Urban fairy tales

>> Sheila Heti's ephemeral wit shines in The Middle Stories

by JULIET WATERS

"Nobody ever accused me of being bright," says Marie, a character in one of Sheila Heti's urban fairy tales, The Middle Stories. After Marie says this: "I just sat at the window then, and looked out at the lawn and thought it was a pretty confusing world, which it is, if you look at it the right way."

No one will ever accuse Sheila Heti of being dim. Dorothy Parker is the obvious comparison and wunderkind is a word that's been used about the 26-year-old former Montrealer.

But let's get back to Marie. She reminds me of a painting I once saw, an abstract pastel iceberg entitled "They'll Never Forgive You For Being Pretty." While her story is only a few pages long, we all know Marie. She's the girl from high school with blonde hair and a nice body, who lacks self-esteem, but is smart in the ways of vapid femininity and who made our smart-girl lives hell. Her life is poignant but effortless. We can forget her, but we can never forgive her--precisely because we've forgotten her.

"Moon monologue" is her sad tiny fable. In the space of a few hundred words she will get angry at Bobby (we all know Bobby) for touching her breasts and getting an electric shock and then calling her "bright" (she's proud of not being bright). She will be sent to the middle of the ocean with two other pretty girls to colonize a new community where she will stay "three whole years," then return to discover Bobby has married "that slut from the prom." She will then become Bobby's mistress and benefit from the many things she's learned in the colonies, one being "about fucking, about how asses really matter." Marie's very short story is part Buffy, part Star Trek and part Penthouse forum. We don't need a lot of character development because she's such a familiar figure from our resonant cultural landscape of high school and space travel. Just the perfectly chosen details will do.

We also don't need a lot of character development for The Poet, The Novelist, The Plumber, The Princess, The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, The Man from Out of Town, The Man with the Hat, The Girl Who Was Blind All The Time, The Young Fornicator, or The Frog. It's a pretty funny, weird, eclectic world Heti has created in The Middle Stories--if you look at it the right way.

But if you look at it a different way, there's something missing. It's hard to put one's finger on what it is, but there's a clue, revealed by Heti herself, at a Web site called Open Letters (www.openletters.net). Heti has written a letter to herself where she ponders an accusation levelled at her by an ex-boyfriend. He claims she has no heart because she has no secrets. She "conceals by revealing." Like a kid, who when asked by his father where he was all night, says "doing heroin," which he actually was, but the father assumes he's joking.

Heti ponders if she's the sort of person who, in aspiring to be an open book, is actually shutting people out. In having no secrets, she might lack "that essential otherness that can't be expressed! That ineluctable core which could never be put into words because it's not a thought, not a feeling, not an experience, not a secret, just that basic human otherness. And by making that the distance between you and everybody else, and not knowledge about you they don't have, and not facts about you they don't know, then the gulf between you and those around you is a thousand-mile-wide gorgon-filled moat."

Maybe this is the problem. We know these characters, and thus they lack an essential otherness. They're funny and clever, but there's a kind of grim, abstract otherness to them, that stamps on them an expiry date. And as Dorothy Parker--remembered for her comments, but not her dated, musty stories--might tell you: "They never forgive you for being clever, they just forget you."

The Middle Stories by Sheila Heti, Anansi, hc, 146 pp, $24.95