Bryan R. Monte
Review of Susan E. Lloy’s Deep Breaths of the Inanimate
Regular readers of Amsterdam Quarterly’s reviews know that I am just as interested in a new book’s cover as its text. I believe this is what first draws in most readers (if they haven’t been fortunate to read a review beforehand). Susan E. Lloy’s latest book, Deep Breaths of the Inanimate, cover by Warthog Designs, features a woman, photographed from behind, with braided blonde hair, wearing a dark pinkish parka, sitting on an old, wooden bus or railway station bench. She is a woman at the beginning or end of a journey, a good visual and apt literary metaphor for the point of departure in Lloy’s new set of 16 stunning short stories.
And do her characters travel: either physically or mentally to a Zurich bar and casino or the tinder-dry Canadian countryside, or meditating on touchstones of past lovers, we are privy to what most are thinking. Deep Breaths is Lloy’s best short story collection yet due to its variety of characters, conflicts, settings, and narrative styles such as science-fiction, Gothic tale within a tale, and multiple perspective stories.
To give an idea of the variety of Lloy’s characters, their conflicts or emotional journeys, I will mention only some of Deep Breaths cast of quirky characters in this book’s first half. In the title story, two or three women muse over three objects that are related to their relationships with three men: a painting, a lighter, a clock. Years later, each object and the memories it evokes still moves the women so much, that they can’t bear to discard them. In ‘Rabbit Fever’, Sadie Rayburn, a Canadian Parliament legislative assistant, loses her job when a video of her as a stripper in her college years appears online. Sally leaves Ottawa and buys a convenience store in an Ontario tourist town. This storyline also morphs even further from conventional to science fiction mode due an outbreak of genetically altered rabbits who bite the locals and make them fall in love. In ‘Girls Only’, an older woman decides to move into a three-storey house of younger women in Halifax, Nova Scotia. While living there, she discovers and becomes obsessed by a Gothic style journal purported to have been written by a young woman held captive by her paranoid aunt who was also held hostage by her aunt. ‘Fixed for Life’ is about Rafael, an abused 18-year-old son, who dreams of a good life someday somewhere else instead of the cold, impoverished one he shares with his alcoholic, gambler mother. However, when his mother finally does hit the jackpot and she offers to share her winnings with him, Raphael leaves and taking all put $5,000 with him. ‘That Was Then’ is a tale of a semi-closeted, gay Quebecer, Bobi Jones, who discovers his recently deceased, pudgy, homemaker, single mother financed her life, before he was born, as a sex worker. Bobi also finds a clue to his unknown father. ‘All In’ is the story of two people—one a female, compulsive gambler, who is dangerously deep in debt, and the other, an older widower, whose only son committed suicide, who meet one evening in Zurich bar and start to have second thoughts about their euthanasia appointment the next day.
One outstanding aspect of Lloy’s characters is their courage (or lack of) to strike out (literally and figuratively) in new directions. ‘She’ is story told from a multi-perspective point of view. It includes the voices of immigrant women in their new countries, some haunted by memories of former lands while living in new ones, others by the loss of a children who disappeared during their migration, and still others who feel they are living neither in a new country, nor an old one, but somewhere in between.
Another of Lloy’s narrative strengths is creating vivid settings. Whether she is describing a character in the grim and noisy bustle of New York City’s Greenwich Village, a quiet, neat, townhouse district in Montreal, the tinder-dry Canada countryside, or a Neapolitan neighbourhood’s narrow streets, she places her characters firmly there and takes the reader with her. Whatever the setting, Lloy’s stories are fresh and peopled by fully-rounded characters, in original conflicts, who sometimes make surprising choices.
In addition, Lloy’s narrative frequently employs intriguing, open-ended stories that make the reader (at least this reader) continue to wonder and care about her characters long after these stories have ended. For example, does Jones in ‘That Was Then’ find out that his mother’s, former-life, ‘manager’ is his father? Does Raphael, who tells his Neapolitan girlfriend’s relatives that he was raise in an orphanage, ever come clean? Does the woman, who turned her phone off after she received messages from the hospital in ‘Turn Left on California’, find out she has cancer? And finally, is the nameless city-girl protagonist who moved to the countryside to stretch her meagre retirement savings in ‘Time Out’, able to thumb a ride out an approaching forest fire in time before she and the tinder-dry, climate change scenery are engulfed in flames? The endings of these stories kept me wondering about the fate of all four characters long after the words on the page had ended.
Each of Deep Breaths stories feels authentic, peopled by characters’ with believable interests, addictions, and sexual preferences, and activities involved in unusual conflicts. (And I’ve only mentioned half of them). These stories are suspenseful: each character’s conflicts are clear, but how they will or won’t not solve their personal dilemmas (or dig their graves even deeper) is not apparent until the very end. In addition, as mentioned above, Lloy’s stories sometimes don’t include standard denouements or resolutions.
Whether they are starting out, starting over, midway, or have reached the end of the line, Lloy’s masterful cast of characters and their conflicts are unique, engaging, quirky, and sometimes surprising. Deep Breaths of the Inanimate will interest everyone and it is unquestionably Lloy’s best work yet. I couldn’t put the book down. AQ