On Beauty: Stories by rob mclennan
Reviewed by Michael Greenstein
Long ago, Longinus wrote a treatise, On the Sublime, which examines the nature of beauty. More recently, Zadie Smith’s novel, On Beauty, and Anne Carson’s poem, The Beauty of the Husband, further explore aesthetic dimensions. Enter rob mclennan with his collection of stories, On Beauty. The description of this book’s cover design – “moments of energy between lethargy and thrills” – aptly describes the book’s contents, for each segment is a moment caught between the still thrill of thought and language.
“Since most of these stories begin with an epigraph, On Beauty may be read for its intertextual polyphony in which each quotation serves as a springboard for beauty.”
This inventive collection comprises many stories, most divided into numbered subsections, with fourteen recurrent “On Beauty” sections interspersed from beginning to end. That there are fourteen of these sections, and that some of them are sonnet length with fourteen lines indicate that mclennan’s poetry makes its way into his prose, as he jiggles genres. Additionally, the prose sonneteer appears in “Fourteen things you don’t know about Arturus Booth,” the first story in the book. Since most of these stories begin with an epigraph, On Beauty may be read for its intertextual polyphony in which each quotation serves as a springboard for beauty.
A sentence from Philip Roth serves as epigraph to the book, with Roth blurring the line between life and fiction. mclennan’s first “On Beauty” is the shortest in the book, as it introduces memory and change with a reference to Niels Bohr, who “suggested, even to silently witness is to alter what is observed.” With his keen eye and clear ear, mclennan witnesses silences, alters observations, and remembers the smell of his mother: “some combination of powder and perfume. It rose from her pores.” Alliteration, assonance, and consonance access memory. The entry of the olfactory alongside sight and sound creates a synaesthetic effect suited to the abrupt generational shift: “The baby is asleep.” In the rest of the book the baby awakens, along with memories of parents in the beauty of domestic drama, and the energy between lethargy and thrills. As much as mclennan’s fragments appear to be centrifugal, there are other forces that cohere in the ear of the beholder.
A sentence from Miranda July’s “Majesty” – “We come from long lines of people destined never to meet” – epigraphs “Fourteen things you don’t know about Arturus Booth.” mclennan’s beauty and majesty, rest and jest, converge and diverge in lines of various length. “There is a shop in London that sells custom-built snow globes.” Since the shop also sells exotic teas from India, it is a reminder of colonial extension, a global wave that plays out against a domestic situation: “Imagine: a diorama of you and your parents standing in your teenage living room, forever frozen in water and artificial snowflakes, a serene scene awaiting interruption.” This book hosts a long line of interruptions – energy between lethargy and thrills – that disturb surfaces to create and interfere with beauty. The narrator was seventeen when his parents died in a boating accident: “They were already underwater.”
Shake the diorama to the second section when the narrator is twenty-six years old. This section contains many clipped sentences that place the narrator in Oakville, Ontario and shape his background. There had been many “interventions” to prevent him from marrying the first woman he slept with. Like interruptions, interventions are wedges into beauty, miniatures of meaning. A sentence disrupts the diorama: “I have many friends, although I rarely see any of them.”
The third section shakes the scene back to the first section: “My parents went into the water.” His older sister Alice enters the hospital to identify their parents: “Our parents, not-alive and not-dead, Schrödinger’s quantum design.” Schrödinger’s cat returns to the family dog, Trudy, but more importantly shakes the globe’s interface between life and death. The paragraph ends with another shakeup: “We went out for seafood, missing the irony.” Although the narrator is allergic to shellfish, they dine on irony, for part of On Beauty is on irony. The narrator reflects on memories of snow on the windshield – the drift of the diorama. Memory and image are dislodged in the intervention of years. Reader, alongside narrator, is dislodged.
Section 4 begins with “thump,” as the blood vessels under the narrator’s right eardrum react to globe-shaking events. He diagnoses a “distracting pulse,” in the rhythmic distractions of mclennan’s prose. The next section chronicles family history in England, which includes an ancestor’s death in a mining accident. It also offers a clue to Arturus’s unusual name: “Like Arthur, the king from his picture books, I was named for this childhood misunderstanding.” It is the art in Arturus that accounts for misunderstandings. Section 6, the shortest in this story, is almost a footnote: “I do not like anyone touching my feet …. I have not felt the need to dig too deep to inquire why.” Pain and humour in the funny bone.
Narrative threads, tangents, and fragments carry through in section 7 where the narrator in the subway spots a young woman with a vintage suitcase whose “sides were alive with scratches.” These tiny details reinforce the energy between lethargy and thrill. “She was remarkably beautiful.” Which brings the reader to a consideration of beauty – specifically, Keats’s equation of beauty and truth. The narrator retrieves the suitcase only to find it empty, a deflation of the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Sections skip from past to present, but by section 10, we receive some relevant information. The narrator’s mother specialized in Victorian children’s literature, so her children are named Alice and Art, after Lewis Carroll’s famous character.
The final section frames the initial narrative, as Art finds himself in Niagara Falls with his fiancée Lucinda. Snapping pictures in the camera lucida, the narrator concludes, “I am already dreaming this image in miniature: three dimensions, surrounded by snowy water.” mclennan’s miniature photographs snow globes, and drafts permanence in Arturus’s booth.
The next narrative sequence, “Interruptions,” begins with an epigraph from Andrew Steinmetz’s Eva’s Threepenny Theatre: “Her memory shot through every age, simultaneously, back to front and front to back, the eternal through the heart of the ephemeral.” On Beauty is a series of interruptions that remember various ages. One definition of beauty may be the presence of the eternal through the heart of the ephemeral, the sublime in the mundane. The stories in On Beauty are interruptions of the “On Beauty” segments, just as the “On Beauty” segments interrupt the scattered stories. After this epigraph the first section begins with “Alberta had a moment when she remembered everything.” Person and province, Alberta comes out of nowhere, except that she follows Arturus and Alice, and her memory is triggered by scents – smoke, skin, and petrichor. Olfactory memory remembers the earlier entry of powder and perfume.
Since Alberta writes novels as naturally as others draw maps, she compares herself to an explorer, “writing to clarify the unknown.” She distrusts David Thompson’s mapping of the forty-ninth parallel: “She pored through his journals, felt for his wife, and, scoffed at his editorializing.” This mention of Thompson’s wife at the end of section 2 serves as a pivot for the introduction of Alberta’s partner, Graham, at the beginning of section 3. Graham’s fourth bout of cancer has spread to his lungs. Meanwhile, Alberta sleeps with one of her neighbours: “She suspects there are no worse betrayals. Suspects but not enough to stop.” The repetition of “suspects” enters into the stop-and-go of Alberta’s life and mclennan’s poetic narrative: “In her life so far, Alberta can’t decide if everything happened too fast, or if the whole story is set in slow motion.” The reader shares in this undecidability of mclennan’s pace between pause and thrill.
Alberta “shakes cobwebs loose. She shakes loose excuses.” This shakedown leads to the trapped sounds of loose excuses, which then get repeated: “Excuses, enough she could drown in.” By the end of this section, she pulls the plug on Graham’s terminal illness. “Lied, lied down. She did lay” in this interplay of lying language and interruption of a marriage.
The next section shifts to her daughter Emily, before backtracking to Alberta’s beginnings with Graham. The plot is a series of interruptions. When she first met Graham, she “fell for his beauty,” but she then drifts towards another man. In the back and forth between mother and daughter, we learn that Emily had been named after Emily Carr. Alberta notices a restlessness in her daughter: “The irony of what Emily didn’t know.” “Interruptions” ends with Alberta writing in a deli near the hospital where Graham has his chemotherapy sessions. She would “pull out her notebook, spend an hour or three spinning her wheels. She couldn’t gain traction.”
On Beauty gains traction by spinning wheels into the next story, “Bicycle,” for balance and off-balance. Instead of name dropping, “Bicycle” drops names in favour of personal pronouns: “He paints a bicycle on her shoulder blade. Etches. The needle cadence, carves.” Patterned after the energy of thrilled lethargy, the bicycle is stationary and in motion, spinning the stillness through verse – the cadences of mclennan’s prose, a stream of consciousness in the Rideau walk that resembles James Joyce’s amble across Dublin’s Liffey River, or Virginia Woolf’s modernist rivers. “An hour passes. Three.” That skipped hour is a moment of energy between stillness and thrill, and its timing returns to the previous story’s “hour or three spinning” in the clock’s rhythm: “Rideau wishes. Wash.”
Section 2 places her as a waitress, shift work within the shifting narrative: “you could set your watch,” and mclennan clocks the melting hours in Ottawa’s excessive heat. Her shoulder throbs from the pain of the tattoo. In her apartment a cuckoo clock further measures history and lethargy on Canada Day. “Bicycle slow.” Her bike is a symbol of itself on Dominion Day: “Bicycle, candy-apple red, with Granny-Smith green trim.” The last section resonates: “A bicycle, like hers. An empty past, broken chain. Her mother is dead.” With her mother’s death, a post empties and a chain breaks.
Which leads to the second “On Beauty,” where mclennan discourses on the history of the novel as “personalized pastiche.” On Beauty is pastiche, collage, and montage – its fragments seeking a centre. If Tristram Shandy begins in utero, then “On Beauty” serves up its own pregnancy in thirty-six weeks on a “snow-globe Saturday,” which then leads to “The Matrix Resolutions” – a natural motherly progression. In this story between parent and daughter watching movies, the focus is on film, specifically The Matrix Revolutions, which impregnates other genres. Section 1 begins: “Plot leads the mind in a particular direction, and often turns. The twist.” mclennan guises us through the twists and turns within On Beauty. When he asks his daughter what she notices first in films – story, setting, dialogue – she replies: “Everything.” mclennan’s mash-up of everything twists plot, as he is disappointed with the third film of the Matrix trilogy: “It veered enough from the path set by the first two that it contradicted.” Off the beaten path, mclennan’s stories veer through moments of energy.
A series of philosophic questions follow within the film’s framework: “What are facts but stories that have been told enough to solidify? To turn to stone.” (The stone story of lethargy returns to Roth’s distinctions between fact and fiction.) These stories fluctuate between solidity and free flow, one genre crossing into another in the history of aesthetics in this critique of the Matrix trilogy. One argument suggests that the most pervasive way to affect culture in the 1890s was through the poem, despite a Dickensian dominance. “Within a couple of decades, it had shifted to the novel. By the 1960s and 70s, it had become film, before shifting to television.” Then back to the movies where by the end of the second film, “Neo broke not the chain but direction.” “The Matrix Resolutions” ends cyclically with beginnings, as a family movie resembles an orgy, and heavy rain branches: “This is where stories begin.”
“The Garden” begins with an epigraph from Gertrude Stein: “My sentences do get under the skin.” Repetition as a kind of Modernist irritant, a bruise of the theatre of the absurd. David studies his garden in a hot pastoral: “He measured his days in rows of pulled, purchased earth” – the poet’s measure aligned in alliteration, assonance, and consonance of phrase. He watches his neighbour, both of them cultivating their gardens, as the narrative senses Ottawa’s July heat with a series of long e’s: “The apartment was stuffy, impossible to breathe. At least outside, the pretense of breeze.” His neighbour gathers ripe baby tomatoes, while he picks snow peas. She has tattoos of small birds down the length of her left arm, which seems to get under his skin, as he remembers “A quote from Gertrude Stein, that she wrote for herself and for strangers. David wondered if he might be one of those strangers.” In the upside-down world, buildings and bats fall and fly. Allusions and incidents drift through the narrative that turns to Marilyn Monroe’s literary aspirations and David’s garden-variety fantasies.
“The Garden” turns to the next “On Beauty,” which is a sonnet, a dream at the edge of consciousness and brush. This sonneteer time-travels with his wife. He wakes up “before the narrative completed,” and moves on to the next story, “Swimming lessons,” which begins with an epigraph from Nicole Brossard’s Intimate Journal: “Tomorrow didn’t ask me what was, what will be my life.” Past and future swim into this entry that begins with a mix of gin and tonic: “Tanqueray, the scent on her father on Sundays. Bombay Sapphire, the ironic sweet taste of colonialism.” Emily sips, and thinks about England and the end of her marriage, as she spends a long weekend in a cottage in the Gatineau Hills. She watches the numbers on her pocketwatch. “Two ground to a halt” in her memory of losing a race in the Summer Olympics. Mixed cassette tapes and mixed drinks, “adjective versus noun.” At the end of the story Emily takes off her swimsuit and wedding ring to swim beneath the surface, to listen to whale music. These mixed drinks return to the beginning of the book’s snow globes, the djinn in the bottle of beauty. “She is a clear glass bottle with note inside.” The lessons of lethargy and energy.
In this anthology of epigraphs, Fred Wah seeks out prairie patterns: “for Saskatchewan to appear before me again over the edge / horses led to the huge sky the weight and colour of it.” On Beauty edges patterns and patterns edges. Phil Hall makes two appearances, the first from A Rural Pen: “The failure of order is the work / disorder is not the work,” and mclennan orders and disorders. The second Phil Hall epigraph is from “Notes from Gethsemani”: “To underline one passage is to help you locate it again.” Readerly and writerly guides recur throughout the collection: “She rereads for clarity, to understand how the story arrived.”
mclennan fills his pages with family and literary history. Section 1 of “This is how it happens,” opens with an opening: “In the opening of Charles-France Landry’s great Canadian novel, Precipice, he describes the unnamed mountain as a finger.” (If you can get hold of a copy of this novel, good luck; otherwise, mclennan will turn the pages for you and guide you through this fiction.) “The novel opens, voice-over, to a filmic panorama: the blue-eyed British Columbia peaks, winking snow-capped scrape a tear, end every tear, a tear-drop, shaped in cloud.” (“Opening” is the title of another story.) mclennan’s wink at the sublime turns to the story’s interior reader: “She knows the book so well, she has memorized the pages. She has started to read between them.” Likewise, the reader must read between the lines of unreliable narration to discover the beauty in irony, and vice versa.
Section 2 fills in the reader a bit more. “In her final year of high school, Juliet adapted a fraction of a short story she loved into a three-minute monologue.” mclennan’s mathematics adapts fragments and fractions within and outside genres, as he swerves from Juliet to Ezra Pound in his cage near the end of the Second World War. Pound is part of Juliet’s monologue. Timothy Findley’s “Daybreak at Pisa” is sandwiched between Pound and Juliet’s performance – adaptation within adaptation. “Learning by tone, and by heart, and the way she stood on stage – feet slightly apart, braced for a blow.” Leaning and learning, Juliet plays her role and performs tones, memories, and heartfelt emotions. The alliteration “braced for a blow” is followed by “held and hunched” in stage gestures that mirror Pound’s animal frenzy. “She hunched, hunkered, lumbered.” This assonance carries into the next sentence – “She lunged across the stage.”
The lean of Pisa, Juliet, and prose participates in her cagey, “caged-animal tone.” She re-reads the novel, sketches and shapes her own notes. She has a passion for fiction, “but anything too lengthy bored her, and something too short, unsettled.” mclennan’s short stories unsettle: “Everything about this unsettled. As Pound himself wrote: Beauty is difficult” – one of the characteristics of On Beauty. We trace Juliet’s dissertation about Catherine Parr Traill’s scrapbooks. “Juliet saw echoes in the ritual from other British constructions.” There is also an echo of Pound’s Pisa incarceration in Parr Trail’s Victorian gardens: “A controlled, tamed wilderness; a domestic bliss from the formerly savage. A collection of lions in pens.” Leaning lines penned.
Section 6 returns to Landry whose history overlaps with Parr Trail’s, while section 7 examines Juliet’s fingers on the manuscript, which returns to the opening section’s mountain finger. Fingers are ribbons that wrap and point to moments of energy in Escher’s drawing hands: “Unspooled, it remained a confusing image.” mclennan’s strange loops invoke Sanskrit’s “anamika,” the name of the left hand’s fourth finger, which translates to “nameless.” Sanskrit itself means refined, adorned, well-constructed or completely formed – qualities that apply to On Beauty. We return to “precipice” to find Landry erased, disappeared, while Juliet plays different roles. The story ends with images of her grandfather and father, the clenched fist and open palm of drawing hands, strange loops, and still energy.
Moira takes over in “A dream about vegetable soup,” with her fascination for names and “the possibilities of short fiction.” She dreams of preparing soup, and her “dreams loop,” loop into “The names of things” and “Interferences,” in this book of transitions, beauty, and irony. From snow globes to bottled djinns, mclennan’s short talks enhance his book of smaller moments of energy.
About the Author
rob mclennan's indefatigable literary passion and acumen can be seen in his countless works of poetry, fiction, reviews, essays--in print and online--as well as his work as publisher and literary impresario. rob lives in Ottawa.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Paperback
9781772127690
University of Alberta Press (August 22, 2024)