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Book Review: The Dead Are More Visible, by Steven Heighton
Jeet Heer, Special to National Post
The Dead Are More VisibleBy Steven HeightonKnopf Canada260 pp;
$22
Steven Heighton is fascinated by the things couples do in bed.
Which is not to say hes a voyeur or a pornographer. Rather, he is a
writer who is exceptionally clear-eyed about the fact that emotions
are only alive to the extent that they areincarnated in physical
acts: in looking, in touching, in caressing, in cuddling, in
grappling, and in all the other motions that led up to the act of
lovemaking and are intensified by it. Nor do these tactile
experiences disappear after consummation but rather linger in the
body like still-warm embers from an exhausted fire.
The stories in Heightons new collection The Dead Are More
Visible are impressively varied, but one feature that gives the
book unity is the authors recurring conc
ern with the biological and emotional urges that bring couples
together and alsosometimes push them apart.Here is an account of a
long-married couple who lost a son in an auto accident: Every night
for months they lay twined without ever having sex, a strange shift
from all the years when they had often made love but always slept a
little apart.Here is a Canadian who teaches English in Japan
describing the postcoital routine he has with his employer and
lover:
Always, after the nights last sex and cigarettes, we would turn
away from each other and lie back to back, space between us, to
fall asleep, but when I woke up inthe small hours she would be
furled into me, face on my shoulder or pressed into my nape,
sleeping hard.
Here is a husband about to divorce thinking about the lingering
sexual tensionsthat exist between him and his soon-to-be ex, a
woman whose outwardly cool exterior conceals her private passions:
Whenever they were in each others vicinity, a vital arc would leap
the synapse between them, etching the air . And in the
sweatyaftermath of sex she would act as if nothing shocking had
just occurred, as ifshe hadnt just been far beyond herself,
laughing wildly, her hard little thighs crushing his hot ears and
cheeks.
Sex is a slippery activity that notoriously resists the efforts
of prose fictionto grab hold of it. There is even a sniggering
annual prize given to bad sex writing. It is a testament to
Heightons authorial gifts that he not only can writeabout sex with
exquisite delicacy, but that many of the best passages in his
stories are about intimacy in the broadest sense, meaning not just
carnal acts but
the full spectrum of sensations that underlie all human
relationships and also our very existence as self-conscious
animals. Heighton is a full-bodied writer, disconcertingly candid
about fleshly urges in a way that shocks us into recognizing and
remembering intense experiences that weve been socialized not to
talk about.
In an autobiographical essay, Heighton once asserted that I
wouldnt have to writeif I could be a gifted athlete, an artist of
the body a runner, a swimmer, a boxer. This admiration for artists
of the body those who live by doing rather than more sedentary
activities explains some of the focus on sports in this
collection
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. One story is about boxers, another focuses on a sports doctor
who once had a promising career as a runner, and a third deals with
the non-athletic but still very physical job of being a fireman.
All of these artists of the body are described with the same vivid
and precise prose Heighton brings to describing sex. Atits best,
this prose manages to achieve the same miracle of incarnate
expressiveness found in Joyce or Nabokov, masters whose words are
so intensely textured and specific that we feel them pulsing
through our body.
To say Heighton is an immensely talented writer is true enough
but insufficient.Thanks to creative writing programs, Canada has
many skilled writers who can carpenter together serviceable
sentences to make a readable story or novel. Middling competence in
fiction is now the Canadian norm and enough to win prizes and even
sell a few books. Unfortunately, given the small army of writers
who can jump over the bar of adequacy and win attention and some
praise, it is forgotten that there is a much smaller cadre of
writers who belong to a different league, who write fiction of
first rank. If Joyce and Nabokov seem like too distant and foreign
as points of comparison, then here is a comparison closer to home:
the best stories in this book the title tale, Shared Room on Union
and Nearing the Seas, uperior are as good as the fiction of Alice
Munro and Mavis Gallant. Or to be more blunt, Heighton is as good a
writer as Canada has ever produced.
Critics are paid to be querulous and to earn my keep I can find
a few faults. Heighton is an ambitious writer, which means he
occasionally aims further than hecan shoot. In the last story,
Swallow, the plethora of secondary characters overwh
elms the central plight of the protagonist. I wish Heighton
hadnt reprinted (in slightly edited form) his older story Heart
& Arrow, which is written in a florid prose style he has since,
thankfully, abandoned. But these are niggling quibbles.The best
stories in this book do what only great art can do: make us feel
morefiercely alive.
Jeet Heer is co-editor of the new book Too Asian?: Racism,
Privilege, and Post-Secondary Education (Between the Lines)
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/05/25/book-review-the-dead-are-more-visible-by-steven-heighton/
