Balancing wisdom and innocence, joy and foreboding, each story in The Middle Stories leads us to surprising places. A frog doles out sage advice to a plumber infatuated with a princess, a boy falls hopelessly in love with a monkey, and a man with a hat keeps apocalyptic thoughts at bay by resolving to follow a plan that he admits he won't stick to. Globe and Mail critic Russell Smith has described Heti's stories as cryptic fairy tales without morals at the end, but really the morals are in the quality of the telling and in the details disclosed along the way. Look where you weren't going to look, think what you wouldn't have thought, Heti seems to say, and meaning itself gains more meaning, more dimensions. Heti's stories are not what you expect, but why did you expect that anyway?
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Sheila Heti's The Middle Stories is a pillow book for fashionable young urban sophisticates. The flitting stories in this collection of faux fairy tales and contemporary fables are told in an intelligent, coy voice, echoing the sort of English children's book that recounts the adventures of young aristocrats-to-be named Cyril or Enid. The Middle Stories are, however, modern and squarely North American, replete with drink, casual sex, postmodern ennui, and bouts of consumerism. Some of The Middle Stories fall into a fairy-tale universe, mixing princesses and talking frogs with luckless, depressed plumbers. Others roam through more pedestrian settings like house parties, campuses, and too-small apartments, but these stories, too, read like fables or even cautionary tales, and one almost expects to find a moral appended to one or two of them.
Heti's contemporary grown-up bedtime stories bear more than a passing resemblance to Douglas Coupland's more playful moods, particularly some of the stories told by the characters in Generation X or the pieces collected in Life After God. Heti's stories represent a younger generation, though, and have no truck with Coupland's dread and pathos, donning a veneer of unconcern instead. Heti is at her best when she allows the satirical undercurrents of her fables to dominate, and in stories like "The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates" and "The Miss and Sylvia and Sam" she can be wickedly funny. The Middle Stories is not a book to be read cover to cover--the persistently ingenuous voice makes this impossible--but it is a pleasant and witty dabbler's pastime. --Harvey Cornell
Review
Praise for Sheila Heti:
"Her prose is brilliantly crafted and everything about her stories is surprising and yet rings true." -- "Hour"
"Her prose is brilliantly crafted and everything about her stories is surprising and yet rings true." -- "Hour"
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By K. Palla
Format:Paperback
Heti's series of short stories were incredibly surreal yet wholly believable.The undercurrent running throughout is the same one you would expirence in a nightmare where nothing blood-and-guts horrible occurs, but you feel a building sense of or horror anyway. It is disquieting, unsettling, sometimes strangely funny, and I was hooked. For some reason parts of the book reminded me of a Dali painting. This is also one of the few books I've seen who's cover is just as innovative as the stories themselves.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By OilCanBoyd
Format:Paperback
the OilCan has to give it up for McSweeney's. This collection will wake you out of your obviously humdrum life. The stories are fantastic and will stay with you long after the reading process is done. O Canada
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I really enjoyed these short stories. Very moving, thought provoking, and insightful. This book will keep you thinking. It visualizes scenes from modern life with superb finesse.
It is a relatively quick read but also it is thrill to read, so I suggest you pace it out, and enjoy it with a cup of tea and some chocolate. Some of the stories are mildly depressing, but that is counterbalanced by the enthusiasm of the writer.
It is a relatively quick read but also it is thrill to read, so I suggest you pace it out, and enjoy it with a cup of tea and some chocolate. Some of the stories are mildly depressing, but that is counterbalanced by the enthusiasm of the writer.
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