by JULIET WATERS

It was almost 15 years ago that I came across Howard Norman's collection of short stories, Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad, in the remainder pile of a bookstore for $3. I'm not sure why I picked it up. Maybe it was the first sentence: "This is a story about my unrequited love for Imogene Linny, which began in Halifax during the war and is still going on." Sure it gave away the ending, but as a character in another story says, "It doesn't matter, does it? I mean, you only really experience the end by going through the whole story start to finish."

The hero of Kiss is a pilot whose death wish antics result in a near fatal accident on a public beach, which has made him a local pariah. It's near this beach one day that he spots Imogene Linny working at a kissing booth to raise money for the war effort. "You can kiss something," she informs him after taking his money, "but it ain't, I guarantee you, my lips." Through 20 years of almost-hilarious dead-end jobs, he follows Imogene's career as wife of hotel magnate Szymon Schectner. "I kept track of Imogene in the papers. I knew that she'd returned to Halifax, and I kept clear of her. But I couldn't forget her, either. Then, after eight years of the same life, I realized I was losing touch with things."

And then a miracle. Schectner declares bankruptcy. Imogene, forced to find work, winds up managing the Hotel Joseph Conrad, where our desperate but pragmatic hero now works. And so the story ends, but not really, with Imogene living across the hall, still haughty, still brusque, still pretty much uninterested, but willing to let him into her kitchen once a week for small talk. "I wash my face. I knock on her door. Sometimes, Imogene isn't all that happy to see me."

When I first read this story I fell in love with Norman's fiction in a way that I never have with any other writer. His writing seems infused with some weird magical light that turns Canada into something like Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude. I read his first novel, Northern Lights, a heartbreaking but exquisite coming-of-age story. Then his second novel, The Bird Artist, a compulsively readable story of love and murder in Newfoundland. Of course, I notice that the heroine of his third novel, The Museum Guard, was named Imogen Linny (notice the dropped "e"). I pondered the mystery of this, and of this author who has set almost all of his work in Canada, and yet, weirdly, is American.

When his most recent book, The Hunting of L, received universally and convincingly negative reviews, I couldn't bring myself to read it. But in the meantime I had slowly become Howard Norman-less. I learned, not soon enough, that a Norman book lent was a Norman book I would never see again. Friends seemed to have a way of not just keeping them, but of moving thousands of miles away with them. By the time I realized this, Kiss was out of print and his other books seemed to be held in some weird publishing purgatory called, "temporarily unavailable for order."

And then the other day I was standing by the cash at Chapters. On the remainder table nearby was a Norman title I'd never seen before, The Chauffeur, on sale for $6. I snapped it up and discovered it was in fact Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad, repackaged and re-released with one more new story.

I felt like Imogene Linny had moved into the hall across from me.

Miracles like this, however, are not to be counted on. So, please, work with me this year to protect this endangered writer. Buy The Chauffeur if you're lucky enough to find it at Chapters. If not, pester them to order it. Make a resolution to get yourself a Norman book (but maybe not The Hunting of L.) Then do not, under any circumstances, ever lend it to anyone.

The Chauffeur: Stories by Howard Norman,
Picador, pb, 216pp, $18