Review of The Hours: Stories from a Pandemic by Bruce Meyer and Nothing Could Be Further from the Truth by Christopher Evans

In his unfinished Arcades Project, written from 1927 to 1940 and posthumously published in 1982, Walter Benjamin connects the everyday to cinematic montage, reflecting modern life in an endless series of fragments. As seen in both books under review here, the short story is an ideal forum for rendering this fragmentation of life through impressionistic experience.

The Hours: Stories from a Pandemic, a collection of six stories by Ontario poet and writer Bruce Meyer, takes the COVID-19 pandemic as inspiration to depict themes of grief, love, and resilience across history and geography. The opening story, “Yellow Jack,” sets the tone, its title referencing the flag that marks a ship under quarantine because of illness aboard. Here, a husband and wife on their fortieth wedding anniversary cruise become trapped in a metaphorical death dance as the ominously named Tarantella roams the Atlantic Ocean, no port willing to take them in or send aid amid the outbreak of an unknown virus. With a similar sense of entrapment, the story “Zoom” details the everyday struggle of a front-line nurse and her family during the recent pandemic, focusing on quotidian exhaustion and emotional burnout. Meanwhile, the titular story “The Hours” returns to 1911, dramatizing a little-remembered eleven-day heat wave that tortured eastern North America, causing mass death, via the story of wealthy Mrs. Henderson and her gardener Angelo as they face the heat’s decimation of their labour of love—a spectacular rose garden.

Collectively, Meyer’s stories express the sense that when a crisis strikes, everyday life loses its familiar shape to become strange and absurd. The stories return us to Benjamin’s concept of everyday life as a labyrinth, in which history haunts the present. In the final story, “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” the narrator asserts: “History is not merely events, but a wind that whips up leaves, stones, and dust, and stings a person’s face until they bear the scars of living” (93). Sentences like these show Meyer at his best—a poetic writer and literary thinker whose sensory awareness catches the reader unawares. In the story’s embodied history, hope and grief become entangled in the figure of Walt Maybee, a deaf World War II veteran who becomes a piano tuner, a story celebrated as uplifting by the postwar media. He marries Grace, the woman who sang him the title Gershwin song, the melody becoming the aural memory (“sounds wrapped in his mind”) that got him through the war.

Grace denotes the divine gift (“God has given you Grace”) which, in Meyer’s world, functions as the antidote against empty absurdism. A deep spirituality threads through The Hours, emphasized by the title’s referencing of a book of hours, a type of medieval devotional text encouraging ordinary people to incorporate spiritualism into their everyday lives. The point seems to be this: during crisis, the raising of public awareness and lifting of people’s spirits are not ends in themselves but necessitate an anchor in devotional rituals and service. To ward off despair is a lifelong endeavour.

Where Meyer sees sensory possibilities even in the face of death, Vancouver poet Christopher Evans’ debut short story collection Nothing Could Be Further from the Truth evokes the existentialist absurdity of an often-unfeeling universe. Evans is a master at dark humour, his stories revelling in the ambiguous netherworlds of private experience and emotion.

Consider his story “Of This, We Were Certain,” in which nine siblings, the eldest being sixteen years old, are abandoned by their irresponsible parents and raise themselves, which they manage to do with an unexpected lack of chaos. Speaking for the siblings, the first-person narrator explains: “Out of Mother’s absence and Father’s detachment, new household structure evolved. We developed routines and rarely deviated from them. We kept to our studies during the week and, on weekends, threw ourselves into a bottle drive” (13). When the mother eventually returns, bringing instant turmoil back among the siblings, the narrator protests by throwing pears at her car (“I threw and threw until the headlights cracked” [16]). The pear tree is central to this story, first providing the deserted siblings with edible fruit to ensure their survival and, by the story’s end, offering a means of communicating the absurdly chaotic situation caused by the adults.

A different kind of absurdity is at work in “You, the Truthteller,” an unusual second-person narrative that hinges on the unreliability of the student narrator Henry. Infatuated with his teacher Marcia, Henry makes her the relentless target of his misogynist projection, with the final lines resounding with aggression (“You are loved, you bellow. You are loved. You are loved. You are loved” [124]). Such disturbing obsessions become a leitmotif, amplified in the sexual focus of “Registry,” where Marlon, a customer service representative, makes inappropriate advances toward his engaged customer Glenda. When Marlon aggressively invades her personal space in the store, he scares her: “Glenda took an equivalent step back, her eyes welling, before she spun and hastened from the store” (174). Perhaps most disturbing is the final story “Do the Donna,” a third-person narrative from the perspective of a woman named Donna-Marie, the president of a dog-food company, who finds herself the central subject of a popular song written by a man she rejected years earlier. The popularity and omnipresence of the overly sexual song (“D-d-d-d-d-d-do the Donna/You can do it, I know that you wanna” [186]) follow Donna-Marie like a stalker, taking over her life. “She stopped wearing makeup and cut her hair short to distance herself from the images of her she thought the song projected” (189). In this creepy world of normalized sexual harassment, Donna-Marie finds sustaining companionship only with her dogs.

In the end, despite the different outlooks, these story collections highlight human entrapment. They also remind us of Walter Benjamin’s lesson that modern life is fragmented, destabilized, and remade by forces often beyond our control. These disorienting forces can be pandemics, heat waves, or social problems caused by inequalities of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and race. Everyday life is mundane, fleeting, and surprising, an insistent fragmentation reflected in the short story’s form itself—its episodic structure, aesthetic compression, and resistance against conclusiveness. We are left with crystallized pain and grief and confusion—but also with evidence of resilience and the truth of sensory knowledge.