Review: Eyestone by D. R. MacDonald

A friend recently asked me what book I had on my shelves that had been there unread the longest. As I went hunting to find out, (Henry James' Wings of the Dove, incidentally), I came across this Pushcart Prize winning collection. Published in 1988, I have owned it for almost as long. And so with a promise to James that I would come back to him, I pulled this one off the shelf, curious to see what had intrigued my high school self to buy it and yet never to read it. I can't begin to guess what it was that drew me to it so many years ago, especially since short stories have never been my favorites. In this case, though, the short story is the perfect form, offering just enough and yet not so much pervading sadness and despair to overwhelm the reader.

All of the stories are set in the rugged and rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, an area populated by the descendants of the Scots, overlaid with the soft sounds of Gaelic and the muted plaids of kilts. Each of the stories in the collection offers a spare sense of place and feels washed in sepia tones, capturing the aging population, fading culture, and the economic depression of the time and place. There is a mournful nostalgia, a harkening back to the past, and a sense of life having long since passed by both the place and the people. The main characters are mostly aging protagonists, an old woman drinking alone in memory of her newly deceased brother, an artist whose wife has left him living cheek by jowl with an elderly widow he wants to evict, a laborer saying goodbye to his lifelong working and drinking buddy who has had a stroke, a fisherman shocked by the sudden, violent death of the local minister killed while on vacation in the old country, a nephew taking his elderly uncle back to the old homestead only to discover it has been vandalized, a brother lamenting his tough older brother's life, an uncle who presents his nephew with the symbol of uselessness, despair, and futility embodied in a Chinese rifle from the Korean War and then in the twilight of his life gets the rifle back, an old handyman checking in on a blind widow living alone and isolated, and an old sailor easing into death as his son remembers his father's tales. Woven throughout the whole collection is a fading, a melting into the gloaming. The landscape is vast but the lives left to the people in these stories are small and drifting towards their finish. A slight book, this must be read slowly and deliberately, just as the stories seem to have been written.