Hot on the back of her Griffin nomination for best book of poetry, North American region (go go dancing with elvis (2003)), poet Leslie Greentree has just won the Howard O’Hagan Award for best book of short stories at The Writer’s Guild of Alberta AGM in Grande Prairie, and added another genre to her engaging and wide-ranging oeuvre. And what a book it is!  Full of her usual wit and sly humour, closely observed nuances of behaviour and speech, succinct scenography, and tight, economical writing, A Minor Planet for You consolidates the terseness of her poetry with a depth of characterization and closely observed kitchen sink drama that ranges over a variety of moods and tones that leave the reader grinning and craving more.

All of the stories adhere to the Realist/Naturalist vein of a good deal of Canadian prairie fiction, and one can hear echoes of Sinclair Ross, Henry Kriesel, Gloria Sawai, and others; nonetheless, a good deal of the turf – urban anomie, broken and fresh relationships, camaraderie among young middle class working women – single, divorced, recently re-married or on the make – is her own, or bears her unique stamp.

I think it’s the economy of the writing that impresses most. Leslie Greentree has taken the minimalist style pioneered by modernists like Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, and turned into a razor sharp instrument by Raymond Carver, Frances Itani, Martha Brooks, and other post-Modern contemporaries working the domestic, realist groove, and reworked it into a feminist account without sounding a strident note or hectoring the reader with a thematic or moral agenda.  The stories read well, and the movement between narrative exposition, description, dialogue, scene and half scene is clockwork masterful; the dialogue is entirely believable and very revealing. 

It’s clear too that Greentree loves all her characters and allows them to speak for themselves, even though she may or may not always approve of their actions.  Indeed, it is her careful mining of the dialogue that allows the characters to reach conclusions the writer is often reluctant to make. While some characters, chiefly the male macho ones, admittedly, are shallower than other characters, often the put-upon, defeated or exasperated female ones, no single character comes across as a stick man or woman or target of the writer’s derisive wit.  Greentree is a good deal more subtle than most first-time fiction authors, and more forgiving.  Contemporary life – the vicissitudes of maintaining relationships against a backdrop of soul-destroying under-employment or desperate time-gobbling hobbies and avocations, for example – is often more of a culprit than the unimaginative or non-empathic male.  We at least have sympathy for his position or gain access to his well-meaning but erroneous assumptions.  This makes the characters a good deal rounder and more sympathetic than those in most first collections of short fiction as well.

In short, I’m not surprised that this collection won the best short fiction award, even against hard odds and against more seasoned competition.

I’ll even go out on a limb and say these short stories take Greentree’s writing to a higher plane than that achieved by her equally terse, imagistic poems.

Take the opening story, “Best Wishes Always,” for example.  The narrator is watching her divorced aunt, twelve years her senior, very closely as she participates in the dubious ritual of a wine and cheese hen party, in which the aunt unveils her latest acquisitions.  Beth, the aunt, has a strange hobby: she collects the special memorial wine and champagne flutes and glasses from ex-wives’ and husbands’ prior wedding ceremonies, and has even been the subject of a city magazine article on her unusual hobby, and now gets phone calls and offers of new glasses for her sizable collection.  When the aunt wants to gloat over the dissolution of a marriage she predicted would end, she delights in choosing the names of the victims and passing them on to a suitable single female, and telling the dread tale behind the acquisition.  At one point she phones the narrator late in the evening to advise her not to marry a Peter as there appears to be a disproportionate number of “Peters” inscribed on her glasses.  Beth craves attention and desperately wants to appear young and vivacious, but the lack of any suitor in the picture makes her brinksmanship cruel and sad in the extreme.

Or take the amateur scientist of the title story who, after the failed hobby of model train and miniature village building, and assorted other male adventures that keep him away from home, settles on amateur astronomy, thinking that the best gift he could give his wife is to name an unknown planet or asteroid after her, when all the long-suffering woman craves is a little personal attention.  He, of course, is stunned at the inevitable prospect of divorce.

Or consider the protagonist of “Vinegar,” who has taken to cruising the deli aisle of her local grocery for exotic types of vinegar, just so she can spy on the grocer she fancies and fantasizes about.  She’s got a cupboard full of rare and expensive vinegars, more than she can ever hope to use in the fancy cuisine that fails to impress her husband, and the grocer is a philanderer who schmoozes all his lady customers, especially the middle-aged and apparently lonely marms.

The collection ranges over the several ages of women, from the pre-pubescent to the elderly, and closely observes a lot of the rituals of the modern woman’s urban existence with style and élan.  I found I couldn’t put the collection down, and even started to re-read it the moment I finished it the first time.  This is an excellent debut collection and bodes well for Greentree’s future forays into the fiction genre.  I look forward to the long hurdles when she decides to tackle a novel.  In the meantime, while lean and mean in form and style, there is nothing lean in the contents: these stories provide a more than sumptuous full meal deal.