Review
STANDING ON RICHARDS
by George Bowering
Viking Canada, 224 pp.
George Bowering is right: the interconnected short-story collection isn’t uniquely Canadian (although the penchant for writing about the disenfranchised misfit may be). In the introduction to his new book of stories, Standing On Richards, Bowering ruminates on the "lost" art of the short story, a different mode of structure and linkage, as much entertainment as it is fiction.
An accomplished writer, Bowering is Canada’s first poet laureate (to the chagrin of some) as well as the first writer to win the Governor General’s Award for both fiction and poetry. In these stories he sets himself the objective of sifting out the strongest elements that can be utilized within prose, leaving (hopefully) strong ideas and reflections. Unfortunately, the aforementioned good ideas are skewered by weak, didactic prose and a brevity that ends up being too thin to create an impact.
The stories find Bowering all over the map, literally, as he writes about characters from Vancouver to New York, "standing" anywhere he feels that an identity can be constructed. The title story, lucid and witty, with an odd mixture of eroticism and quiet intellectualism, has an English professor trying to prostitute good conversation; a harder sell than the typical wares offered on the street. Here we are given a glimpse of Bowering’s ability to tense and relax the prose in a terse but engaging way.
The most crafted and polished story in the collection is "The Elevator," a quick cocktail of sex and violence, concerning a Calgary professor’s recollection of a rather abnormal evening.
But too often, Bowering chooses to write at a loping gait about prosaic, ordinary things, which can be uneventful and boring for the reader on the outside looking in. The book is too nice – quaintness and lazy language are not the ingredients of exciting fiction. Granted, he is often writing about places that have left an imprint on him or his characters, but he still needs to convey that feeling to the reader, not sound like an in-joke or a set of instructions. In "At the Store," the interjection of the author’s voice to try to put forth a solipsistic argument concerning the art of fiction only points out the inherent weakness in the prose itself, rather than explains it.
In the end, by presuming to write stories while letting the reader know that he is aware of the limits of writing and doesn’t want to solve them, Bowering gives us a book that is not only unsuccessful, but also curiously unfinished.
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