They Linger

Mark Anthony Jarman rarely affords his varied characters moments of revelation or Joycean epiphanies. But he is nonetheless fascinated by the ways in which a single instance can reverberate across a lifetime. In his latest story collection, Smash & Grab, these split seconds are often occasions of violence, either inflicted or implied. A woman accidentally hits a child with her car and flees the scene. A swimmer sees dead refugees on the beach and floating in the sea. Now and then, they are just absurd, as when a man finds a tooth in a toilet bowl at a bar. They are rarely transformative, but they linger. Whether writing about Canada, Italy, Ireland, or the moon, Jarman finds an incongruity and maps it onto a wider melancholy.

In “The Bodies,” a former hockey player tools around off the coast of Washington State in a sailboat with his friend Bruno. When they return home to their commune in the British Columbia interior, they find two dead bodies at their door. Instead of asking where the corpses came from or whether the police should be involved, they bury the “perfect strangers” at the local dump. They go for a swim. They head to a bar. The next day, the narrator lazes around, watching Bruno, who works as a farrier, shoe a horse. He pines for a friend, Rachel. It seems like just another day, and apparently he has forgotten about the bodies entirely. Then, in the span of a sentence, decades pass. Bruno has moved to Las Vegas, and Rachel lives farther west in the Cariboo Mountains. “I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again,” the narrator says. “We are like lost pieces of an old jigsaw puzzle.” He wonders about the subterranean movement of the buried bodies, which have come to stand in for all the things he’s failed to examine over the years. “I try to remember what all the faces looked like, but I might be making up someone else’s features,” he admits. Like many of the stories gathered here, this one is thin on plot but thick with incident, reflection, and allusion. There’s no relief, just a pleasing sense of dislocation as the narrative telescopes across time and one mistake resurfaces.

Some entries function more as sketches than as fleshed-out plots, full of language that bursts with the same bright lightning as the violence that peppers the collection. In “Northern Ontario Silver Mine,” a prospector flies in a float plane that has just picked up a woman in labour. The prose unfurls with unexpected imagery: “Clouds in our sky mirror wrinkled hills the colour of bacon lard, clouds like ghostly fingers stretching into heavens where our tiny plane tilts wings and welcomes a wet new passenger.” He remembers his brother, lost in a mining accident, and that grief slams up against the new life entering the world in such a peculiar way. “That one’s dead,” he says, watching the baby, “then the throat opens. It’s alive.” In just two pages, Jarman twins birth and death, summoning a mood with remarkable economy.

Across his work, the Fredericton writer considers people who have seen better days. Drifters, displaced veterans, and travellers can’t seem to get comfortable no matter where they are. They fret over lost dalliances. Old rock songs bubble up into their heads, unbidden. They marvel at a world that feels crueller every day and at the indignities of aging. “My bad back and knees: why the fuck did humans stand up?” one character asks. This nostalgic mode could feel repetitive in lesser hands, but Jarman’s playfulness and stylistic bombast elevate the material to a text that’s funny at times, often surprising, and always engaging.

Jarman is strongest when grappling with feelings of alienation. One of the finer stories, “The Bailiffs Arrive with Their Grey Eyes,” begins with a description of geological time: “surly rock shifting from Nova Scotia all the way to Morocco, I’m out of here, moving in the night like a tenant ditching a landlord on Shore Street.” In the present, the narrator has taken a similar journey, on an extended holiday from Atlantic Canada to Florence. His partner, Emma, wants to move to Italy permanently, but he isn’t so sure. “Do I wish to grow old and die in a strange, beautiful country,” he wonders, “or weaken and die in a familiarly ugly place? Will our skeletons care where we die?” He recognizes the tremendous beauty and history on display all around him but keeps returning to the horrible fates that Galileo, Machiavelli, and Dante suffered. Eventually he tires of the city’s smog, its “oily scooters,” and stultifying traffic. Home begins to seem like a paradise by comparison, so they return. “Back in Canada,” he says, “I see that I prefer ancient ugly to brand new ugly.” Like many of Jarman’s characters, he is faced with reminders of the brutality we inflict on nature and the relentless drumbeat of capitalism everywhere he goes. Nostalgia gives him whiplash. What else is there to do but reflect on the moments that matter?

“Very little greenery shows on the city’s narrow streets,” the narrator says, describing their Florence apartment, “but walled inside each block are gardens and blossoms, greenhouses and palm trees, a secret inner life.” This reads like a metaphor for the kind of sanctuary that fiction offers. With Smash & Grab, Jarman gathers disparate threads, memories, and digressions into something greater than the sum of its parts. As much as the outside world may disturb, in these pages, readers will find a rich inner life on full display.