Willem De Kooning's Paintbrush

The man had come and infected them with a new way of seeing. She felt her vision blunting now even further, blearing the living room couches and chairs into a mass of cubes and blobs at the centre of which was Boyd, his body filleted by shadows from the venetian blinds, his face bloated with suffering and streaked with mucus and tears.

As the above quote comes from the conclusion of the title story in Willem De Kooning's Paintbrush, it feels appropriate as a summation of the whole: in this collection of fifteen short stories (many of which have previously won awards on their own), author Kerry-Lee Powell offers us “new ways of seeing”; encouraging the reader to look beneath the surfaces of people and situations that may at first seem ugly or frightening or offputting (much like the De Kooning paintings that inspired the title). Peopled with refugees and alcoholics, bullies and an aging stripper or two, these stories – replete with humanity and dark humour – explore the ways in which people try to connect to one another through generosity, compassion, and art. With a consistent narrative voice and recurring themes, these stories hang together as a cohesive whole, and as I jumped from one to the next, I was frequently moved and delighted. I'm not surprised that this collection was nominated for all the big Canadian literary prizes.

He wanted to make work that disrupted comfortable or shallow-minded notions about reality. He wanted to go deep, delve into nether regions where even other artists feared to go.

Most of these stories contain an artist as a minor character, and in many cases, these are people who have given up on their art. In the same way that De Kooning's paintings provoke the subconscious with their abstract expressionism, Powell uses subtle images from folk tales to the same effect in her writing – these short stories are crowded with mistaken twins and doppelgängers, witches in the forest, dreams and subterranean exploration, stepparents, grottoes, mirrors, and disguises – and the effect is an expansion of reality without ever losing sight of the fact that these stories are all anchored in the very real. Much was touching and much was funny, in each story characters evolved to a new way of seeing by the end, and ultimately, I couldn't ask for much more from this fine collection.

The  2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:

Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Andrew Battershill : Pillow
David Bergen : Stranger
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Kathy Page : The Two of Us
Susan Perly : Death Valley
Kerry Lee Powell : Willem De Kooning's Paintbrush
Steven Price : By Gaslight
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People

*Won by Madeleine Thien for Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Not really a surprise, but this is how I ranked the shortlist, entirely according to my own enjoyment level with the reading experience:

Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People

Governor General's Literary Awards (English Fiction) Finalists 2016:

Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates

Anosh Irani : The Parcel
Kerry Lee Powell : Willem de Kooning's Paintbrush

Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Katherena Vermette : The Break

*Won by Thien; not my favourite, but not really a surprise.

2016 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize nominees:

Michael Helm for After James
Anosh Irani for The Parcel
Kerry Lee Powell for Willem de Kooning's Paintbrush
Yasuko Thanh for Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains
Katherena Vermette for The Break

 I would give it to The Break.

*And in the end, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize went to Thanh for Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains.