from Goose Lane Editions

“Skin,” the eponymous story in Catherine Bush’s collection, pinpoints her fictional techniques and themes. Truncated perspectives of fleeting moments capture the slices of her characters’ lives and fraught relationships. Like a deft dermatologist, Bush probes the sensual and cerebral aspects of anatomy to get under her characters’ skin. “After her divorce my mother flew to Tanzania.” This abrupt opening sentence introduces parental divorce, as well as spatial dislocation. The narrator’s mother embraces foot-washing as a form of baptism. In a brief paragraph, she criss-crosses Tanzania only to return to Toronto where she engages in washing the feet of refugees. In another abrupt shift of perspective, a refugee reacts to her ministrations as “a besiegement of the unknown.”

That phrase applies not only to his reaction, but also to the reader who navigates between religious ritual and foot fetish. Mother confides to daughter about her erotic response to foot rubbing, and the narrative abruptly turns to her father’s deathbed. The final sentence recapitulates another besiegement and belated healing after divorce: “He made small cries like a wounded creature as her wet sponge touched him and she pressed her fingers slowly and methodically to his wasted flesh.” Skin is both synecdoche for the larger body, and an interface of transference between couples and cultures.

In another story, “Roxanne,” the narrator comments: “This knowledge, so far from anything I know that hands can do, also lies beneath your skin.” In the penultimate story, “Glacial,” the protagonist is told by the glacier’s mysterious voice to take off her skin, as Bush peels back layers of meaning and mystery to embrace empathy.

In “Breath” she writes that “Breath determines meaning,” and throughout her fiction pauses and spaces between sections determine meaning, mood, intimacy and intensity. In the footsteps of Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, Bush carries the torch of Canadian fiction. From novella to shorter tales, she besieges skin to expose the kin and kindness within. ■

MICHAEL GREENSTEIN is a retired English professor, published widely in Victorian and Canadian literature.