COEXISTENCE

This set of interconnected stories explores the lives of Indigenous characters—all of whom are tortured in some way by romantic grief or confusion—in a range of settings across Canada.

We encounter a mother who confides to her son about her youthful passion for another girl, a parolee who struggles to orient his need for companionship as a free man, and several artist figures who agonize over their creative and erotic frustrations. The impact of past and ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples forms a prominent thematic backdrop here, and the dysfunction plaguing individual characters’ lives is overtly linked to systemic forms of trauma. These stories are earnestly told, and the author’s concern for drawing attention to marginalized forms of suffering is clear. However, the narrative’s didactic impulse—paired with the adolescent sentimentality that is this collection’s guiding sensibility—produces rather hollow effects that tend to undermine the plausibility of the individuals it presents to us. The author favors direct summations of his characters’ lives and motivations, which often manage to be at once maudlin, portentous, and fuzzy: “He wonders what the world will be without her in it. The truth: it will be nothing and it will be everything.” A reliance on academic jargon sometimes takes the place of any genuine psychological probing, as in this description of a man eavesdropping on his neighbors’ lovemaking: “Their animal sounds remind me that the I is a trick of the light and that the plural is dense and unbearable.” Though the collection aims to confront large themes—most obviously, the impact of colonialism and intergenerational trauma on Indigenous sexuality—it seems, at last, not to illuminate the subjects it would represent, but to evade them.

A sincere collection of stories chronicling love and loss.