That Light Lifting, Alexander MacLeod’s debut story collection, will be anything but light is apparent from its stark black and white cover shot: a train tunnel at night, with only a distant opening visible at the end. “It’s the light lifting,” the title story’s narrator, a bricklayer, remarks farther along, “that does the real damage.” Indeed, this thin volume, just seven stories strong, devotes itself to the life-altering events that overtake or burden us as we work, day to day, toward the end light.
The train tracks beckon the reader first into “Miracle Mile,” a study of a long-distance runner nicknamed Burner. Set around a Canadian championship race, the story quickly jumps back to a near-death experience in which Burner barely escaped a train while racing down the Detroit–Windsor tunnel at night. “He was like that one stupid gazelle on the nature show, the one who somehow gets away even though the cheetahs or lions or hyenas should already be feasting,” recalls the narrator, a close friend and co-miler who came out of the tunnel minutes earlier. The incident imprints Burner as an adrenalin junkie — someone who encourages conflict, who creates personal and athletic deficits to draw out what is greatest from within himself. Weaving in and out of flashback, MacLeod shows the ramifications of this tendency before, during, and after the race, to great effect.
The narrators of Light Lifting are often working-class men and boys, and the Windsor-raised MacLeod, a holder of three university degrees and the son of noted author and professor Alistair MacLeod, struggles at times to inhabit their thoughts. His primary modes for conveying the internal lives of people less erudite than he — Salinger-style lassitude and Papa-brand staccato — don’t always ring true. When the prose expands too loosely, narrators are left waxing philosophical at awkward times, and in awkward ways: “We are made most specifically by the things we cannot bear to do,” we learn, inopportunely, as a girl who nearly drowned as a child ponders whether to swim out to rescue her lover. When the prose constricts too tightly, it feels self-conscious, almost condescending, as though the narrator isn’t eloquent enough to swim even the calmest streams of consciousness without frequent stops. One flashback, for example, begins, “Origins. A pretty girl in a bar. Notice her Clash t-shirt. Combat Rock. Probably second hand.”
The story from which this quotation is drawn, “Wonder About Parents,” unfolds unvaryingly in this shorthand. It also labours under a certain telegraphed showiness about the author’s research (the male lead just happens to be reading a book on the history of lice). Yet it may be a sign of MacLeod’s promise that it ended up as my favourite of the collection, thanks to his strong storytelling and profound empathy for his characters. The story draws to a close with the wondered-about parents keeping a nighttime vigil over their sick baby. For a brief few paragraphs, the punctuation ceases to intrude, hearkening instead to the peace of the moment. The endnote is exceedingly graceful and sweeping, bearing out much of what has gone before. It wouldn’t be out of place in Cheever. Were it not in fragments. That is.
