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Fidelity
by Michael Redhill
A review by Benjamin Schwarz
In fact there's very little fidelity, at least as conventionally defined, depicted
in this hushed but stupendously accomplished story collection, largely devoted
to the family, sexual, and marital lives of very middle-class Canadians. Whether
exploring a mother's betrayal of her gifted eight-year-old son's trust ("She
longed for him to have weaknesses, to try something and fail. It was a strange
way to express her love, to want him to taste the poison of disappointment")
or a traveling school photographer's rueful reflections on his relationship with
his former wife ("He hadn't, until very recently, he realized, had the heart
for much, and the cost of that had been another person's happiness") or the
corrosive consequences on his psyche of a middle manager's unrevealed adultery,
Redhill's plaintive but unsentimental tales, which combine an almost ruthless
economy with a delicacy of touch, probe good but broken people plagued by the
recognition of their own profound inadequacies. Although melancholic (the narrator
of the last story aptly characterizes sex and love as "a gloomy business"),
Redhill leavens his tales with an off-kilter if devastating humor, as in the gifted
boy's statistical assessment, complete with chart, of the relationship between
his parents' marriage and the manner of breakfast preparation.
He weighted "hot food, mother eats with us" (the most desirable
condition) four times more than "cold food, mother in bed" (the
least desirable) and calculated the Marriage Correlative as the weekly mean
given those weights. And if the monthly average of the MC fell below 4, he
considered the safety of his family life at risk.
He could see from this that things were falling apart.
Ambiguous, undramatic, attentive to detail (the bantering sarcasm that settles
on a divorced couple's conversation; an office manager's meddlesome tone), these
stories will inevitably be described as "quiet." But make no mistake:
every one will leave the reader shaken.
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