Rotary Club

As the cover art of David Carpenter’s collection of seven short stories and two novellas suggests, the telephone — usually an older model, the kind attached to places, not people — is a recurring symbol. It advances plot, conveys how humans can be distanced even when in communication, and represents the past catching up with the present. The outdoors also plays a central role for Hello’s characters, who reside in spectacular but challenging environments across Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan, places that have shaped them.

Jasper is one such setting. Several entries read as a tribute to the fire-gutted community, including the novella “Gordon’s Idea,” which contends with our faulty memories. Sixty-four-year-old Gordon Carter reconnects with his friend Richard, who proposes a fly-fishing trip, a ritual excursion of their youth. Both men had left Alberta decades earlier; Gordon went to Saskatchewan to teach high school, while Richard headed for B.C. to enter conservative politics. Now Richard is mourning a failed marriage and has “cancer of the connective tissue,” while Gordon struggles to move on from the recent loss of his wife.

On their trip in June, they find their once bountiful fishing spots now depleted. As they look back on their regrets and successes, some subjects still arouse tension. Driving home, Gordon wonders “where his life had gone and whether there was anything left to look forward to.” By late summer, Richard’s sarcoma has progressed, which prompts Gordon’s ambitious plan to, alongside two fish smugglers, replenish trout stocks in four ponds and two lakes. It was “his brief reversion to youthful resistance, his little adventure.” (This is not the collection’s only principled illegal act.) When Richard succumbs to his cancer, Gordon resolves to seize what remains of his life, realizing that loss and grief are “just a sad rite of passage for almost everybody.”

Fishing near Jasper also serves as a metaphor for life and regeneration in the nostalgic “Gentle Rain.” In the summer of 1968, shaken by his father’s near-death from a heart attack, Luke sets off to Lac Bonté with his tackle box to meet his friends, most of whom “were either married or otherwise paired off and likely entering their own bouts of intense spawning.” Their trip has “a sweet tumescence with which the rainbow trout, decked out in their deepest greens, reds, pinks and blues, seemed in tune,” but Luke is a “fish out of water” romantically. Instead, the young man yearns to impress his father by achieving a different marker of success: “If Luke could catch a big one, his dad would somehow get a kick out of it and maybe stop looking so grey. And his dad would be proud of his son.”

His father survives. Luke eventually  marries, but rather than choosing a conventional career, he becomes an author of tales that sound suspiciously Carpenteresque (they concern “alienated youths, philanderers, drunks”). Indeed, this potentially autobiographical story ends with “no one dying or going to hell,” as though “the writer has decided to look the other way.” But, Carpenter assures us, “like gentle rain on a parched prairie, this story happened.”

Elsewhere, in “Mallow’s Course,” Carpenter examines sexuality and power. In the late 1980s, the narrator, Jane, crosses paths at a conference with her old friend Eleanor and with Professor Mallow. “Vile, sneeringly witty, goatish, and a very engaging lecturer,” Mallow had, twenty years prior, dropped “sexual references like a chef depositing anchovies on an otherwise plain pizza.” At that time, Jane and Eleanor were chaste graduate students, in a bookish group with “a tacit contract of celibacy.” When Eleanor developed feelings for their friend Jerome, Jane had to break the unwelcome truth that he did not share the attraction. At the conference, the two women reminisce about the episode and about Jerome, now dead, likely from AIDS. “He couldn’t tell me that he was gay, and I wasn’t even nearly ready to hear it,” Eleanor says. “I’ve sometimes wondered what might have transpired for poor Jerome in a more enlightened era.” Sadly, unenlightened Mallow still plies his tired, lecherous routine on women.

Carpenter teases out his stories unpredictably, disrupting expectations of where our sympathies should lie. In “Reincarnation,” a twenty-nine-year-old man disfigured by burns accepts a cheesy gig as a fortune teller at his high school reunion. With garish makeup on his marred face —“features rearranged or missing”— he anonymously taunts former classmates and an ex-girlfriend who he feels wronged him. The revenge backfires and the faux clairvoyant must reckon with his shortcomings.

In “The Fuss,” young Purny retreats to her beloved blue spruce to daydream as a distraction from her parents’ disintegrating marriage. One winter’s night, she crawls “on her belly beneath the lowest branches” and encounters a wounded cougar. After her initial shock, she views the wild cat with purpose, as something she can nurture and heal. Carpenter’s vivid dialogue complements the candid perception of his child characters. With shades of C. S. Lewis, the story is an indictment of adult disregard for both nature and childhood.

Hello concludes with “Frailing,” a short coming-of-age story that feels epic in scope. The title’s double entendre alludes to a banjo-playing technique and the transience of human life. It culminates in a Flannery O’Connor moment of grace — a melodious note on which to end.