It’s been years since I first discovered Kevin Canty’s sterling prose. I was sitting at a sales conference meeting in Florida, listening to his editor talk about Nine Below Zero, having just read it, I felt like the only other person in the room that connected to Canty’s writing. He’s gone on to write other fine collections of short stories, all of them will make you pay more attention to the life around you.
Canty is an inspector of margins, not just people, but people’s marginal feelings, things you think but don’t say. In his new collection Where The Money Went he doesn’t disappoint. I like his cool style, the silently purring engine of his stories, characters often don’t get what they’re chasing, either they don’t know what it is they want or they’ve just got a bad case of the “I Wants”. Canty can get into a man’s head faster than any writer I know. It’s detached emotional surface that he covers, but it’s not without urgency, a kind of burning emotional need to be someone.
I’ve been cruising through these stories since they came my way last year, and it was completely by chance that the afternoon I read No Place In This World For You, my own son started to reflect what I was reading…it was minutes after I finished the story that what I read was acted out in my living room. In the story Walter has a problem with biting, my son doesn’t, he just happened to bite me right after I read the story.
Walter’s parents are trying to make it work, Dad is selling houses, and mom seems like she’s given up but is hanging in there for the bigger picture. There is a kind of flux between Dad’s day job and dealing with his own son and wife who are like static in the background while he tries to sell houses to people who don’t want them. Walter bites a kid at school and suddenly everything is thrown in the air and Dad, Mom and Walter are at a emotional breaking point. Having a child that bites makes it hard to take him to school. It’s like playing golf in a severe storm, you never know if you’ll be zapped by lightening.
Canty gets under Mom’s skin too, finds her breaking point, where she can only dump Walter on Dad because she just can’t handle it anymore, her job ties her down, and she’s got to get some time alone. Dad is the rock, he takes Walter to work with him, and knowing what you know, it’s not a good idea. This story is especially potent in it’s ability to reveal a marriage and family for what it is, incredibly hard work. The quality of life people talk about when they tell you their married with a house and family, is only window dressing, the reality is much harsher and the term “sweat equity” means nothing to people who don’t have this kind of life.
-JR
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