Ontario author Steven Heighton died from cancer at the age of 60 in 2022.Mark Raynes Roberts/The Canadian Press
- Title: Sacred Rage
- Author: Steven Heighton
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Biblioasis
- Pages: 332
In his introduction to The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, published earlier this year, the American novelist Garth Risk Hallberg explains that he developed the wonderful habit of reading a story a day until he’d made his way through all of them.
I liked this idea and did the same over the summer months, ending just in time to begin reading Steven Heighton’s Sacred Rage, a newly published selection from the four short-story collections he authored over his career.
Gallant and Heighton aren’t writers that immediately make sense together, generationally, never mind Gallant’s predominantly writing short stories while Heighton had a more varied oeuvre, involving novels, memoir, poetry and music before his unexpected early death from cancer in 2022.
That said, reading these two in serendipitous sequence led me to think more about what they had in common than not: a cool mordant tone and sharp eye for human indignities at once sad and funny; an ear for how actual people sound and the confidence to let them sound that way on the page; a wicked and sympathetic interest in North Americans making their way abroad with limited, foible-filled success, and a similar such interest in the unexpected intensities of life in unromantic Canadian settings.
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Moreover, as we learn from an ardent and intellectually ranging introduction to Sacred Rage from the indomitable literary editor John Metcalf, notwithstanding all the other kinds of writing Heighton did, he reserved a special place for the short story, as did, more famously and comprehensively, Gallant. But maybe the most significant thing that these late Canadian authors share is that most poisonous kind of praiseworthiness: They both enjoyed strong reputations as writer’s writers.
In other words, both earned admiration from fellow writers and others in the literary world, if never reaching popular success commensurate with the qualities fellow practitioners found and prized in their work. Here’s hoping this new selection of Heighton’s short stories helps remedy this problem (and so too, of course, that new Gallant collection).
I’m hopeful, given the stories on offer here, which testify to Heighton’s “stunning range,” as Michael Ondaatje has said, and so too his capacity to “go anywhere.”
One such place is 1990s Japan, where Heighton sets several stories that feature first-person Canadian men in early adulthood thinking, talking, teaching, drinking and loving in a strange and beguiling world.
Heighton delights in detailing flawed understandings – “‘I shall exploit you … until someone more qualitied applies,’” a harsh and grumpy restaurant owner informs “the first foreigner to wait tables in the Yume No Ato,” an out-of-work English-language teacher from Canada.
The initially easy-feeling intercultural and linguistic tension at a bar in Osaka takes on higher stakes later in the story when the narrator, having drinks with co-workers, encounters similarly flawed English in banter that could be playful or could be passive. “I wonder if we’ve understood each other,” he reflects with disarming clarity.
That line could serve as a signature phrase for the entire collection, including the other stories set in Japan, which, when read successively and despite their varied features, including a hard-boiled absurdist kidnapping tale, begin to feel a little too similar to each other. The stories that follow are predominantly set in small-town Ontario, without the same problem.
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These are no doubt informed by Heighton’s long-time life in his native Kingston and feature people leading quiet, quietly fractured lives shaken up by unexpected events: going through a clumsy car-jacking, trying to save someone drowning in a lake, delivering fried chicken to dangerous people, attempting to return a lost wallet before a woman has a baby, or seeing a dead body while test-driving a used car (alongside a sad-sack salesman magnificently committed to getting the deal done).
The collection’s final story, As if in Prayer, is a devastating tale about an improvised cemetery for drowned Muslim migrants on the Greek Island of Lesvos. Heighton’s experience as a volunteer with humanitarian efforts in Greece, which he explicitly wrote about in his affecting memoir Reaching Mithymna, is clearly at play here. The story features a concerned Westerner whose offer to help with a burial is rejected by an Egyptian immigrant gravedigger, in a subtly nervy demonstration of the limits of even the most thoughtful and empathetic kind of liberal piety.
But if I had to convince you to pick up this collection even if you’re not the writer’s writer reader type, it would be for The Dead Are More Visible. This story, both taut and rich, unfolds a late night encounter between a middle-aged woman flooding an outdoor rink and some drunk young amateur criminals. “‘Nobody could believe my life,’” one of these guys, Shane, tells the woman, Ellen, at one point. My explaining why he says this would be an injustice to the story itself, to its author and to its future readers. Shane, we do believe your life. Steven Heighton created it.
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto.
