Directions for an Opened Body
Kenneth J. Harvey
Mercury Press (1990)
121 pages
Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize!

These stories slice because they’re pared down to a point. There’s nothing here that doesn’t need to be. Every sentence counts in a Harvey book or story, and that’s something I’ve really taken away from his writing when I self-edit. That and the power of a tight POV and the architecture of a sentence. Also: A grittiness shot through with compassion is not an oxymoronic style.

Kenneth J. Harvey’s rise to international stardom started with this collection of short stories. Appropriately so. Directions for an Opened Body highlights all of his qualities. A clear strength in Harvey’s writing is his ability to put a reader in the shoes of someone they are not. With his remarkable knack for a tight, engrossing POV, he takes his readers deep into a character’s psyche, and they therefore experience the story more potently. Right away in Directions for an Opened Body, in the opening story, “Open House,” a man has just snapped, after a final yelling match with his partner, and in a burst of madness, he trashes his house moments before an open house . There’s an eerie edge you feel from his writing, at times, that vibrates through you as a reader. It’s a rare thing I only encounter from a Harvey book — see, in particular, Harvey’s multi-award-winning The Town That Forgot to Breathe – and this book is full of them: a punch that can take your breath away and leave you The Reader Who Forgot to Breathe. There’s an apt Timothy Findley quote on the frontcover of the Minerva edition of the book, “Harvey has created a stunning world of hidden ferocity.”

Also, there is another budding trademark of Harvey’s here: his writing isn’t overly adorned or flashy; it’s calculated and features an interesting way of wording things. Like in “The Profound Liberation of Roy Purdie,” when he describes the sensation of a pair of sunglasses in the inside pocket of his suit jacket as “a giant, brittle bug, sleeping in a pouch.”

Perhaps most impressive: The stylistic range of these stories and their content is astounding. It is a book pulsating with equal parts savagery and sympathy. A collection with lust and violence in equal doses. Stories like “Ballerina” about a woman trying to turn a man’s daughter on him, exemplify that signature synergy of harshness and tenderness that characterizes, for me, Kenneth J. Harvey. That graceful grittiness or compassionate rawness. That and his versatility in style and subject matter. “Open House” drags you into the madness of a domestic dispute gone off the rails, “Orange Shadows and a Sound That Is the Two of Us” is a poetic, intimate, stylistically interesting erotic piece (“Everything that means anything is there in how her face changes when I move inside of her, drawing forth the sound that is the two of us”), “The Passing of Time” is a four-page, subtle-enough elegy to the death of Newfoundland culture, there a parable feel to “The Profound Liberation of Roy Purdie,” and the envelope-pushing tale of bike-gang initiation and other taboo, “My Sister’s Husband,” will plain make you uncomfortable, because it happens, and Harvey never shied away from delivering the story in (relatively tasteful) detail. It’s because of this versatility and sense of what’s next that this remains the only book I’ve read in one sitting.

This book, Harvey’s first, highlights everything about him I admire, namely: 1.) His versatility in style and story content. 2.) The power of a tight point of view: Harvey reaches a hand out of his stories and hauls you in. 3.) That signature graceful grittiness that unites his diverse body of work. 4.) He stands apart. I cannot lump him into categories with other writers like I can and do with others.