Romps to Remember

Steven Heighton was a celebrated writer who died too young. But thankfully there’s now a definitive anthology of his short fiction. Sacred Rage features gems from each of his four story collections: Flight Paths of the Emperor (1992), On Earth As It Is (1995), The Dead Are More Visible (2012), and the wonderful, posthumously published Instructions for the Drowning (2023). Nearly half of the selections come from that fourth book, including “Professions of Love,” a master class in ego and unreliable narration; “Instructions for the Drowning,” a very funny tale about a near-death experience in cottage country; and “As If in Prayer,” a brief piece about a Muslim man who buries drowned migrants in Greece.

“ ‘A Man with No Master . . .’ ” is a standout. The owner of a school in Osaka, Japan, has enlisted the help of the mafia to take down a competitor by kidnapping its principal. But instead of their target, who is out to lunch, the mobsters abduct a twenty-eight-year-old teacher — an expat seemingly modelled on Heighton himself. The mild-mannered narrator is prototypically Canadian. He apologizes to his captors — whom he calls Ray‑Ban and Katana‑san — for using English. After switching to Japanese, he pleads, “I’m sorry. But if you wouldn’t mind telling me — I mean, if it’s not too much trouble — where are we going?” They simply tell him that his boss “has made . . . foolish mistake.” The captive speaks to his abductors as if they are hard-of-hearing Uber drivers: “ ‘I THINK I’D LIKE TO GO HOME NOW,’ I found myself saying. ‘IF YOU’D JUST DROP ME OFF?’ ” When he interjects again, more assertively, one of the men asks if he’d like to calm down.

Heighton’s lines are imbued with hyperbole. The car zooms past an intersection where a lone police officer stands. One of the gangsters comments, “Omawari, neh?” The narrator translates, “It was the slang term for ‘policeman,’ and meant ‘thing idly standing around.’ ” The captors start to worry about their hostage, hoping he won’t be fired for abandoning his class, but he reassures them: “I’ll just tell them I was kidnapped.” It’s a pleasure to read about sympathetic hitmen who, like their hostage, are aware of the intricacies of speech, who think “kidnap is a very strong word,” and who fear that the teacher will say “unfair things about us to the police.”

Eventually they all go for a meal. The conversation turns to films and books. “I try to read as much as possible,” Katana-san says, while Seven Samurai plays on a TV. After a few whiskies, the teacher proposes a new class for his school: “Criminal English 101.” One of the kidnappers loves the idea, saying he can see the teacher feels better, even complimenting his Japanese. Camaraderie fades into fear at their next stop, a bathhouse, when the drunken Canadian is forced into progressively hotter pools. “Suddenly everything was clear,” he recounts. “I would be left to drown. Pink, lifeless as a steamed lobster, I would be hauled from the tub in a few hours and my death put down to foreign inexperience and stupidity.” While suffering “on the damp scorching bench” of the sauna, he runs into his top pupil, who vows to save him.

It’s an incredible story to tell in a short twenty pages, but that is what Heighton does best. He takes an absurd and darkly humorous idea, and instead of letting the plot do the work, he shows off the power of writing with both precision and concision. What enthralls the reader in a story like “Professions of Love” is more than the narrative; here a woman chooses to leave her husband after he, a plastic surgeon, operates on her face without her consent. It is the prose. After commenting on his wife’s aging as “nothing specially unique,” the doctor admits that “what concerned me was my own growing sense of, yes, almost, sometimes, revulsion, when, all right, whenever I would sit down to dinner across from this rumpled imposter, or wake in the morning beside her.” Heighton’s control is apparent in his careful use of italics, exclamation points, and additional commas, which together develop the unique strain of casual narcissism that characterizes the narrator’s voice.

In “Noughts & Crosses: An Unsent Reply,” a jilted lover deconstructs every line of an email from her ex, examining the role of language in her heartbreak and loss. The sender, Janet-Marie, has ended their affair to stay with her husband; the recipient is left wondering what changed. She is both sad and angry, lamenting the love lost and Janet-Marie’s inability to express the painful situation in words. Focusing on lines like “i seem to need some space,” she is sharply critical. “But, but I thought we were bitter opponents of platitudes, you and I; we agreed that our love was not like any other love (italics mine, quotation yours, email 64, line 17: I am now chief archivist of your intimacies).” The precious second “but” is a desperate rebuke, one that certainly reads true to anyone who has felt left behind.

These fifteen stories are exercises in both abundance and restraint. They are formally brilliant, ranging from the hilarious to the heartbreaking. Selected and introduced by John Metcalf, the author’s long-time editor, Sacred Rage is an exceptional display of what Canadian literature lost in 2022. Although Heighton’s life ended too soon, his work will certainly endure. To add to praise found in these pages years ago: if there is any justice in this literary world, Heighton’s legacy will be his love of language, evident on every page.