I Am Not Most Places by Richard Cumyn
Vancouver, B.C.: Beach Holme, 1996
Reviewed by Hadley Dyer
Richard Cumyn's second book of short stories, I Am Not Most Places, is a fascinating examination of lives in transition. With a steady hand and an all-seeing eye, he paints a series of ten portraits that reveals the tensions and desires residing beneath his characters' exterior calm. Cumyn's characters are the story--vividly rendered, intriguing, and faithful to his lonely vision of the modern world.In "Heat Stroke" a young mother named Doreen plays a cat and mouse game with a lost child beneath the heat of the afternoon sun. As the temperature rises, Doreen falters, becomes confused, and loses her way. Overcome by frustration and bewilderment, she finds herself unable to move. Later she asks her husband,
"Why did we have to move here, anyway? Why did you make me come?""It's not the place, it's the heat," he said... "This is as good a place as any."
In this first story, Cumyn establishes the precarious relationship his characters have with their immediate surroundings. Doreen stumbles in her search for understanding, confounded by an unexpected discrepancy between what is and what she thinks should be. The child precipitates the action, but it is the heat that sparks her confusion and causes her to doubt what she had come to believe was true.
Cumyn plays upon this theme of insecurity throughout the nine stories that follow.
In "A Day of Reckoning" a middle-aged advertising agent is fired from his high-paying job and watches his world crumble around him. He loses his income, his home, his wife--all the things that had defined his sense of self. In "Home Free" a teacher encounters a face from his past. A former student, now an adult whom he does not recognize, knocks on his kitchen door. In the dialogue that ensues, she recounts his past deeds and predicts his present impulses. She confronts him head-on and then disappears almost as suddenly as she arrived. As with many of Cumyn's stories, the ending is ambiguous. Will the teacher reform his ways? Has he really sinned at all? Cumyn writes,
"He felt like a robbery victim, but he couldn't say what had been taken from him."The title of the book appears to acknowledge the limitations of a collection that represents life in a series of brief encounters. The stories in I Am Not Most Places suggest much larger stories. If there is a constant to be found among the characters, it is a sense of displacement that each must recognize and become reconciled with. Each story is an exploration, and at every turn Cumyn's voice can be heard declaring: I am neither here nor there.
In these stories Cumyn provides his main characters with a steady presence, a yardstick by which to measure themselves. The neighbour, the happy hairdresser, the statue of the Unknown Soldier in the park--all are content with their circumstances and blissfully unaware of the earth moving beneath their feet. Their steadiness provides an effective backdrop for Cumyn's primary concern: the precise moment the needle jumps on the record.
In "Someone You Can Count On" a teacher follows a flock of Canada geese on his way to work one morning. As he drives, he admires their strength, their unfailing instinct, and is then horrified when suddenly, inexplicably, one falls out of formation and dies in a field as he looks on. Later, he considers his co-workers as they arrive in the staff room. Enter Kate Wilson,
dark-haired, bright-faced, still looking expectant and purposeful after two years of teaching, and Helen Gill, pushing fifty in a sober suit, a veneer of calm and a wry smile belying dread of the day ahead.While his colleagues are described in detail, the main character remains somewhat remote, as he wastes his morning lounging on the couch, lamenting the goose and speaking in riddles, until he is asked to leave. Like Doreen in "Heat Stroke" he is unable to move. He reaches out, not toward his co-workers, whom he observes with sudden clarity, but toward the goose, which he has carried to the school in a garbage bag.We hear long-distance phone companies and Microsoft herald the phenomenon of an ever-shrinking planet. Richard Cumyn observes the phenomenon of the ever-shrinking self. The fluidity of time and space in our modern world has weakened the foundation on which we construct our identities. With movement there is loss. In order to maintain their momentum, Cumyn's characters draw upon inner reserves for strength they perhaps did not know they possessed. Not all emerge successfully from their foray into the unknown, and some fall out of formation. Without judging, without preaching, but with precision and imagination, Richard Cumyn emerges from this collection as a skilled crafter of fiction.
All contents copyright © 1997, The Blue Moon Review, All Rights Reserved.