A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

B o o k s in R e v i e wpossibly—understand; and stylistically, inthe use of bizarre and spectacular imageslike the monstrous severed head of a cow in"Bride on a Carousel" or the terrible face ofthe monkey "like a Hallowe'en mask" in"Shells." Indeed, the criticism might bemade that these images generate moremeanings than do the stories in which theyare embedded.Despite such imagery, these are stories ina minor key where well-meaning whitemiddle-class Canadian women try to cometo terms with otherness in cross-culturalencounters, and signally fail to do so. Lisa,a young student from Cornell, finds herselfholding an abandoned baby in a red jumpsuiton a deserted railway platform inMexico, and an enthusiastic young womanon a summer job at a Native reserve"accepts turtle claws from Fox and dancingbells from Montgomery and for the firsttime it occurs to me that maybe a nativegirl wouldn't do this." Whether stories arein the first person or the third, it is as if theauthor is wiser than many of her characters,for they are revealed as dangerousinnocents abroad who wreak havoc withthe best will in the world:I would protect Fox if I could from my culture,but it is already too late. I have nothingto give back, nothing to give back,and Mink and Fox's child are lost.However, not all the stories are quite sodevastating in their social critique. Thereare moments of grace and forgiveness containedin revelations of human intimacyalthough Wien's protagonists remain"watchers on the outside" and are left withnothing but glimpses and echoes.Helen McLean's Sketching from Memory:A Portrait of My Mother shares this fragmentedquality as she tries to figure out hermother's life, first in the cover sketch (forMcLean is best known as an artist) and thenin the narrative. It is an unfinished portraitwhich retains some of the tentativeness of asketch, as the ambiguously weighted titlewould suggest. The story opens with thesight of a ninety-year old woman in a nursinghome suffering from Alzheimer'sDisease and a daughter's flood of grief atthe prospect of losing Mother: "I had neverbefore imagined this world without mymother in it. I hadn't realized how much Iloved her until now." This is a curious andfascinating biography, written undoubtedlyout of love but love of a sometimes tormentedkind, and it is as much autobiography,family history and social chronicle oflife in Toronto in the 1930s and 40s as it isthe mother's story.McLean manages to write without sentimentality;she who is now the keeper ofmemory goes in search of her lostmother—as an unloved foster child fromGeorgian Bay, later as the wife of a farmer'sson who becomes a Toronto lawyer and as amother who is who is "alternately affectionateand ferocious." McLean's narrative,like Wien's, is constructed from images or"mental snapshots" as she calls them,which cannot be fitted neatly togetheralthough they occur in chronologicalsequence. The most vivid memories of themother are from a child's perspective: ofbeing ill with scarlet fever in the 1930s (inthe days before "antabeeotics") with"Mother leaning over me in lamplight atnight, raising my head to get me to drink,"or of Mother as family tyrant whose emotions"would make or break any occasionfor all of us."As if to contain these irreconcilables,McLean offers brilliantly detailedMunroesque descriptions of 1930s houseinteriors (several of them) for her familymoved many times during the Depressionand then again to Forest Hill during theupwardly mobile 1940s, when automaticwashing machines and supermarkets werenew and exciting. She is an astute chroniclerof the subtleties of Toronto middleclasslife, though her forte is the bizarre,184