HORRIFIC consequences can develop out of the most ordinary incidents, and Kevin Canty pursues the relationship between the banal and the surreal throughout his remarkable debut collection, A Stranger in this World (Viking, £13.50 in UK). Much has been written about the continuing quality and strength in depth of the American Short Story, and this volume is yet further evidence.
A woman passenger in a car causally remarks to the driver, "There's somebody waving at you" seconds before two hoodlums ram the side of the vehicle, sending her flying through the windscreen. Recalling the accident, the narrator reports: "she lived, though the glass made a mess of her face. Her hipbone broke into pieces and hasn't mended, that's what I hear. I don't know. I don't see her, except in my sleep. I see the last thing, Margaret hanging like a red doll out of the hole in the windshield and then the steering wheel breaking apart in my hands and then, most of the time, I wake up."
Elsewhere, a drunk who has driven into a car owned by two losers tries to bully them into not calling the police - and ends up dead. In another story, a privileged young boy, the son of a career couple, repeats to himself "I am solitary, I am not lonely. My mother is a paediatrician, my father is an architect, I am going to college". Against his better judgment he investigates the strange world of Judy, a neighbourhood girl believed to be "nineteen or even twenty one, but really she was a kid, kid T shirts, lollipop colours, big and pink".
Judy is mentally retarded. "Paul did not want to be misunderstood, or understood at all; he wanted to be alone, weightless, he wanted this to happening in his imagination." His initial approach is so tentative as to be impersonal: "His hand reached out, he watched it like a movie, and touched her bare forearm below the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Paul himself didn't touch her, only his hand."
Judy's animal response unnerves him: "The sound of her voice, her little cry, was like nothing he had heard from a human voice, he thought ... and saw her head wave blindly back and forth, eyes closed like a dreamer seeing a beautiful city in the distance." Dragging his guilty secret Paul, no longer the sexual opportunist, goes home to Mom's welcoming "Hi sweetie, where's your tennis racket?". Canty balances Paul's awareness of the wrong he is doing with his totally impersonal attitude towards the sexual experimentation. He watches Judy as if she were alone in the room. When Paul tries to normalise their relationship by taking her to the zoo, the unreality of it is irredeemably exposed.
All of these stories are precisely written explorations into lives about to spiral into chaos. Canty is a deliberate writer, interested in psychological disengagement; everything noted up until the moment of disintegration is lucid and exact. He enters the fantasy world of the imagination which seems to exist on the edges of real life. Few of his characters have pleasant fantasies though, preoccupied as they are by the potential disasters which seem destined to become reality.
In the finest story, "Safety", "Mirian is in the bedroom, Saturday afternoon, talking to her sister on the telephone, when her two year old Will walks in with a plastic bag over his head." She is powerless as the child begins to scream, "she can't focus her mind on the problem but thinks instead of how strange it is to see Will's face in a different material, a cast in plastic of his head and shoulders, a something: a bust, she remembers, that's the name for it, and awards herself a little prize for remembering."
Just as Paul is ashamed for having little human feeling for Judy, Marian fails to resurrect emotion for the child she knows is her son "and she tries to find the peacefulness inside herself, holding him close, trying to fit inside the memory of the little blue bundle, the milky silences of infancy."
TORMENTED by guilt for having hit him, she seems to step outside her own body as she begins to judge her new personality. In her mind, her husband has deserted her because she has become a whinging wretch. Reason reminds her that he has only gone to the hardware store. A visit to the supermarket becomes a nightmare ordeal for Marian as the child misbehaves.
"She slaps the soft, exposed skin of his arm. Will starts to wail and then there comes a moment of stillness, like a picture, the other mothers staring. Abandoning everything, she takes the child and runs out. Back at home arguing with her husband, she becomes aware of a glamorous woman standing in the hallway. Marian realises this is her husband's mistress . . . Except she is merely a passerby returning the little boy who had run out on the street to his bickering parents.
"Blue Boy" centres on Kenny, an unhappy youth working as a lifeguard at a local swimming pool. Hidden behind his dark glasses, Kenny watches the women and girls, but only one of them obsesses him. Mrs Jordan arrives each day and swims 50 lengths. He imagines "she was dying a slow and painless death, some made for TV disease without the symptoms, and in her hours on the chaise longue she was remembering the good years of her life, all spent at the poolside...
Mrs Jordan is far from dying and rescues a drowning child from the pool. It is she who decides to remove the distance existing between Kenny and herself, she also replaces it.
Candy in the title story is in a new relationship, but her most real moments appear to be spent in the company of her dead husband. One exasperated son decides to leave his drunken father: "It wasn't so much that I wanted somebody to kill him, I didn't care if he was dead or not. I just wanted that weight off of me."
The individual imagination proves the most oppressive prison for the characters in Canty's quietly terrifying realist fictions, in which a pink house looks "like it was about six weeks old and about an inch thick"; and guilt emerges as the most palpable human emotion.
