Industrial Roots is a collection of short stories from award winning Canadian poet, author and translator Lisa Pike. I received an advance copy of the collection from the publisher, Héloïse Press, in exchange for a fair review.

Pike captures the world of working class Canadian women in Ontario through their voices, employing slang, vernacular and standard English to bring the women to life. In some ways, the narrative voices put me in mind of Flannery O’Connor’s writings, in others the Anne novels of L M Montgomery. There’s a robustness to the exchanges between characters and the way the women telling the stories relate them that lifts them from the page and allows the reader to be in the scene with them.

I work with someone from Ontario and the speech rhythms of Pike’s characters felt familiar, switching from formal, received language to dialect depending on the situation and the tenor of the story being told. There’s something about Canadian vernacular that lends humour to the telling, even when the situation is more ‘laugh or else you’ll cry’ than outright funny.

That the collection opens with a quote from Addie Bundren in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is an indication of Pike’s intent with these stories. Women are too often the subjects of a male narrative in stories of the working class. Tonally, there are echoes of writers such as Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski – life is brutal, men are brutish – but Pike’s stories are from the perspective of women who suffer the brutality alongside the men and can be as brutish. The Faulkner quote is about working life feeling like it’s just a long preparation for death, and Pike’s stories grab onto that feeling.

Opener ‘His Little Douchebag’ sets the scene for a series of interconnected stories of blue collar family life. Wally is a serial philanderer and gambler. His wife Ruby suffers one embarrassment too many at his hands and decides to take control of her own fate. Of her two sons, the one who still lives at home, and is a potential Wally in the making, is of no help to her. It’s the son who has left to start his own life that backs her up in her decision. The dynamic is a subtle one, but important. As ever in a life lived on the borders of solvency, Wally gets the final word on his family’s future, but there’s a sense that Ruby is going to be okay.

Across the collection, the stories reveal the complexity of family life, the sprawl of generations, and the trove of memories and resentments that turn into folklore. ‘Two-Bit Tommy’ reveals Ruby as a ‘Gramma’ now, to narrator Lucy who walks between the members of the older generation, interested in their past and her connection to it but at the same time trying not to live the same grievances and assumptions over again. Lucy has quit her job to go back to school, something one of her great aunts openly can’t understand.

Ruby’s story develops through the observations of others on her life and her own vignettes placed in between the longer stories. Lucy’s life, too, is seen in glimpses as one of many cousins playing together and in her own accounts of life within the expansive family she’s a small part of.

The collection captures a family history of illness, too, with cancer at the forefront. No specific cause is mentioned, but the reader can intuit that lifestyle, diet, working environments as well as genetics are among the reasons that cancer is so prevalent in this family. The stories in which young women care for their dying mothers and cope with the aftermath of their deaths are sobering and yet not without humour at the ridiculous nature of human life and death. I was particularly moved by the stories about Lucy and her mother. Pike doesn’t sugar any pills in the telling.

After death comes the funeral, and ‘Cowboy Kenny’ captures the strange mundanity of sanctioned public grief coupled with the bizarre way that dressing for a funeral inevitably leads to a decision on how you’d like your corpse to be dressed for viewing.

Coming to a certain point in life when you realise a funeral could arrive at any moment and it’s just better to have a designated outfit, there, hanging at the back of your closet, ready to go. It isn’t until a little later that you decide you may as well pick out the outfit you want to be buried in along with a photo of how you want them to make you up. (You’ve witnessed time and time again corpses made up poorly, lying in the casket looking like they did a decade or so ago due to a poorly chosen photo. Hair, and if it were a woman, make-up that is no longer in style. Best to take care of these things well in advance so as not to shock the viewers and send them into a strange disjuncture of time on top of having to face the cold, hard, fact of death. Besides, it was plain embarrassing to have to go up to the casket and say goodbye to someone like that. Their look so clearly outdated, like someone who walked into a room, showed up for a party with the wrong kind of outfit. Knowing full well that if they were here they’d be nudging you, whispering, ‘for God’s sake, why didn’t you tell me!‘)

The curious mix of a funeral as a place for a young woman to finally meet her absent father with a reminiscence of that father from the third person perspective of the unnamed step-daughter of his brother (complicated!) makes this my favourite story. Both in setting and tone, it represents a meeting of Southern Ontario Gothic with the more familiar (to me) Southern Gothic of O’Connor, Welty and Faulkner. It’s a little off to one side, a little queasy, a little weird, but at the same time rooted in normality.

Another story I really enjoyed is ‘Henry’, a tender tale of love in old age, when bodies begin to fail and help is needed. One of the many Stellas in the family marries for a second time, to a man with a quirky sense of style. She knows him as Alec, but on their wedding day discovers that his real name is Henry. Stella is Henry’s third wife and theirs is a bond that lasts 30 years. Their last decade together is taken over by Henry’s ill health. The story captures the small things about a marriage – making someone’s favourite meal, the parts of an individual past that remain hidden from the present partner, the frustration tied up in physical infirmity. Pike has such a quiet way with her characters in this story that is truly beautiful.

Stella and Henry’s best time of the day together is still at dinner. Stella cooks one of Henry’s favourite dishes and he comes out to eat, carefully feeling his way along the hallway, still in his pyjamas. … Henry always said that he was a meat and potatoes man. Stella, for her part, loved to cook for him. It was the part of the day that made her feel useful, bringing her back to a time when she had kids at home and a future that was always waiting to be lived.

A small number of characters in these stories have gone back to school, like Ruby’s granddaughter Lucy, to gain degrees and then PhDs. Judith is struggling with her student debt, finding that her education has cost her more than she has gained. Alice teaches on contract but finds the job of writing essays for students more lucrative. Her story, ‘Go Ask Alice’, is a blistering assault on the commercialisation of university education and I’d hazard a guess that Pike draws on her own experience. Alice’s world is one of nepotism and the exploitation of overseas students for higher fees. The essay writing service that Alice becomes involved in is largely to help students who don’t speak English well to get through their degrees and is an open secret in the university, if not in the wider world. This story, in its depiction of the university as a business and education as a commodity, chimed with one of the themes in Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economy – that education should be free for the benefits it pays forward into society at large.

There are stories throughout of dysfunctional relationships, none more so than that captured in the final two stories between Maude and her alcoholic partner Seamus. Pike’s matter of fact tone in the telling makes the mundanity of how countless women accept and accommodate the verbal, emotional and physical abuse at the hands of an alcoholic all the more horrific. Nothing that terrible is described, but the layers of past experience are present and create a horrible tension.

I found this collection a deeply satisfying read and would happily read more by Lisa Pike.

Industrial Roots will be published on 11 April 2023. You can order a copy here.

Read 25/02/2023-06/03/2023