Stoop City
Kristyn Dunnion
Biblioasis, 2020
Review by Chantelle Cho
“It’s like last winter when she took that girl Lena on a road trip and left me to finish my thesis in the sub-zero gloom.” This is how the first story in Kristyn Dunnion’s Stoop City begins––dropping the reader into the middle of a thought, into the midst of lives being lived, and asking us to keep up. Many stories in the collection start this way; rather than being introduced like strangers, readers are offered glimpses into the hopeful, sobering, mundane, and disorderly lives of Stoop City’s residents.
To read this collection is to witness stories of human connection told in a myriad of ways, from the absence-of to a yearning-for. In “Now Is the Time to Light Fires,” the unnamed protagonist struggles to come to terms with the death of her unfaithful girlfriend, which proves difficult when she is literally haunted by her ghost. In “Tracker and Flow,” a miscarriage prompts Kelly to adopt a troublemaker cat as a coping strategy, while completely shutting out her husband Tom. Both stories explore how the protagonists deal with their grief, and eventually hint at what comes after. Rather than neatly tie up the narrative, Dunnion leaves the reader with final scenes which imply new beginnings.
What’s interesting about these two stories are the small but insistent financial details that lurk in the background. At first, the protagonist of “Now Is the Time to Light Fires” takes bereavement leave from work, but when she’s let go, she worries about whether she’ll be able to keep her home. “How will we live without my disability pittance?” she wonders to herself––after all, a ghost cannot help with mortgage payments. In the other story, Kelly “calls the office, sends a dozen emails delegating work on her most pressing case” and does not worry about work or money again. Rather, she reflects on the thousands of dollars she and Tom had spent on the fertility clinic in trying to get pregnant, and buys her new cat “locally sourced, grain-free kibble, a silver comb, a rhinestone-stuffed collar.” The difference between these characters’ relationship with money is stark, and shapes the way they grieve. Exploring class struggle (or lack thereof) adds a layer of depth that is crucial in a collection centered on community.
In “How We Learn to Lie,” real estate agent Julia cares more about her next anti-aging treatment than her boyfriend’s infidelity. When her father expresses incredulity at rising rent costs––“[My parents] didn’t know they’d be stealing from other people, here”––she dismisses his words as the ramblings of an old man and asks, “Have you taken your pills today, Dad?” On the flip side, in “Fits Ritual,” scam-artist Hoofy fights abdominal pain as he searches for his boyfriend-in-crime, who was last seen with their latest victim. Both Julia and Hoofy are arguably “scammers,” depending on who you ask, but their difference in class and circumstance relegates them to wholly different lives. Julia calmly rids herself of her now ex-boyfriend with a change of her locks, while Hoofy is left behind, heartbroken and with only half a pain patch to his name.
This collection features characters who are caught up in the cogs of adult life. Even the younger ones are not afforded escape––they may be innocent as to how, but adulthood still permeates their reality. Whether in the forefront or the background, these characters are faced with class struggle, with a search for connection and belonging, with coming to terms with themselves or their situations. While the characters were not particularly likeable, it did not feel as if readers were being asked to “like” them. The focus lay more on the stories themselves, on their lives as shaped by their circumstances, experiences, and surroundings. The short story format is just long enough to understand them in those moments, but never any further.
Many of the stories have no concrete ending, which can be jarring to those used to neat parcels of closure. But, Dunnion’s collection emphasizes that what we see is only a moment out of entire lives. At times, we’re able to see these characters make an appearance in others’ stories; they are both the main character of their lives, and a side character in others.
For example, in “Pristine,” Mary Louise is a newly-divorced “old butch” who tries to impress her attractive younger coworker. But in “Daughter of Cups,” she recurs as the young friend of Ohio, and the two girls are sexually manipulated by an older man. In “Four-Letter Word for Loose,” Hoofy from “Fits Ritual” becomes Carole’s patient, a pitiful young panhandler who “wormed through her defences, into her soft tissue, the vital organs.” Even as their story ends, we can see that their lives continue in the background of others’.
The last two stories bring the collection together and to a close. In “Affliction,” a homeless man dances his way into a riot against technology, bringing with him what seems like every person in the city. Finally, in “Last Call at the Dogwater Inn,” they all gather to mourn the injustice of his death. Fittingly, it was in this last story when it really clicked that these characters were a part of the same community––that they had been making their quiet appearances in each other’s stories.
Dunnion builds a community of diverse, vivid lives sewn into a patchwork quilt––from Julia, the real estate agent who struggles with love, to Jonesy in “Midnight Meat,” an elderly woman who craves companionship despite a fear of it. The author’s strength lies in her dynamic characters: in creating a multitude of existences, and allowing us to share in those moments. And what we see is not the end. The residents of Stoop City live beyond the page.
Chantelle Cho is a Korean-Canadian and Singaporean-Chinese writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Scarborough Fair and FEEL WAYS. She holds a BA in English from the University of Toronto Scarborough and currently works in the book publishing industry. You can find her on Twitter (@chantellecho_).