Hunter’s poignant, linked stories mull love, loss and meaning

Winnipeg poet and novelist Catherine Hunter’s new collection of 10 linked stories, Seeing You Home, is about longtime married couple Clare and Richard as it weaves through their time together, his death from cancer and her discovery of moving on in life.

Time is fluid in these stories — the present often suddenly abuts the past — but the subtle underlying theme is that though death always stalks the living, we are touched with the simple grace of life inviting us, as it does Clare, to move forward no matter how difficult.

The ritual of discovering this insight fuels the great story Romeo, Illinois, when Clare re-discovers “I.” The mixing of first and third person is complex, but Hunter manages it with clear, measured prose. Its use shows how we are seen, and who we really are inside.

Here remembrance joins the daily grind as Clare/I, almost immediately after Richard’s death in the dead of winter, deals with home heating troubles, funeral home business intrigue gumming up Richard’s cremation, the pressures of academic life and well-meaning friends and relatives.

At its centre is the furnace saga with a part needed for the finicky outlet that’s only available in Romeo, Ill., which may as well be Mars for Clare. Her outburst of frustration over this, and everything else, connects her once again to the exigency of life against death.

Even stronger is Re-Entry, told entirely in the first person in striking, poetic short paragraphs detailing Clare’s return to the house as she remembers, in scrupulous detail, Richard’s devastating diagnosis on an Easter weekend and her feeling that their life has already ended. “I am remembering the Columbia spaceship burned up on re-entry. I’m thinking I can no more return to the same old Earth than you can,” she muses.

In Renovations, Clare begins to re-model the family house. Her old carpet becomes a squirrel’s new home, as the reader follows both in finding the best life for each of them. We are even given the squirrel’s viewpoint.

What could be merely coy becomes wryly funny and heartwarming in the best way when Clare decides not to rid herself of Richard’s beloved objects, and instead she “squirrels” them away. In providing discarded carpet for the squirrel’s best home, she realizes she also needs her home filled with Richard’s spirit.

The title story, Seeing You Home, sees fragments of other stories come together much like a coda of a symphony. Clare (or “I”) has gone through the journey which saw the mechanics of dying give way to clarity and strength. As she puts it, “The whole winter falls through a cold hole in my memory and vanishes forever.”

Near misses are few but striking in a collection this emotionally rich. Sidhe, an overlong story about a trip to Ireland, Clare’s ancestral home, turns sentimental though not maudlin, and has an unconvincing lumpy mystical overtone.

In 700 Stages of Grief, an edgy tone towards the entire medical system (which works so well in the best stories) turns to open hostility, while inexplicably Clare’s always-believable exasperation turns to anger. The reader is left puzzled — there just isn’t enough narrative to go on to convince, which leaves this story out of tune with the rest.

No story is dull, but sometimes Hunter’s power of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary falters, though the banal never appears.

Still, even a near-miss by Catherine Hunter is worth considering, while the soaring best of these stories are must-reads.

Rory Runnells is a Winnipeg writer.