A Stranger in This World [Hardcover]

Canty's first collection of stories explores ordinary lives at moments of fateful decision, and human nature at its most consciously perverse.

In simple, atmospheric prose, Canty climbs inside his characters' heads, examining their motivations, whims, memories and desires, all of which go into their next action - the one that's going to affect life for some time to come.

The stories are told from a single point of view although Canty uses both first-person and third-person narration, and writes in either present or past tense.

In the opening story, "king of the elephants," a boy on the edge of manhood is caught between self-preservation and guilt, misery and the unknown. His father is a drunk and his mother is a crazy drunk who's just turned up in a hospital 1,500 miles away. The narrator's first decision - will he tell his father about the call or cut his ties with his mother right then? Each step of the way the boy, impelled by conscience, chooses misery until the reader, relieved by the boy's sense of responsibility, wonders if he will ever be strong enough or selfish enough to preserve himself.

Where "king of the elephants" is poignant, "pretty judy" is shocking, repellant. Paul, 15, "wanted this to be happening in his imagination." "This" is his shame-ridden sexual obsession with a retarded neighbor. Canty's language brings all of Paul's confused, hot-wired, charged feelings to the surface, boiling with the desire to do the right thing without giving up the wrong thing. Where the ending to "king of the elephants" offers a certain release of tension in inevitability, the end of "pretty judy" cranks up the tension with consequences unfolding into the story's unseen future.

Canty's unhappy characters watch themselves with helpless detachment. In "Safety" Marian is a bored, frazzled wife and mother of a two-year-old whose marriage is falling apart. Marian observes her resentments, bitter words and coldness with a vicious self-hatred and satisfaction known to us all.

In "Junk," Parker is more deeply mired in self-loathing - the habit of years of drug and alcohol abuse and a fascinating dissolute wife. Although he has made a new start the reappearance of his wife undoes him in a moment: "There is no other life...the person that you are is the person you're going to be." Even from such fatalism, he views his irrevocable decisions with a sour detachment that leaves all the "if-onlys" pitiably attached.

Self-deception is a favorite theme, along with the self-knowledge we bury; the family ties that bind, the unhappiness we choose. "It was like I had two parts of my brain," says one character and it's this duality of nature Canty most successfully explores.

A few stories, like "great falls, 1966," in which a man who may or may not be dying is caught in the wrangling of his son and grandson are wholly enigmatic; a few, like "dogs, " are wholly fatalistic, or, like "the victim" describe a series of events mostly beyond the central character's control. But most stories emphasize the steady progression of conscious choice.

The writing is minimal without being terse, each word necessary and Canty evokes people who linger in the mind long after the book is closed.

This marvelous debut collection heralded the introduction of a story teller with prodigious gifts. "A Stranger In This World" is inhabited by characters who are all on the outside, individuals who are alienated due to economics, talent or happenstance. And, they are all trying to cut their way out of the emotional nets that have snared them.

Canty has the ability to enthrall readers with revealing narrative and a connoisseur's eye for significant detail. His opening lines compel further exploration, such as that found in "King of the Elephants": "The third time we put my mother in the hospital, my father and I had already moved to Florida, to Jacksonville Beach." Or, "Safety" begins with: "Marian is in the bedroom, Saturday afternoon talking to her sister on the telephone, when her two-year-old Will walks in with a plastic bag over his head."

It might seem that the author's themes are gloomy; this is not the case. But rather they seem to reveal the contradictions found in every human being.

Kevin Canty promised to be and is a writer we will neither ignore or forget.

- Gail Cooke