Book Review

Slipping the Moorings
by Susan McCallum-Smith
Entasis Press, 2009
www.mccallumsmith.com/.
ISBN-10: 0980099927

On the unassuming white and blue cover of Slipping the Moorings, Susan McCallum-Smith's collection of short fiction, rests a painting entitled "Island Life" by the artist Louis Sinclair McNally. The landscape, which frames a few cottages dotted along a waterway bled of all color, is a quaint, congenial one. Although one could be pleased enough by this visual harmony, what's more arresting about the painting is its execution: the muted colors, the methodical lines constructing the village and visual planes, the minimal brushstrokes and McNally's Hopper-esque understanding of natural light. The magic and energy of this work rests in the competency of its execution, which also could be an apt description for Slipping the Moorings. The nine stories here delight the reader with their assuredness, their tight, even stitches and airtight seams. McCallum-Smith knows how to write, and write well. Her stories are dense with detail, yet compact. No word feels out of place; no doubt she has combed over her sentences again and again to find unnecessary strands.

McCallum-Smith's resume as a writer, book reviewer for Baltimore's The Urbanite, and teacher should come as a surprise to no one reading these stories. Although they take the reader from London to Mexico to New York and, of course, her native Scotland, my personal favorites are those in which McCallum-Smith stays close to her motherland. She is clearly comfortable with her brushstrokes of moors and sea-swept cliffs and beer-stained bars propping up liver-spotted Scots. To the reader across the sea, its seeming exoticness is not oft-putting, but rather a whimsical travelogue of whom McCallum-Smith might call "ordinary blokes." In the opening paragraphs of "High Rise," Allison has acrophobia, a husband in prison and, perhaps, a few more pressing issues:

"Some wonky cosmic joke has aligned her periods with her monthly visits to Barlinnie. She's leaking away to nothing. She'll be hollow by the time Malky gets out, like an empty nest, all the best bits of her gone."

Like many of their literary brethen, we find McCallum-Smith's characters at crossroads in their lives. For Allison, it's whether to leave her incarcerated boyfriend Malky and, at forty, adopt her first child. In the title story, "Slipping the Moorings," McCallum-Smith's characters, also middle aged, tread with the mortality of their parents heavy on their minds, in addition to their own failings, perhaps:

"I had taken a wrong road somewhere. The scenery appeared unfamiliar and it shouldn't have been; I grew up in this part of the country."

McCallum-Smith often uses whimsical, sing-songy phrases with denser ones, to peculiar effect ("matchy-matchy bedrooms with sparsely-populated shelves," "boys in hoodie jerseys playing keepie uppie with a deflated ball," "the walls are tiled in the same peely-wally green"). Her unique vocabulary complements, even naturalizes, the vegetable soup of Scottish slang filling our spoons. We are totally immersed in her world.

But it's not just clever wordplay on her part. She fully inhabits her characters and supplies them with believably and plausibility, even in the most their ridiculous, most naked of scenarios. In "Hell Mend You," is Ma doing what we think she's doing with Archie in the tub, and did Da really do that in response?

McCallum-Smith's piece de resistance, "Eilean Ban," the collection's final story, evokes equal parts James Joyce's "The Dead" and the opening sequence of Alice McDermott's Charming Billy. But McCallum-Smith is too deft a writer to not leave her own bold stroke. Helen, who we find at her mother Fiona's wake, is confronted by overbearing neighbors and a secret letter revealed in her mother's belongings. What does it mean for her mother, for her?

It is easy to get lost in the lush details of the wake without caring much about the ending, with lines like "she brushed the crumbs off her lap in a sweeping motion, like a farmer sowing seed" and "whose passion for gossip often resulted in wild conjectures being pummeled toward nebulous conclusions, all conducted in stage whispers accompanied by much nudging and crumbs." In fact, I think it's not conjecture to say that if McCallum-Smith wrote a story about ice cubes melting that I would probably read it. And, if any sort of statement is to be taken away from this first collection, it's probably that this will be the first of many.—Jen Michalski