I Still Don’t Even Know You

Canadian author Michelle Berry says that the underlying theme in her collection of short stories is how even the people closest to you are ultimately strangers you will never truly know.

Perhaps Berry has had some pretty horrible relationships, but making the broad assumption that people are incapable of truly knowing others is cynical and reductionist.

Nearly all of the protagonists in her stories are impossible to empathize with; they are irresponsible, self-absorbed and morally corrupt.

In Hunting for Something, protagonist Tom opens a religious paraphernalia store solely to capitalize on a particular niche.

In Drowning, Laura goes into labour and decides that she and her boyfriend should discuss their relationship problems instead of going to the hospital.

In Five Old Crows, five lazy gold-diggers plot their elderly husbands deaths so that they can live like irresponsible teenagers forever.

Why would anyone want to truly know these people?

Even if it were true that you could never know another person, that is not the theme that is conveyed throughout this collection. These stories provide examples of how people are usually at fault for their own relationship problems.

I was mildly interested yet uncommitted to Berry’s characters in a very familiar way. I understood the familiarity when I read a quotation from Berry in Quill and Quire: “I think of my writing as a movie even as I write it. I’m always picturing how a scene would be played out on film.”

Berry’s characters are insubstantial because she is supplying them for a movie in her head, rather then for pages in a book.

I felt mild amusement at Berry’s characters’ conflicts, such as I would in response to the people on Real Housewives of Orange County and 16 and Pregnant. It’s painful to see a writer degrade the powerful potential of writing to the superfluous entertainment of an indulgence in voyeurism.

If you can never truly know another human being then any attempt you make to know someone is futile and you no longer have to take responsibility for the mistakes you make in relationships. This sounds like the reasoning of a character in a romantic comedy or a reality television star.

Since the book is better than the movie 99.9 per cent of the time, writing a book as if it’s a movie is completely illogical in terms of the craft itself, and quite frankly, lazy.

Michelle Berry`s attempt to address the complex nature of human relationships failed as soon as she reduced her characters to onscreen stars.

Published in Volume 65, Number 7 of The Uniter (October 14, 2010)

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