The rabbit hole of CanLit is a dark and lengthy one. Not only are there many authors who’ve written in the past century or so, but it's dark because so many of them are forgotten, out-of-print, and overlooked. Which is half the appeal of ReSet, a series of books published by Biblioasis, a press out of Windsor, Ontario.
This series has been re-introducing Canadian authors like John Metcalf, Diane Schoemperlen, and Norman Levine to the marketplace for a few years now. For example, take Levine’s travelog Canada Made Me. Originally published in 1958, it was praised by writers like Mordecai Richler (“Far better than any book I’ve ever read about Canada,” he wrote), but fell out of out of print in the 1990s; when it was reissued, Levine had been dead for about a decade and was almost all but forgotten in Canadian letters.
Like Levine, Fraser is not a household name, and he may only register among people who are really into CanLit. His handful of books are out of print, and until Damages saw release last year, he seemed like another name who’d been consigned to oblivion. However, Damages makes a strong case for him as one of the better practitioners of Canadian short fiction in the last 40 years.
Damages is sort of a best-of anthology, one that takes liberally from Fraser’s books of short fiction. It’s got some shorter stuff, a few long stories and the novella-length piece “Foreign Affairs.” (Another novella, Charity, has been published separately by Biblioasis). His fiction is a little verbose, a little dark and mostly set in British Columbia. His characters are people who have come afoul of something, have traveled the world, and are hiding. Sometimes it’s from the law, other times from life itself. In the best of his stories, the rug gets pulled out and life reorients itself on the fly. It’s good stuff.
When I say he’s verbose, I mean that he writes in a more traditional style than the stark minimalism that was in vogue during the period most of this collection covers. He’s not a Raymond Carver type, at least stylistically, and the way his stories read have a slower and more atmospheric vibe, the people talk in flowing sentences, the kind where they’re thinking out loud and you’re never sure if they’re addressing you or what. To wit:
“This heat’s worse than politics in Chicago. The bad smells make you wonder why we didn’t fly right to Crete. No wonder the Caryatids are crumbling. The air’s full of plague. Fumes, corrosion. All night it’s bee bee beep. Sometimes I just wanna hold up a bank and run away with the loot to Palm Springs permanently. There’s no percentage in exotica. This ouzo tastes like iodine.” (pg 154-55)
It’s a world apart from the terse language of Carver or the showy experimentalism of Donald Bartheleme.
His characters, meanwhile, are often world-weary, even if they aren’t exactly the jet set type. For example, in “Healing” the narrator flees to the inner country to a simple life of working as a fruit picker. Fraser sets the scene as such:
“That summer my countrymen were in the news abroad. A violinist was found nude, gagged, dead at the bottom of an air shaft at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. In August, the Playmate of the Year died in a Los Angeles house when a shotgun blew away her face; she was from the West Coast, too. We all were. Even the one-legged cancer victim, the most famous of us, hopping across Canada on an aluminum hinge. Only I survived. “ (pg 167)
The narrator is laying low after his wife vanished and dies; how and why aren’t exactly explained, but he is “a suspect open to questions and even trial,” he says. He gets along with the other workers and the foreman, but butts heads with the landowners daughter and her dog Othello. He’s sly, he’s smart and he’s charming, but on a re-read, he seems to be hiding a considerable darkness, especially when people start going missing.
Elsewhere, “Foreign Affairs” follows a sickly ex-diplomat who reminisces about his time in India, is taken care of by a Annie Wilkes-kind of nurse, and can only look on as his former employer’s daughter spirals out of control - the title’s a dark pun on the kind of relationships that circle around the guy. He struggles to talk and to be understood and the people around look down on him, figuratively and literally.
Not all of the stories connected for me, but the majority of them did, and generally the fiction here shows Fraser as a talented writer. These are not slick New Yorker style stories, ones with a lot of American influence, but instead something that feels more homegrown and Canadian. One wishes there was a note showing when and where these stories ran - it would have been interesting to see how his writing evolved in the 30 years this volume covers. There’s also a lengthy introduction by John Metcalf which is maybe a little long in the tooth, but does a good job explaining the rhythms and language of Fraser’s writing.
All in all, Damages is a nice collection and a good addition to the CanLit annals. Fraser might not have the cachet of an Atwood or a Munro, but who does? Even if he’s solidly in the rank right below, it’s honestly not a bad place to visit.