A trio of trios makes this collection
Did you hear about the guy who found out he was HIV positive but it didn’t stop him from getting “more serious” with a girl he’d been dating? I guess his excuse was he was drunk and he just forgot or wanted to forget for a while.
Then there was this young girl who wanted to expand her finger span on the piano so bad that she let her little brother perform at-home surgery on her! Funny enough the emergency room doctor said the kid did a pretty good job.
Ian Williams’ Not Anyone’s Anything is a collection of these and more “urban-myth” type of stories. He taps into one of our oldest yet most common guilty pleasures — eaves dropping — where our innate snoopiness has us leaning forward to listen to a conversation that doesn’t concern us watching the amourous greeting at the next table at an outdoor café from behind our mirrored shades or checking out the details of a long-lost friend or lover on Facebook.
People clearly love it and Williams generously provides a book full of somewhat-isolated events long enough to read on a short bus ride across town. History context and resolution are often missing — just like in real life. And not uncommon in other artistic expressions.
A truly gifted visual artist can say more with a few strokes than a “wannabe” who uses every crayon in the box. The two notes that precede the shark attack in the movie Jaws got the point across quite effectively. Silence simplicity or a well-timed facial expression work well in the hands of a seasoned performance artist.
But it’s a pretty risky technique for someone who isn’t at the top of their game. The trade-off with Williams’ gamble of writing within the gossip-loop is that the stories can be rather flat. The leading title chapter Not Anyone’s Anything is written in a type of symbolic shorthand. It’s kind of fun reading the cards but the woman from whom the story is related comes off as entirely humourless and devoid of any joy. This is how Williams chooses to portray a first generation Korean-Canadian university working the family convenience store. It seems more of his own biased perception of how the character views the world than an actual account of woman struggling with letting down her emotional guard.
In Break-In he revisits the children of immigrants theme and has two teenagers from Caribbean parents breaking into new houses. These boys stop to discuss the structural integrity of the door frames they force open. The dead bolt fits into a really thin casing and the glasswork panels prevent screwing it in further. Hmmm. It’s anomalies such as this that make suspending disbelief an uphill battle.
The fourth story however was terrific! Here he manages to use the choppiness effectively. The characters are intriguing and unaware of what was going on which made it a better read.
Towards the end of the collection in Prelude and Cardiology Williams takes more space and provides enough substance around the details to draw you in. Prelude which I hint at in the opening of this review made me cringe jump up and hit the ground with a resounding “Well I didn’t see that coming.” Cardiology was familiar tragic and real. I know that guy I’ve felt those things and there’s always more to the story than meets the eye. Bravo author!
I should have stopped there. Williams should have stopped there. He was riding a strong story-teller wave but the last story ends when the word count is reached when the five o’clock whistle blows when the ADD medications wears off or when you reach your C-Train stop. Like most of the stories in this book it won’t haunt you all day but it was amusing for while.
And sometimes that’s the beauty of a stolen story.
