Once upon a time there was a young writer
The Middle Stories, by Sheila Heti, House of Anansi, 144 pp., $24.95

From the National Post, May 19, 2001

Once upon a time there was a young Torontonian named Sheila Heti who wrote Once Upon A Time stories. Her crisp tales featured titles like "The Giant" and "The Favourite Monkey." Combining whimsy ("After all, they were a man and a woman. There was no reason for them not to fall in love") and woe ("The little old woman laid down her head and started to cry. She cried at her table every day, but no one knew it"), they resembled children's stories for grownups. Unfortunately for poor Sheila, her missives puzzled editors, and thus, they weren't published.

That is, until 1999, when Sheila became one of publisher Sam Hiyate's "Literary Babes" in an infamous issue of Blood & Aphorisms. Well! It was if Heti had been sprinkled with magic pixie dust. She began to dart through the lit-mag crawl -- 12 of the 30 Middle Stories have been published in Toronto Life, This Magazine, Taddle Creek and McSweeney's.

The last of these publications mattered the most, since the editor of McSweeney's is a staggering genius named David Eggers, who lives in the faraway village of Brooklyn. According to folklore, whenever an American praises a Canadian, it provides the sort of validation that the mother country is somehow unable to bestow. Heti's career shifted velocity from tortoise to hare after five of her stories appeared in issue No. 4.

And now, with profiles in Elm Street, Saturday Night and the National Post (among others), coupled with a standing-room-only launch in Toronto last month, Heti has received an envious "It" girl coronation. A fairy tale come to life, as it were.

Why has she done so well, so quickly? Perhaps it's simply because Heti turns many a nice phrase and is witty, clever: "He avoided women but now he was following her to a neighbourhood he hardly knew, dirty with immigrants and bicycles." The essence of her charm, however, is novelty -- her fresh style and tone, coupled with her rejection of the twin towers of gritty modernism and classic Canadiana places her in rare literary company. No one else is current creating fractured fairy tales about doomed dumplings.

Her writing is to be complemented for what it isn't: in the world of Heti, graphic designers do not click their mice in time to Sigur Ros; urban existentialists do not detail life in the concrete forest; prairie women do not battle geography, psychology or even biology. Instead, nameless, often faceless people are described by their occupation or traits: the young fornicator, the poet, the little old man, a frivolous young Miss. Narration consists of passages such as: "She met a boy, fell in love, lay out in the sunshine and held his hand and kissed, and f----- behind a video store, and after those three days she had the worst year ever, the worst year of her whole entire life."

These are light, rapid stories, yarns spun as candy floss, with sand mixed with the sugar - characters quote Adam Smith, Salvador Dali, and H. L. Mencken. But Heti's best trick is channeling the ghost of Dorothy Parker. Compare "He was a very good-looking young man indeed, shaped to be annoyed. His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets, and he kissed easily" with "The young woman was tall and her breasts pressed out; she had a fine body that appealed to men." The first taken from "Dusk Before Fireworks" by Parker; the second from "Mr. Jones's First Outing" by Heti. The Parker comparison is most apt because often Heti just doesn't seem made for these times. Her characters play piano at parties, frequent taverns, go on dates at ice cream shops, live in shoes and entertain suitors.

Still, Heti takes advantage of modern mores -- her characters f--- with impunity, visit strip clubs, and a distraught woman bemoans a morning-after mistake by thinking, "Oh God, I slept with a vegan." And unlike Parker, Heti delights in meddling with form. As Russell Smith has noted, these are "cryptic fairy tales with conclusions that may be 'morals,' but which seem to have no connection to the beginnings. They are anti-stories."

Thus, in "The Man From Out of Town" which describes a pleasant, if sometimes morose young man's attempts to find "a nice girl to spend good times with," Heti concludes with "Walking past a fountain on his way to the train station, he passed a girl of late teenage years who was blonde and who he supposed would like the companionship of a man like him. Dragging her into the park he tore out two-thirds of her hair." This turn is unexpected because her prose has a sing-song quality that seemingly precludes the possibility of rape as a conclusion, and because she provides no substantive clues regarding the young man in the proceeding five pages. Such endings jar the reader, removing them from meditative trance of the fiction. Heti's technique suggests she is bored with the constraints of the short story and assumes the same of the reader.

The Middle Stories are quick and dirty and fun, a Can-lit crime normally punishable by excommunication. But tone and gimmickry occasionally overshadows content: 30 stories are spread across 142 pages, the longest a mere eight pages. The price of her catchy style is that her caricatured characters appear detached and passionless. Taken as a whole, the reader is left wishing for slightly more substance.

Regardless, these are delicate, inventive tales that will hopefully shoulder the weight of hype. And if Heti can make the leap from fable to fiction, everyone will live happily ever after.