A brilliant collection of stories. ( )

Rating: 3.5

This is a collection of ten, mostly psychologically realistic, cleverly interconnected short stories, with occasional menacing, supernatural, and/or gothic touches. Each piece was apparently inspired by one of the paintings of iconic Canadian artist Alex Colville. (To see some of his work, visit: http://alexcolville.ca/gallery/ ) Many of the characters are middle-aged or older, solitary—widowed or never married, some of them haunted by a sense of deficiency, of never having quite measured up. Others are burdened by crimes they’ve perpetrated or been victimized by. Ambivalence towards or estrangement from family members, marital dissatisfaction, and loss of sexual intimacy in relationships are recurrent themes. The strong female characters do the emotional work; the men are often aloof, psychologically unavailable, and staid. An unusual number of protected “only children” populate the pages. There are also quite a few teachers and creative types (writers and an artist). It almost goes without saying: every one of the characters has secrets. Some of the stories are almost unbearably sad. In one of them, a dog meets the fate of almost every companion animal I encounter in adult fiction. Sometimes it feels as though an animal is there only for the author to kill off at some opportune time, milking the moment for its pathos.

While I admired these generally well-written, sensitive, and occasionally edgy stories, I found their plots sometimes took surprising, unlikely—even over-the-top—turns. In one story, for example, an undertaker blends the ashes of a dead woman with the paint used to create an enchanted forest scene for the deceased’s memorial service. In another, an old man watches a teenage boy (a complete stranger he’s only just met in the cemetery and barely spoken to) inveigh against and urinate on the grave of the 86-year-old’s wife—a woman that the man still feels lingering bitterness towards for her unacknowledged affair. Later, he’ll offer to help an ex-con have a second chance by providing him with funding for a small business. In yet another piece, an odd woman in her mid-sixties asks to be “deflowered” by a man she is barely acquainted with (the husband of a member of her book club), after he trips on the sidewalk and grazes elbow and knee near her apartment. Writers can, of course, do whatever they please. I just felt that some of the author’s decisions diminished the stories.

Miller’s book has deservedly been nominated for several Canadian book awards this year. It’s funny in a way, as a couple of the stories refer to (one even lampoons) book prizes and the rituals surrounding them. However, Late Breaking recently failed to advance from the Giller longlist to its shortlist. Is that because of some of the things I’ve mentioned in this review? I’m not sure. What I do know is that for me, as compelling as some of the stories were, there was too often an uneasy mix of the realistic and the improbable. ( )