A Masterclass on The Long Sentence
Planet Earth, Nicholas Ruddock. House of Anansi Press, 2025.
Nicholas Ruddock’s collection of eighteen short stories creates a river of minerals for the reader in search of a tapestry of different types of story and writing. As an educator and filmmaker, I am often in search of tightly crafted narratives that are both cinematic and poignant. This collection had me annotating and going back to reread stories. In “The Glass Flowers,” a two-page flash fiction gem, Ruddock writes, “here, for example, is just a common kind of grass lying on its side as though pulled from the earth, roots tangled and clustered and as wayward as such roots are. . . . here are scarlet maple leaves.” There’s a beauty in these parallel-formed bundles of words. His anaphoric repetition of “here” grounds the reader in the immediacy of how special these flowers are. The author’s tone is reverent and admiring. Such beauty flows throughout this story, only to be juxtaposed with the bombing of Dresden. Ruddock renders this entire story in a single sentence.
Another tumbling story of curiosity is about a young man who works for Prince, the musician. The first-person narrator of this story, Timothy, is on a personal break from studying at the University of Minnesota. Ruddock floats in a series of em dashes to amplify the narrator’s fragility: “ — possibly we shared a frailty — that a calmness settled over me”. The em dash is not only an interrupting probability — it also intimates a sort of speculative imagining.
Ruddock again employs the long sentence and anaphora in “Marriage Story,” where a couple happens to see Ralph Fiennes outside a London theatre “without the trappings of stage or stardom, without limousine or hangers-on.” The narrative then jumps to another famous person of sorts, an unnamed Director of the Space Institute, and this single sentence story twists, turns, careens, darts, and jumps to moments between the narrator and his wife Cheryl. Thematically, the beats in this piece move toward a commentary about our planet and how people might one day escape Earth.
Not all the stories in Planet Earth are short. This collection opens on “Wolverine,” a thirty-four-page story. In the first few pages, Ruddock weaves parataxis to reveal an exciting relationship between two characters, Eduardo and Estella: “Estella, the café, the sea, the birds, the secret police.” These paratactic elements, almost a choppy cinematic montage, allow the reader to marinate on these images and make their own connections. Dialogue between the new couple takes a sort of hyper formality: “our letters will be opened. I am unable to prevaricate or dissemble. It does not matter, our love is inviolable.” This ambitious story spans many years, and eventually these two characters move from Peru to Canada. The couple works together to complete an act of revenge and Ruddock’s visual imagery is compelling: “Charred remnants of the house lay jagged, a shell, smouldering.” The ending of this narrative is a literary echo, a bookend describing the metaphorical cobra and wolverine.
In “Dupont Street,” Ruddock leans into a spectacular bit of auditory imagery to describe a house with bats. “They’re crepuscular — meaning active at dusk and dawn — so we could hear them if there was no wind, we could hear their murmurings, their bat palaver jibbering down.” This story slopes into a shared space between a family and bats and how they get along in this tight atmosphere. While their daughter Florence eventually moves to Montreal, the couple is left with the bats. There’s a real haunting simplicity in this single paragraph flash piece that ends with “the bats getting more sleep than we were, all of us, all of us, all of us living in Florence’s thrall.” How will this unnamed couple deal with space? Will they continue to begrudgingly live with the bats?
“Grating” is a deep exploration, again in one long sentence, describing the narrator’s musings on a subway station in Toronto: “I can see why someone might like it here, comparatively it’s warm, and there’s a hum, a vibration, a rush from below that has real force behind it, you can feel it on your socks, your pant legs, banks of industrial fans.” The detail in this piece and the tactile imagery reveal an immersive sense of place. The narrator wonders “how long can anyone breathe it in, it’s metallic, it’s ionized.”
In “Meltdown,” the final story in the collection, Ruddock turns to a single two-page sentence to wrap the collection with a unifying idea. He begins, “Disregarding every principle of common sense, we spin through space within our deteriorating biosphere as though we had forever and forever, witnessing the retreat of glaciers.” Here, Ruddock gives us a deep glimpse into the human condition and into our planet. This culminating story refracts a certain etching in the ice and gestures toward the future. These stories, too, are a metaphorical stacking like the ice. Taken both singularly or as a collection, these beginnings, middles, and ends will stick with the reader for some time.
The textured front cover by the artist Cheryl Ruddock evokes a complex sense of intensity in the characters of these stories. And the cover of this book also reflects the real flames of wildfires burning away on our planet. We are lucky to have this trove of prose to read and reread.
— Ian Clay Sewall’s 35mm film, “Mirage,” starring Booboo Stewart, screened at the Oscar-qualifying 2025 Edmonton International Film Festival and his stories have been published in The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, CNQ, and elsewhere.
Read this review and many others in Issue 307 (Spring 2026). Order the issue now:
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