Like This
In his first collection of stories, short-listed for the Giller Prize in 1995, Leo McKay Jr. portrays a series of male protagonists caught, for the most part, at the cusp of some sort of calamity and/or moment of transformation. Although the setting of only some stories is explicitly identified as small-town Nova Scotia, there is a consistency of sense of place that imparts to the collection a further cohesion and unity. Though they seem low-key at first, McKay's stories highlight moments in which personal freedom and the inevitability of trauma - both physical and personal - collide. The protagonists of these stories find themselves contending with an unfairness or fickle fate that seems to pervade McKay's fictional world, while maintaining a sense that a single alteration could turn everything around, and that everything does not have to be quite like this.
"Angus Fell," the opening story in the collection, begins as a coming of age narrative, as the childhood pastime of diving into the river with his friend Mary takes on erotic overtones for the protagonist Angus. This familiar scenario, however, takes a sharp turn when Angus is caught by surprise by a "drunker," whose sexual advances leave him traumatized and suicidal. His subsequent leap into the gushing water represents not only an attempt at his life, but also his turning over of that life to something out of his control. That Angus is able to grab onto a root and climb back onto shore indicates that McKay's world is not without hope, a notion that recurs throughout the fifteen stories.
Some of the stories, especially early in the collection, are strikingly brief and tantalizingly open-ended. When Cliff pulls a knife on his drunken father in order to protect his mother in "Like This," the stage is set for tragedy, and the story seems designed to capture the visceral nature of the struggle between father and son. However, the story is more about the morning after, when a swollen foot and a cut are the only evidence of the drunken confrontation. There is a transience to this story, the idea that something about Cliff's actions has changed his path, and his father's warning to not turn out "like this" feels potentially resonant and positive. At the same time, though, McKay suggests elsewhere that not every such moment ends with a sense of promise: Phil's joyride on the motorcycle he steals in "Gold Wings" could have been a moment of liberation, but a missed turn results in a tragic end.
This push and pull between fate and human agency is highlighted by "In My Heart," where a teenager on the cusp of expulsion from school finds himself incapable of staying out of trouble. On some level, McKay is using a typical high school setting, capturing the battle between an overzealous authority figure and the troubled student who acts out. But trapped in a town where a wealthier suburb is like "a different planet" and where racial tension is unfortunately tangled with lingering sexual desire, Jim is incapable of keeping his violence in check. His anger inevitably but almost gratuitously puts him on a course for expulsion and leaves him wondering how he came to be in that situation, hurling a racial slur in the heat of the moment during a school dance.
Similar themes of temptation and inevitability run through two other stories: "Fidelity" follows a newly married man visiting his college sweetheart as he struggles with a powerfully nostalgic sexual desire while adapting to their new dynamic as old friends, while "A New Start" sees a father and his children wandering the streets at night trying to scrounge up enough bottles to furnish their apartment. However, whereas "Fidelity" ends with the two achieving sexual release with a wall between them, maintaining fidelity without stifling their feelings, there is no such release in "A New Start" as the cycle of alcoholism and day-to-day living simply begins again the next morning, with no end in sight.
McKay's preoccupation with characters being jostled out of their comfort zones can be seen in two similar stories that seem almost like bookends. Both "A Thing Like Snow" and "Oil" focus on male protagonists set adrift from their loved ones in homes lacking power and heat. "Snow" focuses on an elderly widower, Ralph, who faces retirement without the wife he planned to spend it with, while in "Oil" the lack of oil is the final straw that prompts the departure of the protagonist's girlfriend, who walks off leaving him alone in the freezing cold. Waiting for the oil delivery that will heat up his home, he falls asleep and finds himself in a dream world where he struggles to save a woman slipping away from him beneath the ice. In contrast with this sense of loss, "Snow" chronicles the recovery of community, as Ralph, overcoming his prejudices, is taken in after a snowstorm by the "hippie family" next door, who offer him warmth, sustenance, and hope for the future.
The sense of disruption that runs through the collection reaches its peak in perhaps the finest story of the collection, the uncanny "The Name Everybody Calls Me." Here the common rural experience of hitting a small creature with a car in the dark is transformed into an uncanny tale of thwarted altruism, as the creature turns out to be a small girl who unmistakably has been tortured. The narrator Frick’s nightmarish attempt to aid the girl devolves into a comically Kafkaesque encounter with the hospital bureaucracy, punctuated by a visit to the girl's home that leaves him questioning the veracity of what he has witnessed. As in this story, throughout the collection McKay's narratives are driven by deft characterization and striking, idiosyncratic images: the father in "A New Start" deftly collecting bottles being hurled at him from a university dorm, for instance, or the narrator of "Oil" watching his image on the blank television screen as he waits for the delivery truck dressed in a toque, hockey socks, and skates. This penchant, though, may be too evident in "The Transformed Sky," a story conspicuous in its departure from the naturalism of the rest of the collection; in this surreal allegory, McKay investigates the power of paranoia and conspiracy through the image of a giant light bulb appearing suddenly above the town.
While McKay's style is direct and generally unordained, these are stories with a definite edge - not just the edge on which his characters seem routinely poised, but an edge that comes from the differences in class, social status, and power that drive so many of these narratives and from McKay's ability to capture the implications of those differences in striking, absorbing scenes. The result is a highly complex and nuanced perspective on causality, investigating the question of fate and inevitability from perspectives young and old, furtive and daring, tragic and empowering. As his aptly naturalistic title suggests, McKay's collection is a convincing account that sometimes life indeed can be like this.