Two collections of short fiction offer differing takes on the contemporary human condition

BY ANDREW WOODROW-BUTCHER

SHORT FICTION

Things Not to Do

Jessica Westhead Cormorant Books

Don’t Tell Me What to Do

Dina Del Bucchia Arsenal Pulp Press

THE ANXIETIES and disillusionments of modern life seem to be at the core of most contemporary short-fiction collections. So it is little surprise that the similarly titled Things Not to Do, by Toronto writer Jessica Westhead, and Don’t Tell Me What to Do, by Vancouver poet and editor Dina Del Bucchia, both take up these concerns. Westhead focuses on the interior lives of her characters, and locates contemporary malaise in both the connections and disconnections people have, or want to have, to the people and situations around them. Del Bucchia largely avoids this earnestness, and follows through instead on the ironies and absurdities of the world around us, to humorous, often devastating effect.

Things Not to Do hinges largely on the double-edged nature of empathy. The title story elaborates a small, callous act of pedestrian rage, which occurs when a woman walking through an airport cannot abide someone stopping suddenly in front of her to hug a loved one: a lack of empathy blown up to entertainingly pathological proportions.

In the wonderful piece “Empathize or Die Westhead shows the ways in which empathy also has its dangers, in the person of Dennis, an odd man who stumbles into an open-mic night at a café and relates too much to everyone and everything around him, losing himself in successive deliriums that verge on the surreal. Though “Empathize or Die” represents Westhead’s furthest extension of the theme, over and over this book presents characters who temper their own actions, personal needs, or dreams in gestures of unfortunate compromise.