Featured Book Review: Gambler's Fallacy by Judith Cowan

By Judith Fitzgerald Feb 8, 2008, 10:40 GMT

The conundrum at the core of Gambler's Fallacy, Trifluvian author and translator Judith Cowan's seven-story follow-up to her distinguished 1997 début, More Than Life Itself, involves an impressively erratic cast of fearful and fragile Quebecois characters capriciously transformed into victims of the strange vagaries of chance and serendipitous circumstance. Not unlike Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, or Richard Ford, Cowan creates heartbreakingly felicitous portraits of Chekhovian elegance featuring ordinarily forgotten little folks who, for no apparent reason nor logical explanation, have fallen through the ubiquitous cracks.

"What was luck but fate? What was fate but luck?" Pierre, the star of the title tale, wild with giddy grief following his father's death, believes he sees through the texture of time "for one illuminated instant" before unceremoniously tumbling into a patch of petunias "with their soft trumpets brushing his ears and breathing fragrance into his face" where he falls asleep for the duration. Similarly, entries such as "The Best Time of the Night," "The Small Circle" and, most tellingly, the collection's kick-in-the-head closer, "The Unknown Poet," ascribe luminous importance to the raggedy-jaggedy dissolutes and down-and-out recalcitrants struggling with the incomprehensible contradictions thrust upon them in these terminally benumbered times.

Jean-Charles — out of work, on the dole, and isolated beyond belief — idly wonders why he's gained so much weight surviving — barely — on a diet of coffee, bread, and beer. He laconically hopes against hope his government cheque's in the mail. "Standing before the refrigerator's humming blue heart," Jean-Charles tells time by "the gust of air in the vestibule below, then the clunk of mail being slotted into the tenants' mailboxes." Alas, no cheque; but, "with dull surprise," it slowly registers upon one superbly rendered étude classique du contemporain perdant — Quiconque? — that a love letter, an anonymously sent homemade Valentine, now incongruously glitters in his hands:

[The valentine] was for him alone, not for anyone else, not for him and all his neighbours. Someone had sent this letter to him, personally. But what was it? . . . Beneath the written message there was a heart shape drawn in red ink. What on earth for? It was almost impossible for Jean-Charles to grasp the fact that this thing was a Valentine, or that it could be meant for him.

At that moment, the remaining shreds of reality intervene, forcing the freezing po-mo povert to resume his search for a warm bar congenial to a common, hungry, and broken man among the contemporary-anybody mass of millions recognising "Americans were cleverer now. They bought the factories, then closed them. There was no work . . ."

Suffused with a largeness of spirit everywhere animated by moments of aching clarity and lyrical grace, Cowan's gritty minimalist vignettes will, if truth be told, simply break the most hardened of readers' hearts. You can bet the form on it.

Canadian poet and literary critic Judith Fitzgerald's critically acclaimed Adagios Quartet's BOOK III: Electra's Benison has just been named one of The Globe and Mail's TOP 100 BOOKS (2007). The Almaguin Highlands resident is currently completing Leonard Cohen, Master of Song (Dundurn Press, Fall 2008).