Novel trumps short stories in new Alix Ohlin pair

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IT'S becoming more difficult for authors to find opportunities to publish short-story collections. Publishers are less likely to take risks on anything other than a novel.

A common compromise is to publish a story collection and a novel side by side, as is the case with Canadian literary writer Alix Ohlin's new works.

A Harvard grad originally from Montreal, Ohlin teaches at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and her debut novel, The Missing Person, received a warm critical reception in 2006.

In both the new novel, Inside, and this story collection, Signs and Wonders, Ohlin is intent on exploring characters either in or recovering from broken romantic relationships.

Inside is the better of the two volumes here and should help to bolster Ohlin's growing reputation.

The stories in Signs and Wonders all deal either with characters who are divorced or in troubled marriages. Unfortunately, there's often too little character development beyond the initial conflicts.

Each story begins with an intriguing premise (such as a young man offering to buy a woman dinner if she will pretend to be his girlfriend in front of his semi-prescient mother or a boy gone missing during a family vacation in Scotland), but there is little else to hold the reader's attention through the rest of the narratives.

The story Robbing the Cradle is an exception here and is one of the best entries, but its conclusion is too predictable and undoes all of the complexity that Ohlin has worked to build.

Short stories are not often plot-driven and instead seek to illuminate an idea or emotion, usually relying on some sort of epiphany. Ohlin wants her stories to have this kind of effect but she doesn't trust her readers to notice the revelations on their own. The closing sentences of most of the entries feel as though she is trying too hard to inject them with meaning.

The novel, on the other hand, is more carefully crafted, depicting the lives of four interconnected characters. Grace is a newly divorced therapist in Montreal. While skiing in Montreal, she stumbles upon John Tugwell, a clerk at a stationery store, passed out in the snow after a failed suicide attempt.

Mitch is Grace's ex-husband, also a therapist, working in Iqaluit. Annie is one of Grace's former clients and hopes to make it as an actress in New York.

The narrative focuses mainly on Grace and Mitch, and Ohlin's talent is best showcased while she is exploring these characters. The novel seeks to understand how therapists manage to distance themselves (sometimes not quite successfully) from all the pain and chaos of their clients' problems and find ways to live functional and fulfilling lives of their own. TV viewers might think of the HBO series In Treatment or the Showtime series Huff, both of which covered similar ground.

Grace is obsessive in her need to understand John's motivations for suicide even as she hopes for a romantic relationship with him. When Mitch's relationship hits a snag, he takes a job in Nunavut, where he can certainly be of use but where he also completely isolates himself from his own problems.

These characters understand the deep emotional traumas of others but are not immune to these same issues, sometimes finding themselves greatly affected by the turmoil they help others to navigate.

The odd one out here is Annie. From a plot perspective, she is connected to early parts of Grace's narrative but in terms of thematic subject matter, her story doesn't fit as well with the others.

Her attempts to succeed as an actress, first in New York and then in Los Angeles, are predictable and do little more than reveal Ohlin's own cynicism towards the stereotypical Hollywood lifestyle.

Keith Cadieux teaches English literature and creative writing at the University of Winnipeg.

Signs and Wonders

By Alix Ohlin

Anansi, 261 pages, $19

Inside

By Alix Ohlin

Anansi, 257 pages, $23

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 23, 2012 J9