It’s always nice to stumble on a new writer. It can be hard for a new writer to get their work out there in the crowded Canadian market, but every so often one stumbles across a new book that stands out. Winner of the 2021 CBC Short Story award, Corinna Chong’s debut collection of stories The Whole Animal (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023) is one of these, and it’s a nice introduction to an emerging voice on CanLit.
The stories generally centre around young women who are trying to figure themselves out. They grasp for identity and reject their parents, while trying to fit in with friends. They laugh at people because they’re supposed to; they feel vulnerable when they don’t have the right clothing. It’s not quite coming of age, but Chong captures that feeling of teenage insecurity well.
Some of the stories leap off the page. “Kids in Kindergarden,” the one that won the CBC award, is a captivating glimpse into the life of a young woman and how she feels the need to defend a kid that’s not hers; “Butter Buns'' has a teenage boy looking at his mom differently after she hits a midlife crisis and packs on muscle. In these, Chong gets inside her characters and the ways they look at the world and use it to define themselves. In “Butter Buns,” Gavin is an aimless young adult who works as a lifeguard and limps his way through college; when his mom suddenly gets fit and divorced, he struggles to figure out where he belongs and where he’s going.
“Kids…” meanwhile shows the ways kids can be casually cruel and implies how they’re copying their parents - who, in turn, can’t handle it when it’s turned back on them. It’s a short piece, but it lingered afterwards in the way it shows two friends coming apart.
Not everything quite clicks. The title story follows a couple who seem to drift apart and the ways we remember events differently, but it never quite falls into place and instead is a little disjointed with an ending that feels out of place. Elsewhere, “Old Wives” is short enough to count as flash fiction and feels more like a sketch of something that needs fleshing out - compared to everything else here, it doesn’t seem to add much to the collection.
But when Chong hits, she can really connect. It happens with “Kevin Bombardo,” a story that finishes the collection on a high note. It follows the narrator as they grow up and keep running into an old acquaintance. They remember Kevin and, perhaps more importantly, they remember the various ways they judged Kevin for being an awkward janitor. But there’s also the way he flirts with an older man, yet mocks him behind his back, and the way he grows into being the kind of person he used to look down on, that makes this one feel especially poignant.
At times, it reminds one of Casey Plett’s story “Obsolution” in its wide-lens look at a person growing into themselves, sometimes in uncomfortable ways. But she’s not the only apt comparison: she exists in similar spaces as Souvankham Thammavonsa and Carmella Gray-Cosgrove, and readers familiar with their work will enjoy Chong’s book.
Published earlier this year by Arsenal Pulp Press, The Whole Animal is a slight collection and with just 13 stories, the book is easy to get sucked into and polish off in one or two sittings. But perhaps the best way to read this is to take your time, reading one or two and then sitting and letting them linger. I think Chong is one to watch.