rob mclennan's On Beauty: Stories

Reviewed by Salma Hussain

(University of Alberta Press, 2024)

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The way I see it, rob mclennan’s spell-binding collection of short fiction, On Beauty: Stories grapples with two core mysteries— 

• [what] [how] [when] [why] writing becomes story; and
• the transfer or movement of story between generations.

​Even though there are shared themes, connections and patterns, as well as recurrent characters (from different stages of their lives), each one of mclennan’s thirty-two vignettes is a fully-formed galaxy unto itself. Each piece captures moments of imagery, sensation, internal turmoil and emotional insight with such intensity, dimension and depth that (even though I, as a fiction writer, should know better) I found myself googling mclennan’s own biography.
 
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On Beauty: Stories is what happens when a prolific poet who is also a prolific critic and established publisher of experimental and innovative writing turns his eye towards creating story. The narrative focuses its gaze on images and emotional insights, but structures itself to create space on the page for readers to critique their own assumptions and beliefs about the form, content and purpose of narrative itself.
 
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Each fiction piece opens with an epigraph from other writers about writing. The writers are an eclectic and varied bunch that range from Miranda July to Philip Roth to Gertrude Stein to Paul Auster to Micheal Ondaatje to Fred Wah to Milan Kundera to José Saramago and many many more.
 
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mclennan is a writer’s writer and delights in experimentation, play and originality. Each prose piece grabs you by the throat and seems to want to challenge you to proclaim this here is not a story. Can you?
 
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The forty-six pieces of prose writing are interrupted by fourteen short segments titled “on beauty.”
 
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mclennan’s female characters are written particularly strongly: with a rare compassion and empathy for their experiences on falling in love or falling out of love, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood and more (“she fell for his beauty and stayed for his kindness” 12; “women writers are far too familiar with the guilt associated with writing” 122; “gel on her belly, tingly-cool” 173).  
 
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mclennan circles around the idea that stories are that which we transfer—images, scents, memories, dreams and fears—whether real or imagined. (“perhaps so in love with the form that results weren’t as relevant” 43; “there are things that we carry, that we are unable to set down again” 180; “dreams are stories our heads make up” 182).
 
But also mclennan’s narrative is large and contains multitudes, ex., in one of the vignettes, a character who is a translator posits that perhaps “art [is] known not by what it knows, but by what it tries to seek out” 96), and this statement I believe gets to an irrefutable truth about this compelling collection.
 
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Many of the characters grapple with the loss of a loved one (either through terminal illness, accident or other). With nuance and complexity, mclennan captures the intimate aching moments of characters reckoning with grief.
 
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The work plays with white space, the unsaid and the unsayable. It forces us to pause and reflect. Pay attention. (43)
 
 
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Phrases or verses from well-known poems make surprise appearances in surprising new ways.
 
 
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The World Trade Center towers and their absence is a recurring motif in peculiar and beguiling ways (“fragile, so remarkably fragile” 63; “a shared experience does not necessarily mean a shared response” 105).
 
 
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There is also reckoning with colonialism and ‘men of their time’—“A mound of bodies is no foundation for a moral high ground” (142).
 
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When a narrator asks “how anything connects,” I feel we are being encouraged to question not just how the pieces of this collection connect but rather how any life anywhere stitches meaning and purpose together (184).
 
In short, mclennan is a storyteller who refuses to be confined or tied down. He can never stop moving as “there is still so much that requires attention” (134). As soon as the reader thinks they’ve grasped his story, mclennan points out a new vantage point. Look from here. Lo! Look anew from this angle. Wait, there’s one more slant we may want to consider. And another and another. This endlessly fascinating and original collection is a kaleidoscope of shifting marvels. Borrowing a line from the collection, mclennan’s On Beauty “is a sandcastle, set against tide,” enticingly ordinary, extraordinary, ephemeral and timeless. This one is a collection for dreamers, questioners and lovers of craft.

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​Salma Hussain writes poetry and prose. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Temz Review, Queens Quarterly, CV2, The Antigonish Review, The Hong Kong Review, Ex-Puritan and Pleiades: Literature in Context. Her young adult novel, The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan, about a young girl’s immigration and menstruation journey, was published by Penguin Random House in 2022. ​It was selected for ALA’s Rise: A Feminist Book Project List and shortlisted for the Geoffrey Wilson Historical Fiction prize.