Carol Bruneau's ​Threshold

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Nimbus Publishing, 2024)

It opens in February with a woman dancing to keep warm on Barrington Street in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the fifteen short stories in Carol Bruneau’s collection Threshold observe unremarkable but ultimately significant moments in the lives of ordinary people. Her intimate and granular perspective showcases the small gestures that encapsulate and comprise a life.

Bruneau’s descriptions of east-coast-Canadian life are vivid. Many would recognise the images in “Burntcoat Head,” for instance, named for the national park: “Below, the view of the Bay of Fundy opens wide: red mud, distant blues, the opposite shore a hazy purple-green smudge. Families trudge upward, winded and muddy.” Her first novel, Purple for Sky (2000), is set in the small town of Arcadia (near Yarmouth) and her most recent novel, Brighten the Corner Where You Are (2020), is set in Marshalltown.

Threshold is her twelfth publication following six novels, three collections of stories and one chapbook, and a work of non-fiction about Nova Scotian textile artist Laurie Swim.  Her interest in art is evident in this new collection and her previous, A Bird on Every Tree, though not as prominent as in the two novels which fictionalized two artists’ lives: Camille Claudel’s in These Hands and Maud Lewis’ in Brighten the Corner Where You Are. Here, “Ripple” is saturated with light and colour and reads like a prose poem; it first appeared as No. 14 in The Scales Project. And “More Fish in the Sea,” inspired by Arthus Lismer’s “Sackville River,” originally appeared in The Group of Seven Reimagined.

Actually, several of these stories have been previously published, but Bruneau’s voice is consistent: this unifies the collection. Her dedication to familiar themes will be evident to loyal readers: marriage and love (as in Berth), kinship and community (as in After the Angel Mill), and grief and resilience (as in Glass Voices). As with her prior collection, three epigraphs invite readers into her stories; previously, these were lines from the Bible, a folk song, and a musical, and now, lines from Edith Stein and John O’Donohue, with this from the Book of John: “Perfect love drives out fear.”

But Bruneau’s readers know that she doesn’t write about perfect love. “That whole family thing,” she writes in Berth, “it was like the elastic in underwear that got stretched so much everything dangled.” And, in A Circle on the Surface: “The way nothing is fair in love or in war, and yet we keep breathing.” She focuses on the love stories that don’t inspire greeting-card verses or Hallmark movies. In “Animal Kingdom (or What Women Want),” for instance, Cheryl asks Ritchie: “Did you actually mean it? A dog for a baby. You weren’t just arsing around?”

These are stories populated by characters who have been bruised but remain in motion, shopping for groceries or waiting for the bus. Their drawers contain “balled-up T-shirts, underwear, and dresses” and they might be standing up in an Italian market to eat “fresh mozzarella, sesame bread, dried salami” or gulping down frozen lasagne: they’re leading busy and messy lives. Quotidian details add specificity and reflect external realities (class and customs) and interior motivations (cravings and priorities) and Bruneau is alert to unexpected connections. The heavy fog outside a ship’s porthole in a story about a character’s obsession over the sinking of the Mary Celeste, for instance, aligns with the faint hiss of oxygen from an intubation tube in another character’s nostrils: “It was quite the rig.” And there’s laughter, too, sometimes so much that it “blurs the sound of Hokusai’s wave cresting in my head.”

The conflicts are universal, but the stories maintain a tight perspective. Fractured relationships are rarely all-out war, more often a nagging thought or a private reflection. Like in “Ship Time”: “But didn’t everything come down to some kind of risk, even marriage?” On occasion, a moment heavy with earnestness reflects the compassion that girds Bruneau’s lifetime of work, as in “The Spectre of Unknown Roads”: “The history of the world was the history of users—users and the used, it struck him, grotesque as it was. Traders, traffickers, and the abused: Sharla’s ancestors and those people feeling God knows what, who were lucky if they made it to Lampedusa. The history of the world. Fuck.”
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Themes of power and privilege erupt in more than one story: damages ensue. In “Alpha Frontier,” the narrator has a wound that “looked like an adaptor had been plugged into her leg” and in “A Procession of Night Owls” some “[v]ehicles flew past honking” until her “heart bobbed in [her] throat…like the floaty thing in a toilet tank.” Stress and anxiety take characters to the edge: it can overwhelm but also has the potential to be transformative. “Who wants to pollinate grief?” asks one character in “Faith Healer.” But isn’t pollination also a small miracle, with the inherent capacity to revitalise. What buoys Bruneau’s work is the breath of private, oft-overlooked epiphanies—imperfect and blooming. 

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Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.