Dark Roots: Stories
Issue #34
By Cate Kennedy (Black Cat, 224 pages, $13)
By Kate Rockwood
Published: March 1st, 2008 | 12:00am
Cate Kennedy's debut story collection is about two things: death and dying. In the first story, a young woman’s girlfriend is in a coma following an auto accident and the woman must decide whether to take her lover off a respirator. In the second, an aging athlete puts the 15-year-old family dog down, almost as an afterthought. The third story takes place entirely in an airport, where a woman dying of some unnamed disease is trying to calmly smuggle three kilos of cocaine back into the country for one last drug-tinged hoorah. And in the fourth — well, you get the idea.
The 17 slim stories in Kennedy’s collection, which was originally published in Australia in 2006, are brimming with an incidental sort of misery. Step off the sidewalk wrong and bam!, the whole landscape of your life is changed. Taken individually, a handful of the stories are richly haunting, peppered with evocative imagery (a Chinese line cook tosses the wok “so that everything inside rolls over like a wave on a smoking black beach.”).
But as a whole, the collection does little but strike the same chord over and over again. There is the shark attack, the unprompted seizure, a boyfriend’s murder following his request that his girlfriend have an abortion. Some stories miss their mark entirely: this one too pat in its embrace-your-aging-body sentiments, that one incapable of bringing the character to life.
Layered atop one another, even Kennedy’s more graceful stories don’t deepen the aching sadness or vulnerability of her characters. Instead, the collection steamrolls the individual nuance into a monotonous but serviceable beat. Life is dangerous, connections are tenuous. But in the end, Kennedy isn’t able to push the reader past these observations and deliver impact.
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