Pathos, Suspense, and the Absurd: Steven Heighton’s Storytelling Gifts
Sacred Rage: Selected Stories, Steven Heighton. Biblioasis, 2025.
Steven Heighton was a master in equal parts of the poignant, the comic, and the dramatic. Sacred Rage, a posthumous publication of stories drawn from his four previous collections, demonstrates his characteristic versatility in terms of form, subject matter, setting, and point of view. He was a writer in tight control of his narrative, which is delivered to readers in blazing prose.
The collection opens with three stories set in Japan, where the protagonist is a Canadian English teacher. In “Five Paintings of the New Japan,” he takes a summer job as a waiter to supplement his teaching income. Throughout the collection, the exploration of serious themes is leavened with humour, here provided by the English-language errors of a Japanese waiter who utters butchered idioms such as “I’d bet my bottom.” However, the humour is not entirely at this character’s expense; the protagonist is never sure if he’s being toyed with, wondering whether, in fact, the speaker’s English skills are better than he lets on.
In “‘A Man with No Master . . . ,’” the Canadian English teacher is “kidnapped by the Japanese mafia.” Here, Heighton deftly creates a combination of absurdity and terror. Although drama is not one of Heighton’s published genres, he seems to have a playwright’s sensibility for the construction of scene and dialogue. The protagonist’s captors take him to a bar, where one of the kidnappers is engrossed by the television:
“A wonderful film,” Katana-san said, nodding at the screen, cheeks
bulging with beer and food. “I have seen it many times. You — uh
— would like another whisky?”
“If possible. Please.”
“You’re not touching your lunch.”
“Kill him,” snarled Ray-Ban, beating a thin metallic knell on the counter.
“He knows every scene,” Katana-san explained, swallowing. “The film
is an important one for us. . . . Probably you think of us as uncultured
people . . . ?”
Contrary to what readers might expect, humour exists alongside a carefully crafted sense of dread.
Heighton’s ability to craft tension shines in “Shared Room on Union.” The story, which was made into a short film, concerns a couple who are locked in the trunk of their car by their carjacker, who is — ridiculously — angered that he can’t drive standard. The couple’s conflict about the best way to resolve the situation adds to the tension, as does the fact that the one passerby who hears their cries declines to help them after the male of the couple obstinately refuses to give him money. In spite of the absurdity of the situation, the dread is palpable, and readers really don’t know if the couple will make it out alive.
The collection highlights Heighton’s versatility as a writer. In a change of form, “Noughts and Crosses” is written as a breakup email and subsequent parsing of its content by the rejected party, who laments the loss of the relationship. Heighton’s subject matter varies widely, as well. In “The Dead Are More Visible,” a woman parks worker filling an ice rink at night is threatened by three men, but the story takes a horrifying and unexpected turn when she defends herself with the hose.
Not all Heighton’s protagonists are sympathetic characters. That of “Professions of Love” is thoroughly contemptible, a plastic surgeon who operates on his middle-aged wife. Told in the first person, the story is a remarkable example of Heighton’s skilled creation of character and voice. Of his wife’s agreement to surgical remedy of a stroke’s effects upon her face, the surgeon says,
I believe she was coming to regard Time, as I have come to regard
Time, as I have perhaps always regarded Time, as the ENEMY it is.
Not that I believe it to be defeatable! Only neurotic fools and faddists
believe as much, or pretend to believe so, and I am neither neurotic
nor faddist: nonetheless I feel that a certain, what, a certain honour
lies in fighting a losing battle with courage and resolution, undertaking
a défi.
The man is narcissistic and self-deluded in the extreme. As he continues the operation past what his wife has consented to, he muses,
The sculptor is said to discern and exhume a Form dormant in his
medium; I was effecting changes that would disinter the face, the
long-beloved face, that mortality had sought first to blur and next,
at its leisure, to obliterate! My wife did not understand that such a
gift could be, . . . and she herself would be elated in time.
In contrast to the inside-the-head perspective of “Professions of Love,” “Notes Toward a New Theory of Tears” uses a third-person point-of-view with considerable narrative distance. The effect for the reader is like reading clinical notes, appropriate for a story about a military therapist who thrice attempts suicide after listening to too many stories about traumatic acts of war. The story is structured under five headings, suggestive of the book the therapist is attempting to write, which also contributes to the detached, clinical tone.
Heighton’s use of language is a pleasure, in both rhythm and the ways in which he paints vivid, apt description. In “Nearing the Sea, Superior,” the protagonist describes his wife: “Porter could look haughty patting a spaniel.” In “Five Paintings of the New Japan,” deft descriptive strokes portray character with unnerving humour:
Mr. Cruikshank swallowed his olive then impaled his wife’s with
the plastic sword. He turned back to me, inadvertently aiming the
harmless tip at my throat . . . “You’ll find it hard here without any
Japanese,” Mr. Cruikshank advised me, ignoring his wife, drawing
the sword from his teeth so the gleaming olive stayed clenched
between them.
I appreciate the introduction, written by Heighton’s long-time editor, John Metcalf, for the perspective it gives on the writer’s oeuvre. Metcalf relates part of an interview where Heighton says that he’s both an atheist and “essentially a religious writer . . . by religious I mean concerned with whatever transcends the limited ‘I’ consciousness (to use jazz musician Kenny Werner’s term for the ego).” Through these pieces, Heighton shows us how to feel deeply for humanity, without taking ourselves and our lives too seriously.
— Janet Pollock Millar writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in Victoria, BC.
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