if-true confessions The Last Chance Cafe and Other Stories, by Anita Roberts, Polestar Press, 139 pp., paper- back Means of Escape, by Hugh Brody, Douglas & Mcintyre, 192 pp., now in paperback Barbara Blach’ BOOK REVIEW HERE SEEMS {to bea -wealth of what might be called confessional fiction on the market. It is a . hybrid —~ not quite autobi- ography, not entirely fiction. _ACits core is some pain or grief that the writer needs to : exorcise, to reshape in order to .: make sense of it. The challenge of this confes- sional fiction is for it to transcend its persona] roots and communi- _ cate to hundreds of readers. It is ‘anything but escape reading. In fact, there is something dis- ‘turbingly claustrophobic about it, ike being trapped in a tiny room with a stranger who confides an ‘awful secret. . §. You want to flee, but you lis- .iten — out.of a combination of campassion and morbid curiosity. Polestar Press contributes to "this genre with Anita Roberts’ fic- tion debut The Last Chance Cafe and Other Stories. \n this collec- ‘tion, Roberts shows a talent for ‘portraying the myopic perspec-" five ofa child, Ann, a she ° grows to womanhood. . But buried within. the ingenu- -- Ous-sounding narrative are mild- “= ly disturbing or perplexing : “:events. These are the emotional “. and physical perils of a develop- «cing girl, instantly recognizable to any woman. er ~"” But Anna is not everywoman. She is a complicated mix of defi- ance, imagination and vulnera- - bility, qualities arising out of a childhood marked b:!.inpre- ‘ dictability and violence. _ As the book progresses, the - coping strategies Anna learns in her childhood are carried over into her hood... _ UISING.“ Cruise “and daughter which is both bond’ _ and bondage. Roberts injects a tinge of humor into the stories, especially in the early accounts of Anna’s childhood. She writes: “Going to Communion was always interest- ing. Anna knew she was sup- posed to have holy thoughts but she usually found herself trying to sneak a look at other people’s tongues.” Anna gives birth at the age of 16, unready but resilient. Roberts describes Anna's affection for the unplanned infant: “Anna felt tears brimming and then spilling over as she - looked down at her baby, but she didn’t feel sad. She felt somewhat more powerful than she'd ever felt before. It was as though her heart had cracked open and all of her was pouring out.” If it weren’t for the humor and childlike tone of the narrative, this collection would drag the reader down into its more serious confessional undercurrent. Instead, it clicits compassion and dread — dread of hearing some too-awflul personal revela- tion. The result is a powerful, inti- mate fictional framework. One, | might add, that does not need the author's confessional at the end to lend it legitimacy. Hugh Brody, in his collection of stories Means of Escape (Douglas & Mcintyre), sets an entirely different tone. He states in his opening words: “Fiction is not, of course, an escape.” Certainly not. . The content af his emotionally complex stories brought me to the brink of nausea. One, in par- ticular, about a woman trying to escape her imperfect mother, was a gruelling, emotional read. In this story, “Island,” - Mariannne goes back to “work it out” with her mother, Ysobel, ‘who lives on an almost uninhab- ited island in Scotland. The trip is Marianne’s effort to both remem- ber her origins and, as it turns out, escape them. ” Her mother and her husband, George, have a sort of sick sym- biotic relationship. During her visit, Marianne is imprisoned in the couple’s emo- tional web, along with the reader who scrambles to understand the half-real half-myth of the story, the connection Tetween mother ‘In “The Lake,” a’ much more ' tender story, a husband recounts his Jewish wife’s pilgrimage to Germany. Not until their old age ee with a PRINCESS does the husband learn that she had escaped Hitler's genacicde as a young woman, fleeing into the woods of central Asia, He confesses he was aware of some deep hurt, but did not probe into her secret stories. As a memorial to her after she dies of old age, he writes about her experience, her original escape and her escape trom that past during her life in England. With a chilling lyricism, if there can be such a term, Brody exposes the means people use to retrace their history, to admit to it, to reject it, lo redefine it. And he reveals the struggle people go through to secure a sense of place. 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