Summary:

This award-winning collection, published when the author was in her late 80s, contains 96 poems, most of them no more than one page in length. These poems are complex, interesting, surprising, and full of the pain of life. Stone has suffered and she does not hesitate to dwell on the causes of her suffering but she is not maudlin--she has lived and thought about life and she shows us how she lives and thinks.

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In the Arctic, winter goes on for ten months every year. The cold temperatures penetrate every aspect of human life. Existence is a struggle. In the Canadian community of Rankin Inlet, an Inuit woman finds personal tragedy as abundant as the snow. Victoria is diagnosed with tuberculosis (puvaluq) as a child and sent to a sanatorium far south of home. Following treatment with medication and a thoracoplasty, she returns to her town years later. Victoria's experience has changed her view of the world but she quickly discovers that in her absence, the people and locale have transformed too.

She marries an outsider, John Robertson, who is a British businessman. His success and local influence allow him to arrange for a foreign-owned diamond mine to open in the area, and with it, a new hospital for the territory. The couple have three children - a son, Pauloosie, along with two daughters, Justine and Marie.

Victoria seems a magnet for misfortune. At age 16, she has a miscarriage. A fourth child dies during a complicated delivery. Her marriage is increasingly strained beyond repair. Victoria's father suffers a stroke and becomes demented. Her mother dies of lung cancer. Husband John is murdered - someone slits his throat. Marie commits suicide. Pauloosie leaves home and sails to the South Pacific.

The Robertson family frequently interacts with the American primary care physician stationed in the isolated region. Dr. Keith Balthazar is a middle-aged atheist who has toiled in the Arctic for more than 20 years and abuses morphine. He keeps a journal of his experiences and meditations and commiserates with the local priest, Father Bernard.

Escape appears to be the best chance at happiness. For Victoria and most everyone else living in this harsh and beautiful land, survival - both physical and emotional - is hard. Personal choices are confusing. Nature doesn't seem to care one way or another.

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As the novel opens in 2002 we learn that the protagonist, Evan Patrick Molloy, has been wandering through a particular house and its yard for ten years, passing through its walls, unperceived by any of the people who have occupied the house. Evan is a ghost. The house he wanders through is the one he lived in when he deliberately put an end to his life by gunshot ten years earlier. It is the house he had lived in for a while with his ex-wife, Claudia after he resumed his relationship with her. Claudia's 10 year old daughter from a second failed marriage, Janey, lived with them. Several individuals and families have occupied the house since Evan's suicide. The current occupant is Maureen, who has moved there as part of her attempt to break off a relationship with her married lover, Ned, a radiologist.

Evan's story is revealed as flashback, interwoven with Evan's present-day fascination with Maureen and his watchfulness over her. The flashback chronology is not sequential but Maureen's life in the house and her interaction with Ned, who tracks her down, unfolds chronologically. As Evan thinks back on his life he tries to reconstruct the events, relationships, and state of mind that culminated in his suicide. At the same time, he wants to understand what is going through Maureen's mind and what motivates her actions. These two narratives merge at the end of the novel.

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The haptograph - an experimental device that mimicks ordinary feelings on the skin and stimulates previously unknown tactile sensations - sits in a locked room in the basement of a renowned scientific institution. It is 1889, and the reasearch facility is headed by the Wizard. He is a brilliant inventor who is cognizant of the importance of patents and profits. Multiple projects are ongoing, and the Wizard supervises all of them. One of his aims is to mechanically replicate each of the human senses.

The Wizard has many assistants. Kistenmacher, an electrical experimenter, is one of the best. His pet project is the haptograph. The machine consists of a body suit (covered by a network of wires, brass caps, and miniature electromagnets), battery, and unit containing replaceable cylinders. Two test subjects are enlisted. The research librarian (who tells the story in the form of diary entries) is a willing volunteer. Earnshaw, a stockroom clerk, is an unwilling participant.

Inside the suit, the librarian is impressed by a variety of familiar feelings of touch. When strange sensations - a total body caress, regeneration, an out-of-body event, and a sense of being suspended in air - are provoked, a new world is revealed to him. He experiences bliss. With ten times more funding and three additional researchers assigned to the venture, the haptograph could be commercially available in three years.

Dreams are smashed when Earnshaw deliberately wrecks the apparatus. The Wizard terminates the project and reassigns Kistenmacher to a more menial task. The librarian ponders the Wizard's motives in halting the development of the haptograph. Perhaps the gadget is too dangerous and even heretical. Possibly the public is not ready for it. Maybe the Wizard figures he cannot turn a profit from it.

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A beautiful elderly couple are forced to confront Fiona’s (Julie Christie) problems with memory. Always stylish and active, she begins to neglect her appearance and do odd things. She loses her way while cross-country skiing in a familiar terrain; at nightfall, Grant (Gordon Pinsent) finds her frightened and frozen. She decides that she must go into a nursing home, but Grant is horrified to learn that, in order for her to adapt, he may not visit for an entire month. When he finally returns, bearing a bouquet of flowers and hoping for her warm affection, he is stunned to find Fiona pleasant but indifferent to his presence. Instead, she is preoccupied, even infatuated with Aubrey (Michael Murphy), who silently occupies a wheelchair. Fiona is able to interpret Aubrey’s moods and desires.

At first, Grant is hurt and jealous, but gradually he accepts Fiona’s need to be important for someone. Haunted by guilt over an affair with a student years ago, Grant wonders if Fiona is somehow retaliating. When Aubrey’s wife Marian (Olympia Dukakis) brings Aubrey home because she cannot afford the care, Fiona is despondent. He approaches Marian about returning Aubrey to the center. Thrown together by their absent yet present spouses, Marian and Grant indulge in a half-hearted affair. By the time, Aubrey returns, Fiona may have forgotten him, but she still knows Grant and appears to recall his distant infidelity though so much else is lost. But he still loves her and together they can find reasons to laugh.

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Fifty-something Canadian professor of history and lifelong womanizer Rémy (Rémy Girard) lies in an overcrowded hospital with a fatal illness. Family and friends gather, including Rémy’s estranged son Sébastian (a wealthy financier played by Stéphane Rousseau) from overseas, and Rémy’s ex-wife (Dorothée Berryman) and several previous romantic partners. Rémy and Sébastian fight painfully about Rémy’s philandering, but after a plea from his mother Sébastian decides to make things better for his father, even if they have not been reconciled.

This he does in many ways, most of which involve spending lots of money and many of which are highly irregular or illegal. For example, he arranges to have his father taken into the U.S. for an expensive PET scan that would have required six months’ wait to have free in Canada. And he arranges through Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), a childhood friend who is now a heroin addict, to provide a regular supply of heroin to control his father’s pain, which the hospital apparently is not able to do with morphine.

These and other extraordinary measures work for Rémy, and the process of caregiving brings Sébastian and his father closer. (Rémy’s only problem seems to be the feeling that his life has been wasted because he has not left his mark--and he gets help with that, paradoxically, through several conversations with Nathalie.) For his last few days, Rémy and ensemble move to a friend’s lakeside cabin, where the conversation is witty, intellectual, and sexually frank, and the mood upbeat and conciliatory.

In the face of Rémy’s imminent demise, all is forgiven, and others seem to gain insight about their lives. Rémy’s last act is peacefully nodding to a sorrowful Nathalie to begin the series of heroin injections that will end his life. In a final dig at the establishment, the heroin is administered through an IV provided on the sly by a hospital nurse.

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In a future society in which biological reproduction is restricted and humanoid robots ("Mechas") are routinely manufactured to supplement the economic and social needs of humans ("Orgas"), Dr. Hobby (William Hurt) creates a prototype child Mecha, David (Haley Joel Osment), who has "neuronal feedback," the ability to love, and "an inner world of metaphor, self-motivated reasoning," imagination, and dreams. David is given to Henry and Monica, a couple whose biological child Martin is incurably ill and cryopreserved, awaiting a future cure.

More specifically, David is created out of Hobby's own loss and given to aid Monica's mourning for Martin, whom she has been unable to "let go" of as dead. It is thus Monica (Frances O'Connor) who must make the decision to perform the "imprint protocol" that will make David love her. After she stops resisting the desire to love a child (of any kind) again and implements the protocol, Martin is unexpectedly cured and comes home.

The ensuing turmoil sends David, accompanied by a robot Teddy bear, out into a nightmare world of adult Mechas, comprised of both Rouge City, where functioning Mechas like Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) do their sex worker jobs and also the fugitive realm where unregistered, discarded Mechas try to find the spare parts they need to rebuild themselves and elude trappers who take them to reactionary "Flesh Fairs" where they are publicly destroyed as an expression of rage against artificial technologies.

Joe and David, both set up and betrayed by humans jealous of their superiority at performing human functions, join together on a quest to make David "real" and return him to Monica. The quest takes them to a partly submerged Manhattan and sends David and Teddy two thousand years into the future to resolve the dystopic narrative.

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Annie, eleven, has been sent to spend the summer with her grandmother after she and her mother get the news that her father is missing in action at the end of World War II. Annie herself has just recovered from a month-long stay in the hospital, following surgery for a burst appendix. While there, she developed a habit of entering dream encounters with President Truman, who appears in dreams and fantasies to reassure her about her father, and about the other uncertainties she faces.

While at her grandmother's home in Walla Walla, Washington, a small farm town, a young African-American woman, a war widow, comes looking for work and is taken into the grandmother's house as an accountant. She and Annie become fast friends, much to the disapproval of her uncle, her father's younger brother, who has returned from the war wounded and bitter, having alone survived a battle in which all the other members of his platoon died. He and a few other troublemakers make escalating attempts to get the African-American woman to leave, including threats and a burning cross in the yard. But the grandmother, Annie, and Miss Gloria, who has seen worse racism in Georgia, hold out.

Eventually the brother comes to his senses and reports his fellow culprits to the police. Annie's father is found in a hospital in France, recovering from serious wounds as well as temporary amnesia. He and her mother arrive in Walla Walla after Annie has made a prize-winning speech in her new school about the losses and costs of war to individuals who return, going beyond the count of those dead. The father is nearly blind, but otherwise fairly well recovered, and he is accompanied by a young African-American aide who brings a ray of hope for companionship to Miss Gloria.

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Sophie, who has lived with her aunt in Haiti for the 12 years since her birth is being sent to live with her mother in New York. She leaves her aunt and grandmother amid a riot at the airport, and arrives in New York to meet her mother and her mother's long-term lover. Her mother has frequent nightmares, related, as it turns out, to the rape that eventuated in the birth of Sophie. Sophie's mother insists that the only road out of poverty is to study hard; she wants Sophie to become a doctor, and jealously oversees her work and protects her virginity, frequently testing her to make sure she has not been sexually active.

Eventually Sophie elopes with a kind musician, Joseph, but finds herself unable to enjoy sex. She returns to Haiti with their baby while he is on tour, and finds refuge among the women who raised her, though they themselves suffer various effects of poverty, alcohol, and violence. Sophie's mother flies to Haiti to be reconciled with her and takes her back to New York where the two women and their partners briefly share peace and kindness. But when Sophie's mother finds she is pregnant, she begins to have the nightmares about rape again, and kills herself. Sophie and the mother's lover fly to Haiti for the burial. Sophie runs away from the gravesite into the fields where her mother was raped, and attacks the cane stalks in fury, frustration, and a final cathartic gesture of self-liberation from a painful past.

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Summary: All thirteen short stories in this collection draw readers into the quietly compelling lives of disparate and very ordinary characters who function and suffer in unsettling ways. We are like them and not like them, but their circumstances, while sometimes disturbing, are familiar--and strangely magnetic. The opening lines of "The Lapse" illustrate this power of attraction:

I married Joanne during a lapse. A religious lapse. I don't display my beliefs like a gold medallion, though, as many whom I know do. I prefer to observe in private. After all, any intimate relationship belongs only to the entities or people involved. (p. 35)

Who can bypass an invitation to enter into announced intimacies, however private, that must be revealed in a matter of pages. What lapse and who is Joanne?!

"Bad News," centers around Sheila Powers, a psychologist, whose disruptive marital break-up is compounded by her mother's recent diagnosis of cancer and a subsequent flow of memories about her mother, her father, and herself. She is "between worlds...between life zones." (p. 113) Aspects of the future, at least her mother's, may be somewhat predictable, but the complex depths of the past mix with the present to generate sticky threads that belong to the story and to the readers as well who will recognize bits and pieces of their own family lives.

In a fourteen page story with a decidedly off-putting title, "The Encyclopedia," Wineberg zeroes in on Doris who, after a dissolved relationship, decides to sell the thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica-"the macro-edition, the micro-edition and the year books" purchased by the former couple. Not about remote bits of history or dinosaurs, we discover, but a story about separation, a series of lovers, benign conversation with a fellow worker who claims to be similarly tired of men, a possible buyer for the unwanted encyclopedia, a relationship with the married buyer, an end to the relationship, and a decision to keep the books after all. Her life, we might decide, is encyclopedic, a litany of minutiae that does, indeed, provide information about conditions of existence.

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