Why She Had My Vote For The Winterset Award: A Review of Kathleen Winter’s boYs

 

 

 

Kathleen Winter

boYs

Biblioasis (2007)

189 pages

  

 

Kathleen Winter’s vibrant collection of short stories, boYs, has won the Metcalf-Rooke Award, and has recently won the Winterset award. If you haven’t bought it yet, what more encouragement do you need? You can buy a copy at the Tickle Trunk, Afterwords or Chapters. Or, as she offered: “You can usually accost me on the street and buy one, signed, at an author’s discount, since I rarely go anywhere without a copy or two in my bag. I’m into selling books!”

 

This book defies a nutshell summary. There is no genre that could encase this collection of short stories. It is too fresh, too new, too unique, and in the best way possible. This book is alive! Every sentence pops like firecrackers, you expect nothing and love everything, and yet there isn’t really much happening. It is a book you read for it’s ultra-modern, punchy, lucid diction. What I enjoyed the most was her consistently jagged, unexpected, and yet remarkably apt similes and metaphors which catch you off guard, such as “Sponge flan soaked in red sauce that tasted like bandages,” and “[The wind] smelled like wildflowers and clouds and lakes with trout in them.”

 

Kathleen can portray the normalcy of things with a rare and gifted simplicity. As I read the pages I saw images, not words. It is one of few books I’ve read that appeals to all of the senses. The imagery is so vivid you not only see it, you understand your own world a little more. Even the sounds blare off the pages, and then there are the smells, like “…sweet to breathe the mysterious scent of someone else’s blankets.” We all know that smell, right?  

 

This new and catchy feel is what is getting this diction-driven book all of it’s well-deserved attention. Not the stories, but the writing itself, what we should be awarding authors for: Their skill, their magicianship with words, how well they slap a sentence together. Which brings me to what will ultimately be the main critique of these stories: Their lack of plot. Some critics might be quick to point out the lack of plot, but they would be wasting their breath and ink. Why is it assumed that an author’s main goal in writing is to create a story driven by plot? By twists, conspiracies or grand revelations? boYs is the kind of book you read for the explosion of creative writing in every sentence, and I believe it was rewarded as such. Her vibrant phraseology negates the need for a captivating plot. And I would argue that it takes more skill to write a captivating plotless story than it does to write a captivating plot-driven story.

 

While her lively diction is at the forefront in terms of this book’s literary merit, the book is also laced with the occasional, perfectly place aphorism, such as “No matter how many people die, the amount of tragedy is still the same,” and many of these stories and characters capture actualities about our world in a very nice, uncontrived manner. The toad-rearing, kaleidoscope-making father in “You Can Keep One Thing”, to me, embodies the mystical, unknowable nature of most of our fathers. 

 

I didn’t want to compare her to her brother, Michael Winter, so I won’t, but it is evident that these two inherited some rare gene that enables them to articulate character-defining features like no one but…each other: “When he chewed his sandwich she could see how the teeth were not part of him and had no sensitivity.” Every paragraph is blocked full with such microscopic attention to detail.

 

And I loved the characters too, each one is endearing and memorable. It helps that Winter brings her characters to life as well as any writer I’ve read, and does so without overdoing it. She whips out the most unexpected and spot-on sentences to illustrate them, and uses dialogue quite skillfully to further enliven them. The result is a cast of characters I find hard to believe are not real. Seriously. In my mind, there really is a handsy, juice-loving, and often incoherent Sandy Milandy out there, whose “…hair sprung off his head like sunrays when he took off his hat…He kept a perpetual glass of juice going. He drank so much of it Marianne was worried about the chemicals.”  And I still can’t get the image of the toothless, bun-loving Ms. Snellen out of my head.  

 

Lastly, hats off to her publisher, Biblioasis, for taking a shot on this atypical collection of short stories, and I am glad to see it is working out for them! Biblioasis might be proof that the book industry is not so rigid after all. boYs is the first collection of short stories to win the Winterset award, and that speaks for itself. Stay tuned, my next article is an interview with Kathleen, and I loved every answer.

 

(The other two books shortlisted for this year’s Winterset award were Breakwater’s Cod: The Ecological History of the North Atlantic’s Fishery by George Rose, and Creative book’s The Silent Time by Paul Rowe. Congrats to these two as well!)

 

Chad Pelley

(comments, criticism and suggestions welcomed at http://chadpelley.wordpress.com/articles/)