Gilbert Reid’s So This is Love, a collection of nine short stories, mostly reads like a more intelligent version of a script for softcore TV series The Red Shoe Diaries. There is no sex in barns and no David Duchovny, but there is that persistent awareness of the sensuality of strangers, of erotic possibilities on city street corners, and of the haunting quality of past sexual encounters.
The stories’ shifting settings-a summer evening in small-town Ontario, an abandoned hospital in war-torn Bosnia, a restaurant on the beach in Italy, a rainy night in Paris-each brings with it something unfamiliar and thrilling. Reid’s descriptions of these distant places are always richly coloured by his narrators’ own sensual preoccupations. Ultimately, no matter how far Reid hurls us geographically, we feel that the “unrepentant, full, masturbatory moon” of “Irony Is…” follows us everywhere. Even in “Soon We Will Be Blind,” and “Hey, Mister,” stories of familial love, there are unsettling sexual undertones.
Despite the different contexts, Reid’s male narrators are unified by their incessant alcohol consumption and midlife-crisis lust. They engage in intellectualizations of their desire, but it is these unsuccessful attempts at sophisticated discourse that makes them sound sometimes detached and irrelevant, but more often just slightly drunk. Reid explains that his male narrators are similar in their “Hemingway-esque detachment, often portrayed as a form of impotence.” And as the narrator of “Lollipop” admits, “Such mystical moments come after the third bottle.”
In “Irony Is…” a man has sex with a woman who enjoys impersonating a monkey during intercourse. This experience leads him to aimlessly roam the night streets of Paris and wonder, “Where do I go and what do I do now that I have done everything that can be imagined?” It is hard to take seriously the quasi-philosophical struggles of the disillusioned, greying narrators of So This is Love. Largely, their universes are private collections of empty wine bottles, bikini tops, and fading sunsets that are comical rather than erotic or thought-provoking. Though as they slouch in their street café chairs, reflecting on the paradoxes of desire, they do make for highly entertaining company.‚-MARIA GERGIN
