Making Light of Tragedy (2004, Porcupine’s Quill)
by Jessica Grant
203 pages
Short fiction from the author of the multi-award-winning novel, Come, Thou Tortoise!
The qualities of Jessica Grant’s writing are beyond words, and not having the words makes you feel like an inadequate writer or critic. She’s stumped me, and others, and for that reason, Jessica Grant’s Making Light of Tragedy might be the best collection of short fiction printed this decade. Every story has been told, writers are getting sharper and more talented … but no one except Jessica Grant is writing so fresh and so clean in a way that is accessible to a broad audience.
Sometimes a book is so good you rip through it, pull an all-nighter, and you’re tired at work the next day. Other times, you buy a book everyone is talking about, and can’t get past the first dull chapter.
Less common: you come across a book you like so much you savour it, you refuse to waste it, you read it slowly, afraid it will end. I have yet to read the last 3 stories in this collection.
I’ll reel it in, but I’m blowing nothing out of proportion: these stories have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and the opening story alone won the country’s top short fiction award, The Journey Prize, in addition to the heavy-hitting Western Magazine Award.
This is an astonishingly original piece of work, perhaps most notable for its off-kilter, endearing, and often over-contemplative characters: “It’s the kind of ceiling that bursts helium balloons … what if sometime I need to bring helium balloons in here?” I fell in love a few characters. Well, every one. Whether you want to read something for its creative merit, its originality, or because it’s Goddamn funny, read this book and meet these characters: “I learned there is nothing sexier than damaged fingers. But I was a soak-in-Palmolive kind of girl. I didn’t have the balls to let loose on my own hands with a hammer and achieve an authentic damaged finger of my own. So I opted for painting my nails blue.”
Every story is delectably unpredictable, delivered in a distinctive way, and she plain has fun with language, and this combo makes her the most readably original voice in Canada. Over the course of my reading this collection, I witnessed Canada slowly realizing that, as her novel Come, Thou Tortoise was nominate for award after award. She’s unique, fresh, fun, at times sad-sans-pathos, vibrant, distinctive, engrossing, and endearing. “I jogged down the walk from my building, hopscotching over the ice patches.” Hopscotching as a verb. She experiments with structure, has fun with language, makes her own vivid descriptions, and her characters are all experiencing some facet of life too few of us can tune into.
In the opening story, the journey prize winning “My Husband’s Jump,” you get the play off the title (and the bookcover). A woman has just lost her husband, but the story is somewhat hilarious, somewhat implausible, but portrayed in a way that’s believable. It’s about an Olympic ski jumper who hit a big jump and still hasn’t landed. “I pitied the Swiss ski jumper. I pitied them all. For any jump to follow my husband’s, any jump with a landing, was now pointless … I had heard the IOC was planning to scrap ski jumping from the next Olympics. How could they hold a new event when the last one had never officially ended.”
You never know where Grant is taking you, and that’s one of her great attributes as a writer: to tell stories in a truly new way, to offer believably off-kilter characters, to extrapolate some quirky, fleeting thought into an engaging story. To make that story shine. To do all that, as a rule, in just a few pages. These are short, short stories, and a book you should buy.
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