I’ve been thoroughly enjoying reading and being challenged by rob mclennan’s fine new book of stories, On Beauty. It’s called ‘stories,’ but the author’s approach to narrative is largely unconventional, untraditional, and distinctive.
In mclennan’s work there is a fine balance between how each piece happens and what happens, which is a particular delight for readers who are writers: opportunities to learn craft from a master. Poetry and prose combine, and fuse. mclennan has the facility with language of a poet, uses compression like a poet, yet he also indulges a fondness for story. He uses brush strokes, wispy suggestions, evocative details, and graceful, often charming phrasing to convey meaning drawn from the domestic to the sublime.
At times mclennan speaks directly to writerly choices in craft: for example, “Who is the intended reader of the contemporary novel? Some books are composed to be intimate. Is that better, or worse? Perhaps an improvement to be spoken to directly, as opposed to listening in to a conversation between others.” Thus the frequent use of the close third person, and first person, drawing his readers near to his head, and his heart.
Each of the often brief stories, which are interspersed with fourteen “On Beauty” sections, is introduced by a quote that both informs each piece, and also illustrates how well-read mclennan is, how varied his influence are, seen through a wide range of writers including writers like Brossard, Auster, Kundera, Wah, Stein, Miranda July, Gunnars, and many others. A diverse bunch of language lovers.
Examples are surely the best way to convey the fineness of mclennan’s work. Here are a few of my favourites.
Before his son is born, the persona writes, with humour and delight:
I was beginning to see them more clearly, fleshy outline of baby-foot in my dear wife’s belly. There was something inside.
And then, on witnessing the birth of that son, the persona observes:
Stunned as our newborn pulled himself to the breast. Baby skin-to-skin as I quietly wept, and our new trio drifted from anxiety to relief.
Note how much he can convey in so few words, a quick character sketch of a wife as an domestic whirlwind: "Their mother a flurry of cupboards and movement"
And then there’s this, which follows a quote from Paul Auster: "What frightens us most isn’t death, but its result: absence"
Or, in “Translator’s note,” “I am shaped by these words, as I understand them.”
And here’s one of my favourites, in which a social media excerpt is incorporated:
On National Boyfriend Day, @adultmomband posted: that ex u still romanticize is just a concocted projection based off of everything they were never able to give you.”
The piece goes on to note: All of this is projection. All of this is created.
Throughout On Beauty mclennan provides the reader with the “delightful instruction” Aristotle speaks of. I would add that On Beauty is also of beauty, in beauty, from beauty, as well as being simply beautifully written, beautifully expressed. Lovers of language and of narrative will delight in this volume.
Congratulations, rob mclennan, on this fine book of intellectually and emotionally engaging work, work that skilfully uses the abstract and the concrete to entertain, touch, and move the reader with mclennan’s open mind and open heart.
