LIGHT LIFTING

Alexander MacLeod
Biblioasis
(2010, USD $19.95, 219 pages)

Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting has an intriguing recurrence of turning sweet to sour. Nearly every story in the author's debut, a Giller Prize nominated collection of shorts, spins lucidly out of control toward violence, even horror, by the final sentence.

Opener "Miracle Mile" centres on old track and field buddies Burner and Mikey the day before a big race. It's that pivotal day in history when Mike Tyson chews off Evander Holyfield's ear – an event the runners analyse during the first chunk of the story.

Reading on, Burner reveals similar athletic grotesqueness with his taste for performance-enhancing drugs. He's always been an adrenaline junkie, like when he and Mikey were teenagers and they would literally race freight trains trough the Windsor-Detroit tunnel. They both feed off excitement, but Burner, more competitive by a long shot, thrives on that extra sting. By the end of their race, he violently lashes out on Mikey who threatens to take first place. He crosses a line like the hungry boxer on page one, acting inappropriately and wrong.

The most fantastical violence comes in the final scene of title story "Light Lifting," which follows a stereotypical landscaping crew of criminals, ruffians, and a highschool greenhorn through a busy summer. On the last day of the season they take the afternoon to celebrate at the pub. The moral reader's senses tingle: should these guys really bring a youngen drinking?

Out of left field (you struggle to connect the crashing plots) hardened workhorse Tom lips off at some city workers: "Fucking pussies" he shoots. Then a disgusting bar-room brawl breaks loose, with the youngster inches from stepping up.

If it isn't brazen violence, it's tragic fate that darkens other stories. "Adult Beginner I," another athlete tale, looks in on a cheeky group of lifeguards: the "Tuesday Crew" who, after teaching swimming lessons every Tuesday, crack a few beers and go diving in the Detroit river under light of the General Motors Renaissance Center (same area as Burner and Mikey's practice tunnel).

Stace, not a lifeguard but accepted for her determined swimming skills, gets roped into the dangerous hobby. The story takes a deep detour into her backstory, how she fills a depressing void in her life with swimming. But a late Tuesday dive, echoing Atwood’s classic Death By Landscape, proves that her new pastime will still swallow her whole.

There are other instances where MacLeod drops the horror for a more harmonising look at life. In "Wonder About Parents" a young family struggles with a bout of lice. Obsessed with the subject, the story exhausts every bit of information on the little buggers: "Partial list of substances people have put on their heads to kill lice: rendered dog fat, glasses of human spit, mercury, arsenic, cedar oil [...].”

Again MacLeod makes grand use of flashbacks, centering on the couple's wild college days and, more sentimentally, a fourteen hour Christmas Eve drive from Montreal to Windsor when they were ripe new parents with a sick baby. The rite of passage makes all the future battles worthwhile – the lice, the worry – when they make it as make-do but loving parents.

However, "Parents" is arguably a sap-fest unwelcome in a blood bath. Playing on the heart strings clashes with other gloomy, more grabbing tales. Where is the usual fall of events?

Redemption comes in "The Loop," with more tell-tale grotesqueness. Twelve year old Allan makes after-school bicycle deliveries for local drug store Musgrave's. His patrons are archetypal elders: ladies offer him cookies, men spook him with blue-collar war stories.

What surmounts in Allan's deliveries, though, are elderly people over the edge of general sanity. A blind woman with breast cancer wants him to take a closer look; aging retired line-worker Barney wants to share the latest Playboy centrefolds. Allan must slowly back away, keeping on his side of the imaginary line, until one day Barney is belly-up from a stroke. Allan is forced to cross the line to save his life. That's his last day on the route, deciding kid stuff is more important than having a job anyway.

Light Lifting shows MacLeod is a honed storyteller. What will surprise, and surely impress, is the fresh, imaginative subject matter. And the integral prose: MacLeod has the ability to wave his wand and paint a picture in milliseconds, carving images out of dust.

- John Coleman　

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