Way Up [Paperback]

Way Up, the debut story collection by Toronto-based writer Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, is populated by characters who struggle--and mostly fail--to contain their intense emotions. In "Dead Man's Sheets," the relationship between a small-time thief and a university student becomes increasingly dangerous after he inadvertently unleashes her violent tendencies. In "The Nez Perce Ride Again," a girl barrels headlong toward a sexual awakening after she becomes preoccupied by the wild Appaloosa horse that also fascinates her father. In the title story, a photographer takes a road trip with an ex-girlfriend when she goes to interview the children's television icon known as the Friendly Giant--though the Giant's famous puppet pals Rusty and Jerome make cameo appearances, the story's outcome could hardly be construed as gentle.

As Kuitenbrouwer's characters try to make sense of what they feel, they snipe at each other, circling like hungry animals. When the release comes, it's often bloody--a recurring image is of clothes or bedsheets soaked in the stuff. "Blue Skinned Potatoes" is narrated by a Nova Scotian woman whose 10-year-old son Jake was killed by her fisherman husband in a murder-suicide. In one of the book's most affecting passages, she describes the discovery of her son: "Jake's body was torn up with wounds. There were five. He was twitching, trying to hold on. I kept kissing him and saying, It's okay, it's okay, but he was shaking his head. He said, No, Mummy, it's not okay." A few lines later, she says how she washed her clothes of his blood: "It was a great sadness, to wash Jake away like that."

Though they have flashes of humour, the 13 stories in Way Up are dark and raw. (The influence of Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and other practitioners of dirty realism is clear.) They're also some of the most impressive examples of new Canadian fiction in recent memory--stark, vigorous, and sophisticated. Kuitenbrouwer ruthlessly exposes the darkest corners of the psyche without trading in misanthropy. Indeed, what's ultimately most striking about Way Up is its humanism. The blood that is spilled never entirely washes away the characters' hopes for better, kinder lives. --Jason Anderson

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s stories are set in situations and characters of the real, familiar, daily world. But hers stay rooted there. There is no transcendent closing of the circle, reaffirming hope and the spiritual. Her characters are of the earth, earthy and totally believable in their particular dilemmas. Her stories are weighted toward the dark, not the light, and their effect is completely without an infusion of comfort. The effect of reading them consecutively is rather like enduring a series of hard knocks on the head, interspersed from time to time with nods of appreciation.
“Falling Out”, for instance, follows James and Meredith as they go to the hospital where Meredith is to have an abortion. Both are in misery and neither can connect with the other. To Meredith, the abortion must happen. James prays frantically that Meredith may change her mind and keep the baby, all the time knowing that his prayers are useless. Their ordeal coincides with the lift-off of the space shuttle Challenger. As Meredith returns to the post-op ward, she is greeted with the news of Challenger’s explosion. In James’s truck, going home, she says: “I don’t want to see you again. He said, I thought not.” Unremitting bleakness with no trace of sentimentality: “James went home and went to work and went home in a trance-like state, which really wasn’t so out of the ordinary.” This story, and the entire collection, can turn the reader away in a complex mixture of revulsion and pity or, equally likely, lead to a grudging recognition of its rightness given each story’s circumstances. In either case a compulsion to read on is rooted in sincere admiration for Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s command of closely observed detail, her imaginative skill, and her unflinching determination to follow where it leads her.
Clara Thomas (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

“Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s stories seduce you with a glance and a wink or shock you with a hard punch to the jaw. They are funny, wise, and unique, with wonderful turns of phrase and a sparkling, fresh originality.” — Lewis DeSoto -- Lewis DeSoto

“Well written, a fascinating voice, very sensual, and wise as well.” — Anne Montagnes -- Anne Montagnes

In the thirteen stories that comprise Way Up, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s canvas stretches from downtown Toronto to isolated farms, from the Canadian Shield to Nova Scotia and Europe, and even into outer space. In “The Last Magic Forest,” she turns her Gothic imagination loose in the bush of Northern Ontario, where tree planters have developed a unique culture. In this wasteland of clear-cutting and scarifying, the concept of “nature” overturns everything readers (and tree planters) expect. When Kuitenbrouwer takes a Canadian tree planter to Belgium in “What Had Become of Us,” only the outer topography changes. In the superficially more cultivated European forest, the value and meaning of human life depends on the inner topography the forester brings with her from the Ontario bush. In other stories, Kuitenbrouwer’s characters engage in a continual play with perspective, in a perpetual balancing act. In an emotional spectrum ranging from corrosive grief to murderous recklessness, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s characters make — or fail to make — the constant adjustments necessary to stay fully human. By intention or accident, each character steps into a more comprehensible life or crosses into seductive darkness. (20120504)

In Way Up, grimy workers deal with love, fear, and death in the machine-mangled bush of the Canadian Shield and in the strangely urbane chaos of a Belgian forest. A restrained marriage silently unravels along the cliffs of Normandy, isolated grief is tragically contained on a tiny Nova Scotia island, and a man on a car trip flirts with his ex’s morbid passion. In thirteen surprising stories, Way Up illuminates the constant adjustments necessary to stay alive, aware, and fully human.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer has worked as a tree planter in Northern Ontario, a lumberjack in Belgium, and a baker in the parks of Toronto. The former fiction editor of The Literary Review of Canada, she has seen her stories published in magazines such as Descant, Prairie Fire, Blood & Aphorisms, Smoke, and Prism International. A sophisticated and trusted reviewer, her byline is familiar to readers of The National Post, The Literary Review of Canada, Books in Canada, The Hamilton Spectator, and The Globe and Mail. She was born prematurely in a fragrant cedar forest in the Ottawa valley; nobody thought she would live. She now lives in Toronto.