Short and Bittersweet

Author Sandra Sabatini. Courtesy Penguin Group Canada.

For something so apparently innocuous, the short story has a surprising ability to carve out battle lines among book lovers. There are those who sing the praises of the concentrated nature of the form, the way a single image can be seared into your mind, the way each word, each idea, counts. The rival chorus grumbles about this brevity, complaining that as soon as they’re drawn into the author’s world, they are spit out again, left with nothing meaty to chew on.
 
On the business end of things, there is also a great divide. Writers tend to like writing short stories. Maybe it’s because they get to see the fruits of their labour in journals and magazines, a more immediate gratification than the long lead times in book publishing; or because they have accepted the long-held (and occasionally accurate) belief that gathering 10 or 15 stories and calling it a collection is an ideal way to launch one’s credibility and career. But most literary agents and publishers will tell you — albeit with regret — that short fiction doesn’t sell; unless, that is, your name happens to be Raymond Carver or, say, Alice Munro, in which case it not only sells, but wins buckets of awards and praise of the best-living-writer-in-the-universe variety.

Publishing a book of short stories can be a fraught and potentially demoralizing exercise — one that comes with the added irritation of being asked when you will write a “real” (i.e., full-length) book. But Sandra Sabatini, a Guelph, Ont.-based writer whose taut and richly imagined short fiction collection, The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie, is out this week, doesn’t really see it that way.

“I love short stories — reading them, writing them,” she says on the phone during a recent visit to Kingston, Ont. “And with five children, my writing gets done in the evenings, between the children’s homework and activities. I remember reading an interview with Alice Munro, who said the reason she wrote short stories in the beginning was because she had small children and short bursts of time to work. I think that’s been true for me, too.”

Dolphins is actually Sabatini’s third book — a rather amazing feat considering her children range in age from 11 to 21 and are all still at home. Not to mention her other work at the University of Guelph as a research administrator and occasional English instructor. Her first collection of short stories, The One with the News, was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Writers’ Craft Award and praised for its evocative rendering of the effects of Alzheimer’s on family, caregivers and the sufferers themselves. Her second book, an academic work called Making Babies: Infants in Canadian Fiction, was based on her PhD dissertation.

Courtesy Penguin Group Canada.

The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie touches on the subjects of her previous two works (aging and children). But more than anything, this collection is about women and girls teetering on the razor’s edge — peril on one side, promise on the other. In “Water Hazards,” a girl named Connie (who turns up in several stories) spends a languid summer at the cottage hanging out with her older brother, eating Pop Rocks, swimming and fishing. But the fast-running river that makes Connie “smell like a fish” has leeches that linger along the sheltered shoreline. And there are more threatening hazards to contend with when a paunchy and, yes, lecherous man takes an interest in her. With the action always threatening to topple over into deceit, loss of innocence, even death, Sabatini’s stories are filled with a powerful tension that builds over the course of individual pieces and — despite the fact that most of the stories are not connected — over the book as a whole.

“I’m really interested in that place of tension,” she agrees. “I started thinking about these stories a few years ago when I was at one of those goofy home parties — for skin care or something. I don’t even remember what. But I was in a room full of women all roughly the same age, and talk turned to growing up in different parts of Ontario. Almost everyone in the room had a story about being approached by a creepy man, lured by someone, molestation and worse. It was an amazing, shocking sort of experience to hear these stories. And none of us was particularly outraged. I found myself wondering, why was this OK? What made it begin? Where in boyhood did boys begin to think that was a good idea? I began some of the stories with that question. But as a mother of boys — great boys — I also know that that’s not the whole story, and I wanted to write about that, too.”

Not surprisingly, the characters in Sabatini’s stories are also on the cusp of becoming in its most generous sense. In “Typical Guy Stuff,” Angela experiences that simultaneously powerful and utterly destabilizing moment when she understands herself as the object of male sexual attention. In “Holes,” Connie waits for her beloved aunts to pierce her ears and longs for access to their grown-up world, their easy camaraderie and, especially, their secrets. In “Maternal Instinct,” dealing with a fierce mother raccoon and her kits living in the chimney exposes a family’s fault lines.

The recurring Connie character is the strongest embodiment of this leitmotif, though she ranges in age through the collection — from a child to being a mother herself. “I think Connie is those women I talked to at the skin-care party,” explains Sabatini. “Any one of the stories I heard that night could have happened to her. She’s bumping into life, and so much of it is confusing and so much of it is downright evil, and yet there’s this other experience that’s so wonderful. She sees with her aunts the heritage of stories, the close world of women. I guess she’s a canvas for me.”

Sabatini’s preoccupation with the bittersweet is also played out in the summer — often cottage — setting of many of her pieces. It’s the perfect backdrop: there’s the heat and languor, the promise of empty days spilling out in front of you and, on the flip side, the menace of the outdoors, of children with newfound freedom, of bug bites, nettle stings, leeches and more. Sabatini nails this feeling with rich, economical language and lovely brush-stroke character descriptions. One female character wears “firm foundation garments that sculpted the soft mass of her flesh into a shape both solid and viscous. Hug her and you slipped off.” Sabatini also has a brilliant ear for the cadence and unvarnished cruelty of children.

This crisp style and poignant subject matter may seem particularly well-suited to the short story form, but highly distilled writing and memorable characters are hardly undesirable in longer works. Indeed, fully realized, truthful and haunting long after the book is finished, Sabatini’s collection is a kind of knockout punch for champions of short fiction. After all, great writing is great writing— whatever the format. But yes, if you really must know, she is working on a novel.

Andrea Curtis is a Toronto writer.

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