A Reckless Moon: and other stories [Paperback]

Warren's third collection of stories explores the small disruptions in the lives of ordinary people living in rural America and Canada. In "Hawk's Landing," Edna Carlson's adventurous days are behind her; she now finds vicarious thrills in the escapades of the local delinquent. Her quiet existence with her elderly mother is upset by the appearance of the widow of her brother, whose death her mother refuses to acknowledge. The title piece introduces a middle-aged woman who is traveling with a horse buyer whose license has been revoked for drunk driving. Both are pensive people who have little to discuss on the car journey, but who feel connected to each other nonetheless. When a storm stops them, they have time to recount their life histories and reflect on their pasts. In "Tuxedo," a trip to the dry cleaner launches Claire into a confusing relationship that, even by the end of the story, she is unable to understand. Meanwhile, Claire's best friend and her friend's mother complain to her about their problems with their husbands. Throughout these stories runs an appreciation for minutiae, whether it involves the narrator of the title story peering at a horse in the moonlight, or Carmen, a restless teenager in "Bone Garden," crawling out from beneath a tree in a hotel and spitting dirt from her mouth. Warren (Wednesday Flower Man; Black Luck Dog) is a competent writer, and these quiet stories are enhanced by the subtlety with which their secrets and surprises are revealed.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It always seems a shame that there is such a strong tendency in Canada to divide our short fiction into camps: realistic vs surrealistic, psychological vs symbolic, rural vs urban, traditional vs cutting edge. Especially difficult to avoid is the Alice Munro conundrum; you're either with her, or railing against her seemingly far-reaching "establishment" influence. (This last is unfair to everybody, including Alice Munro, who, while remaining true to her voice, continues to take amazing risks in her stories.) That risk-taking and hybridity occur in all camps is perhaps what's most interesting and overlooked in our stories. Stylistically wide-ranging recent collections by technically grounded and innovative writers such as Annabel Lyon, Libby Creelman, Mike Barnes, Sheila Heti, and Shaena Lambert prove that it is difficult and maybe even wrongheaded to try to pigeonhole how we write (or don't write) short fiction as Canadians.
That said, it is hard to resist placing this new collections from Raincoast Books, A Reckless Moon, by Dianne Warren into the character-driven, "psychological" camp of Canadian short fiction. Warren's stories try, and for the most part, succeed, in getting inside their characters' heads and hearts. There is a sense also of the characters searching for meaning in their lives, even if that meaning is somehow unrecognizable or unavailable to them. Set in "real" Canadian places, the stories in A Reckless Moon have a notion of solid geography in common, although their characters' perceptions of "location" often prove more ephemeral.
Warren's seven "short" stories in A Reckless Moon are long and large in scope. Approaching novella status, they incorporate whole communities and explore an intriguing depth and breadth of interactions. Warren manages to achieve this through rich back-story, fully-realized atmosphere and subtle, colourfully drawn characters. The majority of these stories focus on the grapplings of women-with family, autonomy, and work-and many revolve around small gestures of rebellion, articulations of independence, confidences that blow up or fizzle sadly. They are not, however, limited in gender or theme. Indeed, part of the appeal of Warren's stories lies in the sense of expansiveness she manages to suggest through particular, telling details.
In the opening story, "Hawk's Landing", Edna and her mother Mrs. Carlsberg receive an unexpected guest, Hildie, the wife of one of Edna's recently deceased brothers. Hildie shakes up the mother and daughter's day-to-day living pattern and inadvertently brings some secret alliances to the surface. This situation is fodder enough for a short story, but Warren also seamlessly works in a neighbour boy's acts of rebellion, which in many ways mirror Edna's own buried restlessness. Set in Hawk's Landing, Montana, an isolated has-been resort spot, the setting itself plays a role in the women's sense of themselves and each other. Edna is wry, observant, and pragmatic as a character: "How stupid and careless, she thought, to let people you love get away. But there was no use thinking about that, no sense beating yourself up." Like many of Warren's women, she has accepted her lot, but under quiet protest. This is a story remarkable for its slow build, wherein apparently unrelated threads are woven loosely together at the end, with the impression that they could, momentarily, and without notice, unravel themselves.
The same light touch and superb pacing are evident in all the stories, but "Tuxedo" and "A Reckless Moon" are particularly noteworthy. The narrator of the former, although a younger city dweller, shares Edna's capacity for summing up people and situations: "I was thinking Lenore wasn't capable of doing terrible things. If she were, she would be a different person, possibly a happier one." The ending is a wonderful (bordering on farcical) scene at a wedding in which the narrator learns that everything she suspected, but refused to believe about a certain type of man, is in-her-face true. "A Reckless Moon" explores the reverberations of the decision of a dying patriarch on his family and his farm (and most especially his daughter's pride) in ways that are both revelatory and oblique at once. All of this in a drive to Prince Albert from Saskatoon! It is tempting to use writing workshop clichés when describing Dianne Warren's stories-her endings feel so, well, well-earned. But that term implies labouring or straining towards an outcome, which would be an inaccurate description in this case. Instead, these conclusions seem to simply "occur" to the stories, as an apt thought or idea might to a person. It is tempting also (and perhaps apt) to bring up that name-Munro-as comparison here. These stories are traditional, I suppose, in that they have at their core the "personal epiphany", albeit fragmented or incomplete. But however familiar their structures might seem, it is Warren's lucid, empathetic voice and vision that make the collection exceptional.
Although Warren's stories do stick to a fairly straightforward realism, there is something magical in some of her themes, and her characters' revelations, although not earth-shattering, are often surprising. In "The Bone Garden", she shifts easily between the perspectives of Dixie, a social worker returning from a meeting, Moe, the sixteen-year-old son of one of her clients (and a blossoming delinquent) and Carmen, Moe's soulmate, who's been forced into a road trip with her mother and brother. The three characters ultimately converge in a postmodern hell of a hotel in Saskatoon, where the two teenagers act out a bizarre, primeval passion play under the domed skylight. Here, Warren has taken a relatively simple situation and allowed it to web out into something farther-reaching; we feel not only the imaginative desperation of the kids, but also Dixie's resignation to it. The "hint" that pervades the story is that Carmen and Moe's behaviour is justified in the twisted world in which adults force them to survive.
The stories in A Reckless Moon are outstanding, infused with insight, and anchored by their unassuming, affecting prose. Warren is a writer who has excelled in other genres (Warren was shortlisted for a Governor General's Award for her play Serpent in the Night Sky). It is a boon for readers that she continues to enrich and broaden the realm of Canadian short fiction.
Heather Birrell (Books in Canada) -- Books in Canada