The Best Thing For You [Paperback]

Lyon's opening novella, "No Fun," is a study of violence and family squabbles in suburban Vancouver. It is followed with "The Goldberg Metronome," a classy set piece that traces a Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed metronome backward in time, through the turmoil of 1930s Germany to its origins, and forward again to its discovery under a sink in contemporary Vancouver. Both are genuinely interesting and well-told stories, but it's the final novella, "The Best Thing for You," that is the star of the collection. Lyon begins with a flourish, pushing the line that divides writing from over-writing:

The idea first came to her one limpid yellow morning toward the end of the war, as she sat across the breakfast table from her husband, watching him chew with toast-textured jaws. The minutes were falling down like dominoes, and she had a full day planned once he had left for the eight-fifteen, so that the idea had at first seemed negligible, a silver coin of a lake glimpsed from the window seat of an airplane, easy to forget.

"The Best Thing for You" is a murder-ballad in novella form, complete with a bored young housewife, a complicit butcher's boy, made-for-cinema crowd sequences, and a gifted young teenager who takes an interest in the aftermath. Set in the WASPish Vancouver of the Second World War, the novella draws much of its menace from writing that only occasionally plunges into flashiness. Lyon achieves something very unusual here, a mannered English that could only have come from British Columbia, that employs phrases like "bright as a gewgaw" without feeling affected. "The Best Thing for You" could well stand alone, and it is certainly the best piece of writing here. There is, however, a satisfying unity to these three novellas, which only adds to the pleasures of a fine collection by a shockingly talented author. --Jack Illingworth