Review | Twenty-four authors (and one astute editor) drag CanLit beyond its traditional realist approach

It is helpful, as a starting point, to pay attention to the first word in the title of André Forget’s short fiction anthology “After Realism: 24 Stories for the 21st century.”

The word “after” can of course mean “following” or “in the wake of.” It can also mean “chasing” or “hunting,” as in “a dog going after a scent.” And in a poetic sense, as Forget points out in his introduction to the current volume, it can connote “in the manner of” — that is, a recognition of indebtedness to an earlier writer or mode of writing. Each of these comes into play at various points in the volume’s collected stories.

“As suggested by the title,” Forget writes, “the stories in ‘After Realism’ are not so much post-realist as they are written with a conscious understanding that realism is one tradition among many.” Such a perspective is welcome given that the dominant tradition in CanLit — the one that garners the bulk of what little review coverage remains and claims most of the country’s glittering prizes — extends an adherence to a realistic mode of presentation, usually married to a historical setting.

The contents of “After Realism” comprise a cross-section of fiction by a new generation of writers who do not feel constrained by the dictates of conventional CanLit; the writers featured in the anthology enact a freedom and willingness to experiment with the structures of form and language that is as bracing as a quick plunge into a January lake.

This is apparent from Forget’s gambit to open the collection with a strange take on an epistolary story by Toronto writer Jean Marc Ah-Sen. “Swiddenworld: Selected Correspondence With Tabatha Gotlieb-Ryder” begins as an exchange of correspondence between a broker and an art collector; midway, and without warning, the reader is plunged into missives that have become pornographic as the two enter into a love affair that ends badly.

The piece is a stand-alone excerpt from Ah-Sen’s 2020 novel “In the Beggarly Style of Imitation”; a purist might cavil about including a novel excerpt in a collection of short fiction, though it is equally possible to argue that the generic mutability is a testament to the boundary exploration at the core of Forget’s anthology. (And Ah-Sen has proved nothing if not willing to challenge classifications and stylistic presuppositions in his work.)

Numerous contributors to “After Realism” elect to break down the short-story form by literally fracturing it into multiple discrete sections, whether numbered or told from different perspectives or voices. (Or, in Ah-Sen’s case, by alternating letter writers.) Eliza Robertson’s “The Aquanauts,” about a group of undersea scientists (identified only as Nos. 1 through 5), employs this technique, as does Naben Ruthnum’s “Eight Saints and a Demon,” in which an illicit student-teacher relationship is narrated in the context of school assignments to write fictional entries for inclusion in an updated version of “Penguin Dictionary of Saints.”

Not all of these experiments work equally well. John Elizabeth Stintzi’s “Going Toward Gadd,” which counterpoints a non-binary character’s attempts to create a “queer-punk” identity on social media using a skeleton named Hu, with sections detailing the progress of a Dungeons & Dragons game, feels like it’s trying to carry more weight than it can reasonably bear. And Paola Ferrante’s “The Underside of a Wing” literalizes the stock metaphor of an albatross without renovating the metaphor other than having the albatross ride the Vancouver Sky Train and post bathroom selfies.

What the stories in “After Realism” display in aggregate — from Casey Plett’s talking cat in “Portland, Oregon” to Michael Lapointe’s chilly “The Stunt,” about an underage actor manipulated by and torn between her well-meaning on-set tutor, a megalomaniacal director and her boozing, gun-toting father — is a willingness to stretch form and subject to their limits, adapting or rejecting traditional techniques and approaches at will. As a whole, the volume provides a provocative snapshot of the forces dragging CanLit — kicking and screaming — into the 21st century.

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