At night, it was easy to imagine a sacred world adjacent to this one, a world in which everything human was diminished and every speck of earth was a symbol of the divine or its opposite. It was even possible, at night, to imagine the worlds as porous, the divine (or its opposite) intruding on the banal, though he had no real access to that other world and only glimpsed it in strange dreams. For the most part, the miraculous seemed to shun him. It had left his life ages ago.
The Night Piece is the collected short fiction of André Alexis, and if, like me, you’ve only known Alexis from the novels that make up his “quincunx” project, these stories might seem to be from the mind of a different author. With tales for the most part weird and uncanny, Alexis pushes the reader to confront those things that go bump in the dark — even if, or perhaps especially if, they only bump around in the dark of one’s own mind — and they ultimately expose relatable truths about community, connection, and dislocation. Consistently interesting and unpredictable, in smooth and polished prose, this beefy collection masks psychoanalysis in Gothic storytelling and I enjoyed the whole of it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The Soucouyant had long, dark hair, almond-shaped eyes, a nose that was a trifle broad, full lips, and a strong chin. Her neck was graceful, her breasts full, her hips narrow. Were it not for her breath, she was his imagined ideal of a brown-skinned woman. (But she was nothing of the sort. She was neither beautiful nor attentive. Her hair was not soft, nor were her breasts full. “She” was not a woman, after all.)
Some of my favourite bits: The spooky Caribbean fable of the Soucouyant brought to life in The Night Piece; the bizarre eroticism of The Third Terrace (involving only sex workers’ hands and assorted fabrics and lubricants); divining the source of creative inspiration (with attendant humour about Canadian literature) in A (“All their names began to lose sense: Onwood, Munwood, Mistwood...Why, he wondered, had he ever wished to belong to such a cloudcuckoo world?”). Throughout, there are countless ghosts and gods and civil servants; dreams and trains and so many cups of tea; poets and novelists and other madmen (Alexis himself appears or is referenced more than once; not quite flatteringly). I’ll also note that with most of these stories set in Ontario between Ottawa and Toronto, I was (naturally) engaged by familiar landscapes; most entranced by tales that set loose the strange in my mundane.
I seemed to glimpse a purpose to the universe: everything is pushed from behind or held in place. The stars couldn't move. The sun was held fast; the earth was constrained. All we could do, any of us, was spin. All that we want, and all we pursue, gives the illusion of movement, of liberty. There is no movement, no liberty, only local phenomena of such paltry significance it’s a wonder we get out of bed for them.
And while these stories are, for the most part, spooky and surreal, Alexis uses them to explore a consistent philosophy. This collection is interesting to read on a storytelling level, even more interesting to think about after the fact, and I am happy to have met this other side of an author I thought I already knew.
