The Dead Are More Visible [Deckle Edge] [Paperback]

As a novelist, Steven Heighton shines brightly in the firmament of Canadian letters; he is probably my favorite male writer after Michael Ondaatje (female Canadian novelists are something else again!). I was astounded by his sweep and historical acuity of his AFTERLANDS, set partly in the Arctic and partly in Mexico, and swept up in the Himalayan drama of EVERY LOST COUNTRY. Besides their geographical range and richness of characterization, both books tackle the significant political theme of the fate of threatened indigenous peoples. Only one of the stories in Heighton's present collection, the opening tale "Those Who Would Be More," has an international subject -- in this case, the relationship between a teacher of English in Japan and his female boss; Heighton acknowledges it as the late offspring of his earlier Japanese collection FLIGHT PATHS OF THE EMPEROR. The remaining ten stories are primarily urban, and all set in Canada. Clever though these are, I miss the scope of the novels, and the stories do not gather sufficient momentum as a group to make up for it.

Nevertheless, there are recurring themes. Chief among these is a random encounter with the potential for violence: a female boxer and her male sparring partner in "A Right Like Yours," an engaged couple and a mugger in "Shared Room on Union," a skating rink attendant and three handsome thugs in the title story "The Dead Are More Visible," and an aging runner with an aggressive mountain biker in "Journeymen." The most interesting things in all these stories are less the encounters themselves than what they reveal of the private lives of the protagonists. And here Heighton is marvelously skillful, revealing information only when needed and then only by hints: the tense of a verb, the gender of a pronoun. Few of these people project far into the public view, but the gradual revelation of their inner lives is unfailingly interesting.

Another theme is the break-up of a relationship. The Japanese story is of this kind. So is "Noughts and Crosses," an academic's unsent deconstruction of the good-bye eMail from her former lover. So is "Nearing the Sea, Superior," which focuses on a grief-stricken man and his ex-wife in a fogbound airport. Or, probably my favorite in the collection for its humor and slightly larger scale, the last story of all, "Swallow," about paid volunteers in a drug-testing program, all of whom are, for one reason and another, fugitives from normal life who nonetheless emerge stronger than when they started.

For one thing that Heighton the storyteller has in common with Heighton the novelist is an interest in those extraordinary situations that reduce a man (or woman; he is amazingly good at writing from the female pint of view) to his most basic state. The strange half-hallucinatory story "OutTrip," which sends a man in a drug rehabilitation program for a five-day trek in the desert, reminds me of the Mexican sequence of AFTERLANDS. "Fireman's Carry" is about a firefighter's traumatic final day on the job. "Heart & Arrow" (a story whose central event is amazingly similar to the story "Adult Beginners I" in the collection LIGHT LIFTING by fellow Canadian Alexander MacLeod) flirts with substance abuse and suicide. But however low Heighton brings his characters, he always allows them the possibility of redemption. He is a fine writer who will reward reading, but I still prefer the novels.

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