This first collection shines with verbal brilliance--the surface of these stories moves and writhes like live skin. In fact, Canty's attention to the outward appearance of things is at the forefront of these pieces: of a young retarded woman in "Judy," he says "Everything she felt was on her face." Of Tina, in "The Victim," the narrator observes, "She scribbled on this emptiness herself: eleven earrings in her left ear, two in her right. She's shaved her legs and dyed her hair . . . trying to write a new version of herself." But it is what moves beneath these surfaces that becomes a little trying for the reader, for Canty seems to distrust his eye and ear, investing his narratives with tabloid violence or soap-operatic drama. There is an exploding head; there is "Margaret, hanging like a red doll out the hole in the windshield"; and epiphany upon epiphany. Still, Canty has enormous promise. The opening story, "King of the Elephants," ends with an image so beautiful and so strange that it can't be paraphrased: "I looked at the trucks passing by on the highway and I watched my shadow circle around me in the headlights, the thin man torn to nothing in the dark, again and again. After a few minutes of watching I turned back toward the car, where my father was sleeping." Altogether, an impressive debut.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In his first collection of stories, Canty depicts nightmarish events and situations encroaching on ordinary lives. His restrained tone underscores the sense of horrible inevitability; the reader cringes but cannot look away. The characters are indeed "strangers"; people at peculiar turning points in their lives, they're lost on what feels like familiar ground. Temporarily impaired by alcohol or sadness, they don't read situations well and make the wrong choices. In "Pretty Judy," a bright, lonely teenager deceives himself as he enters into a desperate and doomed sexual relationship with a mentally retarded young woman. In "Blue Boy," a teenage lifeguard, daydreaming about an older woman, acts on those fantasies with painful consequences. After Tina and boyfriend Bobby have murdered their abductor in "The Victim," she concludes that "events have their own current." There direction-like that of Canty's characters-cannot be altered. These very strong stories are highly recommended.
Eleanor Mitchell, Arizona State Univ. West, Phoenix
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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