257 pages @350 wds/pg
First line:
I could see Willie coming along the road from his place, walking fast like he always did.
"The Conversion of Willie Heaps"
Great lines:
It was a face that was familiar to him not only from his possession of it, but because it was also the face of most of his friends. What was it the speaker at the service club luncheon had called it? "The physiognomy of success."
He tried to recapture his feelings of the morning, but when he looked at himself in the mirror all he saw was the staring face of a fat frightened old man.
"The Yellow Sweater"
A fighting, hard-drinking, hard-living writer, Hugh Garner would have fit the stereotype of an American novelist in the 1920s and '30s. He certainly didn't fit in with the effete.... more
I can't think of any Hugh Garner stories I like better than the twenty-four in this collection. So I guess these are his best. They're pretty good. In fact, it is difficult to think of anyone's stories I like better than these.
If you grew up in Canada since the 1960s, you probably already know some of these stories—you've studied "The Conversion of Willie Heaps" or "One-Two-Three Little Indians" in school. These are stories that not only show with gritty realism the heart-breaking lives of their characters, but also carry clear moral messages such as anti-racism.
But although Garner is a feisty, iconoclastic writer for his time, he's at heart a storyteller with a profound interest in people. His moral purpose is just to show you others' lives, others' experiences, to make of them what you will.
Some of the tales you did not read in school, like "The Magnet" and "The Yellow Sweater", concern sexual tensions. "The Magnet" hardly mentions sex, yet the relation between the farm widow and the hired man is thick with desire, jealousy and foolish pride. For me, it's the understated masterpiece of the collection.
A few that deal not with other characters but appear to be minor bits of memoir or journalism, like "How I Became an Englishman" (a great title at least), are too slight to be of interest and should not have been included.
Then there's "E Equals MC Squared" that first seems to have been written just to justify such an impossibly dry title, then turns into a moving piece of work.
But for the most part these are classic stories, told with deceptive simplicity. The very best of them I would hold up against the best that any county has to offer.
— Eric
