Trap Lines

Twenty-eight year old native writer Eden Robinson’s first collection of four long short-stories recognizes in the fragmented family some deep, inescapable longing for order irretrievably shattered. So these stories each portray an adolescent carefully walking the fault-line of an inevitable earth-quake — booze, drugs, sex and, of course, repeated beatings come crashing off the walls like decorative knick-knacks nobody is likely to miss. In fact, the litany of sameness which accompanies this flattened landscape natural disaster deadens the reader’s apprehensions; we turn away from destruction, however finely wrought it may be. Some may like the way these stories are completely lacking in emotion — dead-pan characters run for their lives from their eternally drunken family members — but others might object to a narrative that excludes all literary conventions, a well written book, yes, but one that is ultimately buried under the rumble of its own convictions.

Eden Robinson / Knopf Canada / $26

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