Peterborough Examiner Referrer

An articulate new Canadian voice

Discover Alexander MacLeod’s ‘Animal Person’ collection

MICHAEL PETERMAN REACH MICHAEL PETERMAN, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT TRENT UNIVERSITY, AT MPETERMAN@TRENTU.CA.

“Animal Person” is Alexander MacLeod’s second collection of short stories. He is also a literature professor at St. Mary’s University in Halifax and a longtime summer resident of Cape Breton. I picked up a copy of “Animal Person” in Bridgewater last summer and found that almost every story offers a glimpse of Maritime experience. The title struck me as a bit weird (what is an animal person? as a dog lover am I one of them?) but was deeply impressed by the eight stories in the collection. The animal person in question has a rabbit.

And if the MacLeod name seems familiar, it is because Alex is one of Alistair MacLeod’s sons and the heir to the short-story writing tradition in which his father excelled. But while Alistair specialized in the hard life of Maritime fishermen and their families, Alex has a more mainstream base, focusing on ordinary domestic situations familiar to most Canadian readers.

Like his father, however, he manages to create such intensities of individual experience that each story proves surprisingly gripping for the reader — each conveys far more than surface matters and takes the reader deeper than the mundaneness of the subject matter would seem to call for. There is an artistry here that leaps up and grabs you in its (literary) tentacles. No story disappoints; in fact, some of them stay alive in one’s mind for days and days.

I am not sure that I can say why Canadians both past and present have excelled in short-story writing. Many writers have worked with the form and several have succeeded brilliantly including Alistair MacLeod, Norman Levine, and Alice Munro.

What is clear is that MacLeod belongs in very important company — he knows the form well and takes advantage of its flexibility, immediacy, and power to draw the reader quietly into its core. Each story casts its spell slowly, leading the reader into situations and insights not initially apparent. I read all eight of the stories of “Animal Person” twice — the second time allowed me to see some of the ways that MacLeod crafted each narrative and developed its fascinating effects.

Let me describe one of the stories that I found particularly intriguing. It’s called “The Entertainer.” Scott Joplin’s well-known piano rag is its title and several lines of the song’s musical notes appear at intervals. The story’s first line poses an issue for the pianist and the reader: “The problem with this song is that everyone thinks they already know how it’s supposed to go.”

The voice is young Darcy MacIntyre, an “adolescent boy” who is scheduled to perform “The Entertainer” during the Halloween program at the Brookfield Retirement Living Complex, located somewhere in Halifax. He is a student at ‘Debbie’s School of Music—Music for All Ages’; he has been there for seven years, though for the last three he has worked solely with Roxy, a teacher by day and a singer at night with a rock group called ‘Roxy and the Midnight Soul Machine’.

Initially, MacLeod gives us Darcy’s troubled thoughts as he faces his perilous situation. He’s not panicking, but he just can’t bring himself to master his allotted piece. To him “it is spring-loaded into everybody’s brain, just waiting to go off.” Its many performative challenges leave Darcy at sea. “I used to be good,” he recalls, “but now it seems that “I’m actually losing it, like there are connections inside my head that aren’t working right anymore, and whatever skill I used to have is seeping out of me.” Despite weeks of unsatisfactory practice, he hasn’t been able to master Joplin’s challenging piece; hence, his failure is upon him. In fact, Darcy has reached a climatic moment in his musical training. He has tired of his lessons and seems no longer able to meet the challenge of preparation. Or, the piece may be too difficult for him. “Right now,” he tells us, “I am the only one who understands how bad the situation is, but in about ten minutes, my disaster is going to swallow everyone in this room.” It is a terrifying situation; as he realizes, it’s going to be hard for his parents and sister who are sitting with him in the audience awaiting his performance. Hard too for his teacher Roxy.

Such personal crises must be familiar to many music students at a certain point in their training. Darcy seems ready to face his public failure. But, as we prepare for his awful moment, McLeod shifts the narrative to Roxy who is busily doing her duties as master of ceremonies for the concert. Now we now see the situation from her more experienced point of view.

A Royal Conservatory graduate, she is a singer who has had her own dark moment in her musical education. She also knows what it is like to be caught in her own kind of career stasis. Her Soul Machine is making a little money and playing in Maritime venues with some regularity, but the group’s future remains uncertain. They seem frozen in place; in fact, one member of the band, a talented drummer, is thinking of going his own way. Having failed to expand upon their local reputation, the Soul Machine’s members worry that they have missed their chance to achieve a higher level of recognition and fame.

Roxy’s section reveals her frustrations not only as a musician but as a teacher. Darcy is currently the “only one” of her students that she “can have any hope for.” But she knows that she has “pushed him a bit” in making him take on “The Entertainer”; her hope was that the challenge might “light him up again and bring him back across the line, over to (her) side of the world.”

Though she realizes that her job at Debbie’s School is poor-paying and repetitive — her duty is to move her students along a conveyor belt until they choose to drop out — she has seen Darcy as “different.” But her strategy hasn’t succeeded in his case. Anticipating his failure, she recalls her own dark moment during one of her own Royal Conservatory examinations.

Then the big moment arrives. In his David Bowie costume Darcy seats himself at the piano but soon freezes in his playing. At this point the unexpected happens. Before him he sees the sudden presence of Grace Ferguson, an 80-year-old resident of the Brookfield Retirement Living Complex who is suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia. She was seated in the front row, watched over by her doting husband, when she suddenly moves to the stage and orders Darcy to “move over.”

The frisson of the moment has awakened Gladys from her passive condition. “Nothing made her more furious than witnessing another person suffer embarrassment.” What she does is firm but not violent.

That story is told in brief sections by Darcy, Roxy and Gladys’ husband. The ending is both surprising and exhilarating. It is a triumph above all for music as a creative discipline and a humane force. Three generations suddenly interact in this special moment.

Other stories shine forth like “The Entertainer.” They deal with powerful and unexpected moments in ordinary experiences as Alexander MacLeod take the reader deep into basic human situations while dramatizing insights into the mysteries of human motivation and interaction.

Each story is exciting and liberating in its own way, a testimony to the power of the short story form and MacLeod’s insightful writing.

ARTS & LIFE

en-ca

2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://thepeexaminerepaper.pressreader.com/article/281844352661086

Toronto Star Newspapers Limited