Driving Men Mad (1995)

Project Reading Widely is now in its fifth year. The results have been conclusive. Now more than ever has my focus never been sharper. Two passive sentences in a row (the last one idiotic) and I remain ... unconvinced ... of the urgency ... of anything.

Elise Levine is a writer a few years older than me, but we started out together in the '90s, when no one knew what that decade was -- and no, we'd never met. But there (Finally, I thought to myself) at the Sally Anne at East 12th was a copy of Driving Men Mad (1995), and I inhaled it in a couple days.

Everything moves quickly in the stories of Driving Men Mad. There is no lingering, no sustained rumination, for Levine's is an amphetamine tendency that was (or wasn't?) popular among younger writers back then (she was not yet "a Canadian Lorrie Moore," as her current publisher claims her to be).

Of all the stories, "Retiring" might be my favourite, a choice that would be impossible if I'd read it when it first came out. The story is set in that modern 9-5 village known as the department store, on the eve of a Cosmetics clerk's retirement.

My advice to younger prose writers today is to write prose, not fiction. And if speculative fiction is not your bag, write about life as you imagine it might be when you're on the verge of retirement from a job and a national pension plan that will, by then, no longer exist.