a review of goodbyeharold goodluck

In the introduction to her new collection of short stories, Goodbye Harold, Good Luck, Audrey Thomas comments that although she thinks of herself as a novelist her readers often prefer her short stories. The reason for this preference is obvious. With the exception of Songs My Mother Taught Me and Munchmeyer, Thomas' novels experiment radically with both form and subject matter. Mrs. Blood, Blown Figures, Latakia and Intertidal Life dissolve plot and linearity to portray fleeting moments of subjectivity in their encounter with the seemingly fixed forms of the external world. However, in her short stories in collections such as Ten Green Bottles, Ladies and Escorts, and Real Mothers, Thomas tends to work within the conventional short-story form of Joyce and Mansfield. Indeed, Thomas has gained a reputation as one of the finer short-story writers in Canada, often mentioned in the same breath with Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro.

While the stories in Goodbye Harold, Good Luck do not differ markedly from those in her earlier collections, Thomas has clearly begun to introduce some of her novelistic concerns and devices. The stories present a wide range of styles. "The Princess and the Zucchini" is a slyly wicked fairy tale of the kind Playboy delights in printing but Thomas offers a feminist twist to the theme of the captive prince; "One Size Fits AH" develops from a dream sequence; and "The Man With Clam Eyes" plays on a typographical error to descend into the clammy emotions of an undersea world. In their brief fable-like form these fantasy sketches owe much to Borges. At the same time they offer an emotional perspective normally lacking in Borges' highly intellectualized play with literary forms.

Among Thomas' short stories proper, a number employ the first person and obviously involve a high degree of autobiography. As a graduate student at the University of British Columbia Thomas worked extensively on the fiction of Henry James and undoubtedly knows his warning about the "terrible fluidity of self revelation." Yet it is exactly this "fluidity" that Thomas desires to evoke. She aims to give her readers a sense of being in time, of moving forward without any sense of pattern or external authority. In what is arguably the best of her new stories, "Breaking the Ice," Thomas succeeds brilliantly in depicting the loneliness of a woman alone on an island, separated from her children on Christmas day. As the story moves forward, probing, hesitating, one senses the attempt of both the woman and the prose to evoke new rhythms. What seemed utterly desolate at the story's beginning metamorphoses at the end into new feelings and experiences.

Like a new-wave filmmaker, Thomas recognizes that if the lens of our attention can be kept focussed on the moment time will eventually have its will and the scene will necessarily be transformed. Thomas understands that such an attitude means a transformation of our sense of an ending. Her best work opens up the present, insisting on the possibility of living in a now that, while not ignoring the past or the future, comes to know the living moment as an expansive plain.

Thomas' stories offer an openness to experience, an acceptance of the oddities of human life, that has clearly cost her much in time and reflection. "Relics" tells the story of a middle-aged woman revisiting in memory her younger self in Scotland. The woman recognizes that her youthful enthusiasm for love and life so absorbed her perceptions that her earlier self remained cut off from the lives and needs of those around her.

Although Thomas' fascination with the open-ended quality of everyday life can make for a superb story, James' warning about the dangers of autobiographical fluidity is not without its force. Occasionally the stories suffer from a lack of focus; the reader is left somewhere between the mind of the character and the event being described. This occurs in "Degrees," where the reader remains unsure whether the subject is the narrator or the various people in Africa who fail, by degrees, to fit into colonial society. In a post-modernist mode this uncertainty might itself be the subject but Thomas indicates her preference for realism. Lack of focus can also defuse a story's ending. In Goodbye Harold, Good Luck Thomas' delight in winding through a maze, building on "correspondences"—as she comments in the introduction—leaves one with a set of correspondences but little indication of their significance.

This is not to say that Thomas does not craft her work. The amount of rewriting she does and the care with which she introduces her patterns can be seen by comparing the version of "Mothering Sunday" in this volume with an earlier one reprinted in the current issue of the journal Room of One's Own, dedicated entirely to Thomas. Both versions are set in an elegant restaurant on Mother's Day and both illuminate divergent ways of seeing and experiencing motherhood. Where the earlier version ends with a flip comment by a cynical waiter the later version ends with the protagonist preparing to tell a story about her mother to a friend who has just arrived. Since the reader has already heard the story, Thomas obviously intends to stress the act of storytelling about motherhood as crucial to the role of motherhood. While the point is a good one, the story fails to present it dramatically, and the reader comes to the end with a sense of aesthetic disappointment.

Thomas would no doubt reply to such criticism with Henry James' comment that the reader must give the writer her donnee. But then James also remarked that "there are degrees of merit in subjects" and that some subjects have more reverberation than others. In certain stories, such as "The Dance," Thomas settles for subject matter that merely redescribes the contingency and shapelessness of the world. Where she succeeds brilliantly is in stories such as "Local Customs." The subject—summertime life on the beach as seen mostly through the eyes of a young boy on the verge of puberty—might have been narrow but Thomas amasses a wealth of realistic and symbolic detail that considerably enlarges the story's concerns. Anna standing before the boy, naked except for her Egyptian beads of the dead, the blind German uttering his inane laugh, "We Churmans, ha ha ha"—both events lend a vivid public dimension that heightens and dramatizes the passage from innocence to experience.

In sum, Goodbye Harold, Good Luck shows Audrey Thomas at her strongest and weakest. Her concern with reproducing the experiences of people finding their own lives within the multitude of patterns from the past is leading her into exciting new territory. However, this impulse threatens to remove the drama, the vivid moment of the story, when the genre itself would seem to require definition. It will be interesting to follow Thomas' future writing to see whether she discovers a solution to the dilemma or whether she is forced to move to a new form of the short story.