Dislocations: Stories

The title of this first collection of short stories (1986) by Janette Turner Hospital says it all. These characters are dislocated by space, time, religion, education, unforeseen events, even death. And though they may travel to the four corners of the earth, whether it is India, Canada, the United States or Australia, they never really ever leave their homeland. When left unattended, their thoughts return there. Most of these stories have hard sayings. A burn victim, formerly a pretty young girl ("Golden Girl") must face a reconstructed future with a reconstructed face. A dying woman ("The Dark Wood") who two days ago learned of her death sentence longs to putter in her tomatoes. A friend whom the narrator has just left is killed by an automobile in "Some Have Called Thee Mighty and Dreadful" leaving the narrator overcome with guilt: "If I had invited them back to our house. If I had only tilted time a few minutes to one side or the other. This is shock. Of course I am not responsible. Life is random, brutally indifferent." In "After Long Absence" a woman returns to Brisbane and her family whose fundamentalist religion she has long since left behind. Her teetotaler father, so as not to embarrass her in front of her friends in a university lounge, "takes polite sips" of white wine. She, on the other hand, is unwilling to select a passage and read from the Bible as is the custom for visitors to do in her parents' home at the evening meal. "It cannot be a concession anywhere near as great as my father's two sips of wine. . . Yet I canot do it. 'I am sorry,' I say quietly, hating myself. . . Outside I hug the mango tree and weep for the kind of holy innocence that can inflict appalling damage; and because it is clear that they, the theologically rigid, are more forgiving than I am." As always, Ms. Hospital gets right to the heart of the matter as well as the hearts of her readers.