a significant step forward. Though the subject matter remains much the same as in her first two books (stories of quotidian lives mainly told from female perspectives), in these stories she is extending her reach and experimenting with voice and form, light and dark. Many of the stories are built around memory and are often filled with expressions of disappointment, grief, regret, sometimes bewilderment, occasionally satisfaction with how things have turned out. In the breathtaking title story, Et is recalling her beautiful, impulsive, temperamental older sister Char. The sisters grow up, a tight-knit pair, in small-town Ontario, Char much more dramatic and worldly than her sister, and the more adventurous when it comes to love. Char’s early beau is Blaikie, whose family owns the local hotel and spends the off-season in California. When Blaikie marries someone else, Char takes poison. It’s Et who saves her. Later Char marries Arthur—a teacher, an unexceptional man—and lives an ordinary life. But the poison episode remains with Et, who one day makes a startling discovery in Char’s kitchen, which leaves her forever wondering what her sister might have been capable of. “How I Met My Husband” is narrated by Edie, who is recalling when she was fifteen and working as housekeeper for the Peebles, Dr. and Mrs., and their two small children. Though not farmers, the Peebles live in farming country, five miles outside of town. One day a small plane lands in the empty field across the road from the Peebles’ house. It turns out the pilot, Chris Watters, is touring his plane from town to town, and for a small fee will take people up to enjoy the view. By happenstance, Edie strikes up a casual friendship with Chris, which quickly becomes physical, and soon Edie’s head is filled with all kinds of romantic notions. When Chris moves on, leaving behind Edie’s broken heart and an empty promise to write to her, Edie’s life takes a turn she never saw coming. And “Executioners” is narrated by Helena, whose father is a drunk and whose inattentive mother nurses her grudges lovingly. Helena is tormented by her peers, ridiculed because of her odd clothing and her father’s dissipation. But Helena is a curious and generous child who, through an act of kindness, comes to the attention of Howard Troy, the shiftless son of the town bootlegger, Stump Troy. Howard starts bullying her, for no better reason than that “he may have seen the glimmer of a novel, interesting, surprising weakness.” The story turns on the family of Robina, Helena’s mother’s housekeeper, whose younger brothers are enemies of Stump Troy. In the story’s principal scene, Helena and Robina stand among the curious onlookers witnessing the fire that one night consumes the Troy family home. The event is tragic, but Helena views the spectacle coolly, reporting it in clinical terms, hinting but never overtly suggesting who might be responsible. Throughout, Munro’s prose is flawless: precise, understated, rarely drawing attention to itself, but shining nonetheless, evoking character and setting in painterly fashion: “Her tall flat body seemed to loosen, to swing like a door on its hinges, controlled, but dangerous if you got in the way.” In Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You people are often mysterious to each other (and sometimes to themselves), their actions troubling, their motives opaque. Munro’s narrators spend a good deal of time and mental effort wondering how and why they do the things they do. Munro seizes on this aspect of daily life and turns it into a major building block of her fiction. The result is a collection of poignant, thoughtful, loosely structured dramas that eloquently explore what it means to be human. Essential, vintage Alice Munro.

Leo McKay is no stranger to addressing explosive themes in fiction. His prize-winning novel Twenty-Six, published in 2003, is a riveting account of the Westray Mine disaster from the perspective of the family of one of the dead miners as well as a searing indictment of corporate greed. In What Comes Echoing Back, McKay tackles the impact of social media on communities and individual lives. In a narrative that crosses several timelines, McKay’s novel focuses on two teens who have seen their lives turned upside down after their images were posted online without their consent. Patricia’s experience is one we’ve seen lead to tragedy far too often. After reluctantly attending a drinking party with two friends, she wakes up groggy and hungover to learn she’s been drugged and sexually assaulted and that a video of the event is going viral on the internet. To make matters worse, a friend who was also assaulted at the party later commits suicide. Soon Patricia finds herself the unwilling centre of attention in a small rural town in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Unable to cope with the humiliation, reeling from grief, feelings of self-blame and an overwhelming sense of worthlessness, Patricia goes to live with her Uncle Ray in Hubtown, where, seeking anonymity, she changes her name to Sam, keeps her head down and hopes nobody who saw the video recognizes her. Robert (nicknamed Robot), son of an alcoholic mother, is a talented guitarist whose life revolves around music. He’s also physically imposing—a trait he attempts to downplay with a low-key, self-effacing manner—but which attracts attention nonetheless. As the novel begins, Robert has just been released from prison after serving a year for killing another student in a fight. The killing was unintentional. In fact, Robert hardly knew the other boy and had no issue with him. But the fight was encouraged and staged by two students looking to gain notoriety by urging people into violent confrontations and posting the fight videos on their social media channel. Robert and Sam meet in music class and form a bond that grows out of their status as social outcasts. McKay’s novel describes Sam’s and Robert’s halting efforts to re-integrate themselves back into a society they are not sure wants anything to do with them while shielding themselves from further pain. In a series of moving scenes drawn with great compassion, we witness their first tentative steps toward one another, watch them overcome their doubts, and see how their mutual trust grows over time, bolstered and sustained by the healing power of music. At its core, What Comes Echoing Back tells a relatively straightforward tale of two damaged, vulnerable people struggling to build a connection following life-altering trauma. It leaves us wondering not only where their lives will take them next, but also questioning the forces at work in a world that seems to offer no defense against the malicious exploitation of technology that has the power to destroy innocent lives with a keystroke. A note of caution: it’s possible the depictions of violence and alcohol addiction in this novel could be triggering for some readers. Rest assured that Leo McKay’s treatment of this difficult material is unfailingly engaging and honest.