Light Lifting (Biblioasis, Sept.20th, 2010)
Short fiction by Alexander MacLeod
The apple may have fallen from the tree, but Alistair and Alexander are two very different apples, writing-wise. Green and red, or Granny Smith and Gala: each with their own distinctive qualities. Alistair seems known as a masterful storyteller, and the voice of dwindling cultures, whereas Alexander feels like part of the “new wave” of “the new writing” out of Atlantic Canada. His writing is clean, confident, and distinctive. His stories — urban and universal — are ambitiously constructed and all the more solid for it. In fact, Light Lifting features a story, “Miracle Mile,” that was a Journey Prize finalist — the Journey Prize being the country’s most esteemed award for short fiction. And it’s not even the best story in the collection.
The backcover of the ARC I read claims that, “MacLeod’s stories are as compelling and true as any currently being written in this country.” I think they chose some fair adjectives there. He has a very compelling voice; I was drawn into his writing by a narrative hook sharp enough to keep me on the line throughout his longer-than-average stories. And “true” is a good descriptor here. He takes you right in to the universal threads of various relationships in these stories. Like how work can bond the most eclectic groups of co-workers, as in the stellar title story, “Light Lifting.” In his structurally intersting and ambitious, “Wonder about Parents,” a real stand-out story, he tackles the strength of the countless tiny threads that bond a man and his wife, a man and his child, a man and his memories … as well as the history of lice, the mass panic of H1N1-like outbreaks, and then some.
There is a confident, distinctive, pleasure-to-read style in these stories, and a lot of surprising and apt lines in here too, like the description of a kid’s face after a fist fight, “[Blood] ran back towards his ears and up into his hair and down into his mouth in these long, long, spidery lines. It was like his face was a window and someone had thrown a rock through the middle of it.”
Light Lifting is an assured and promising debut, and one of the region’s finest collections of shorts in 2010. It puts a new MacLeod on the scene, and the way I see it, from here on in, we’ll have to say, “Which one?” when someone refers to MacLeod’s writing.
And, is it just me, or is Biblioasis the country’s metal detector for short fiction Gold? Kathleen Winter, Rebecca Rosenblum, Amy Jones … Alexander MacLeod.
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