THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 28, 1994 TAG: 9408310402
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JEFFREY RICHARDS
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
A STRANGER IN THIS WORLD
KEVIN CANTY
Doubleday. 180 pps. $20.
There is something almost Calvinistic about this startling collection of stories. Kevin Canty, a native of Montana who teaches at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, writes of people whose little mistakes or petty indecisions lead to awful changes in the ordinariness of their lives. None of the stories posits any theological or metaphysical cause, nor do any moralize. Yet one senses after reading these pieces that all of us live too close to obsession, foolishness and ruin to feel much distance between ourselves and the losers in Canty's world.
One constant in A Stranger in This World connects the several people and venues: the falseness of perception. In the title story, a woman who cannot shake the memory of her dead husband goes South to meet the family of her new fiance. Expecting in some corner of her mind a house from the ``Legendary South,'' she instead finds a place that ``looked like part of a Barbie set, new, cheap and pink. Even the landscaping looked fake, stiff little bushes and a green felt lawn, stolen from a model railroad.'' Disoriented, the woman, Candy, goes through the greetings as if in a Kabuki play - even to the point of seeing her fiance's brother as the image of her dead husband.
In ``The Victim,'' another young woman, Tina, suffering from burnout and sore wrists as a reservations operator, looks for something to inscribe in the ``blank space'' of her life; she dates the tattooed Bobby because when he touches her, ``she feels his intention spill out of him to fill the blank, amorphous mass of herself.'' Bobby is a nobody, but Tina's own perception leads her to follow him around; on the way home from a beachfront amusement park, they get into an accident with, as it turns out, a psychotic.
Though horrible things happen to his characters, Canty never strains to work in a made-for-television bit of plot. All follows relentlessly from the premise that an empty person who lets accident determine his or her situation should not expect the rainbow.
Some stories provide dark little flashes of grim reality. ``Dogs'' is the reflections of someone who euthanizes unwanted pets at a shelter. In ``Great Falls, 1966,'' a man with cancer goes to Glacier Park with his uncommunicative son and grandson for a meaningful experience, but some other tourists' stupid blunder and the ``terrifying'' beauty of the mountains confuse rather than clarify. And in ``Moonbeams and Aspirin,'' a story very much like Raymond Carver's ``Cathedral,'' a struggling couple finds a moment of togetherness with a blind man in a scene seemingly borrowed from the movie ``The Scent of a Woman.''
Canty's best stories deal with teenage sexual confusion. In both ``Pretty Judy'' and ``Blue Boy,'' mid-teen boys follow impulses that lead to emptiness - not the fulfillment they expect. In the first one, Paul visits the young retarded woman who calls him to her window and fools himself as to her motives. In the other, Kenny, an accidental hero at the swimming pool, fights the battle between good sense and hormones; just a slight gesture inspired by the latter shatters all he might have gained from reason.
As relentless as a Puritan preacher and to modern tastes much more entertaining, Kevin Canty propels his characters onward toward their separate days of doom. MEMO: Jeffrey Richards is an English professor at Old Dominion University. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
In ``A Stranger in This World,'' Kevin Canty mines the gap between
perception and reality.
Jacket photo by EVA RUBINSTEIN
Jacket illustration by KATHY KIKKERT
by CNB