Surreal deal

>> Kate Sterns' strange Down There by the Train adds to her brilliant career

by JULIET WATERS

In 1992, a London reviewer claimed about Thinking About Magritte, that "there's something about Canada that breeds marvellous women novelists; and if Kate Sterns' assured debut is anything to go by, it cannot be long before she is mentioned in the same breath as Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro."

Forget that Alice Munro isn't really a novelist. A more accurate assessment, nine years later might read: there's something about Canada that breeds English professors who write marvellous books once a decade. If Sterns' second novel, Down There by the Train, is anything to go by, it won't be long before she's mentioned in the same breath as Linda Svendsen and Alistair MacLeod. But don't bother trying to convince the gregarious Sterns to give up her new full-time position at Concordia for international glory. "I really can't write more than four hours a day," she confessed over lunch last week. "And what else is there for me to do? Waitressing? Done that. And I'm too tired for prostitution."

A tiny lobster hangs from one ear, and a lemon stud adorns the other (in another interview she wore chickens). Sterns personifies the quirky absurdism of her writing. The late great writing teacher Brenda Ueland once wrote that "art is infection." And "infectious" is the best word I can think of to describe Sterns' writing and her personality. It's hard not to imagine her as a great teacher.

Infectious is also an appropriate word, given her current obsession with archaic medical literature. Her favourite subject right now is the Black Plague. Every topic we discuss seems to circle back to it. Levon Hawke, hero of Down There by the Train, abandoned a master's thesis on "Implied Narrative in Medical Histories." But Sterns certainly doesn't seem to be followed by the morbid little cloud that hangs over Hawke wherever he ventures.

Except when she discusses the subject of her novel. She gets the slightest frown when she explains how it explores an argument she's been having with herself about grief. One senses a personal quest, but lobster earrings are good armour against serious questions like that.

"I wanted to look at the way people fill the void after they've lost someone," she explains. There are the normal ways: work, ritual, food, drugs. And then there are the ways of Sterns' characters: prison time for breaking into a house and doing a fourth grader's homework, experimentation with poison tea, resurrecting the dead by baking life-sized dough people.

Ex-con Levon's journey to an island in the Great Lakes district and his romance with a fiery-haired, grief-stricken young woman named Obdulia Limb, make up the surreal landscape. Part Lewis Carroll, part Hans Christian Anderson, part Italo Calvino, part Gogol, one expects frogs to start falling from the sky.

It's an expectation created by the imagery, a stream of surrealism. A hockey captain is described as having "square white teeth billowing out of his mouth like handkerchiefs on a clothesline." A late afternoon sky is a "tipped rubbish bin. Out of it spilled crumpled, inky clouds and yards of shimmering fabric stained with pink dye." And Obdulia is described, in a not so romantic moment, as "a bouquet of red and purple veins lay on the marble table of her thighs. She snuggled into the toilet seat, her bottom surrounded by a white porcelain ruff. After a second's hesitation, out gushed a flood urine."

Still, the plot never takes a fabulous turn. "Kate Sterns writes as if fairy tales could come true," claims the press release that arrived with her book. This is very true. But one thing Sterns points out is that in the original fairy tales, B.D. (Before Disney), endings were often tragic or at least ambiguous. I'd hate to give anything away in a gothic romance, but it's best to let go of expectations when reading this book. Read it, however, expecting it to be a while before she writes another one.

Down There by the Train by Kate Sterns, Knopf Canada, hc, 246 pp, $29.95