Mark Paterson's review in The Rover, a Montreal-based online arts magazine:
Contrary to the codes of cliché, there’s more to men at midlife than Ferraris and pharmaceuticals. In his fifth book, the excellent short story collection The End of the Ice Age, Terence Young trains his sharp eye on the tricky state of being between young and old. His meaningful stories catalogue an array of possible experiences that reach beyond the platitudes so heavily relied upon by lazy advertisers, and reveal more nuance than can be expressed in 30 seconds.
Not every man has a so-called crisis, not every man acts out upon reaching a certain age. Some don’t even notice they are aging at all. In the book’s title story, an unnamed he is informed by his lover, an unnamed she, “Your problem is you still don’t think you’re old.” Indeed, he observes, he does feel like he’s younger than everyone else, even those who are officially younger, but he’s perplexed as to why he should consider it a problem. With this character who feels immune to getting older, as if he alone is capable of resisting the march of time, Young alludes to our tendency to feel self-important. He shows, however, that the clock is undeniably ticking, unstoppable, literally and figuratively. The lover is too absorbed in her compulsive reading to ever check the time. Instead, she repeatedly asks Mr. Ageless to check for her. Even if he doesn’t get the message, the reader does. And with a deft switch to the present tense for the last sentence of the story, Young reminds us time stops for no one, not even his own characters.
Resentment and redemption figure importantly in “Fair Market Value.” Ted, married with two children, has an epiphany when his childhood home unexpectedly goes up for sale: the reason “he’s never been truly happy all these years” was his parents’ sale of the place and his subsequent departure from it. To right the wrong, he buys it. Ted’s decision constitutes a move to a new town for his family. It quickly becomes his wife and children’s turn to bear a grudge; she for the costly and time-consuming renovations the old house requires and they, more significantly, for the uprooting. Both kids talk of buying back their own old house when they are old enough, and the cycle of indulgence and injury is firmly set in motion.
Other themes treated to Young’s precision include mortality angst (“Fair Enough,” “That Time of Year,” “Last of the Silent Movies”), the search for meaning in one’s existence (“Dream Vacation,” “Suburbs Going Down”), the unease of bumping into a past lover (“Mole”), and becoming what you purport to abhor (“Infestation”).
Young’s sense of humour is sharp and often delightfully morose. A bizarre roadside accident in “The Garden of the Fugitives” involving a windsurf board, a gun, some beer bottles and a moving van is a case in point. Young’s style is concise and uncomplicated, but nothing feels incomplete, nothing feels unsaid. He can, in only a few words, evoke feelings intrinsically understood. His description of the awkwardness of a party buffet, for example: “It’s not easy to balance a beer and scoop up a spoonful of rotini at the same time.” One sentence and the reader is there, in the character’s skin, wishing to grow a third arm adapted for efficient rotini scooping.
Men the world over will continue to age and, undoubtedly, the cheap jokes will persist. But for a reminder of midlife’s true and diverse face, men of middle age and those who love them can always come back to their copy of The End of the Ice Age. As long as they can recall where they left it.
Mark Paterson’s story “Spring Training” won the 5th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers, Mark is currently writing a novel called With the Lights Out.
The following review by Julian Gunn appeared in both The Times/Colonist and The Ottawa Citizen
The End of the Ice Age
By Terence Young
Biblioasis, $19.95
- - -
"They thought I would save them from their lives, and when they saw it wasn't their lives I cared about, they got angry," muses the narrator of Fair Enough early on in The End of the Ice Age, Terence Young's second collection of short stories.
An award-winning Victoria, B.C. writer and teacher, Young is also a poet and the co-founder of The Claremont Review, a journal for young writers. The End of the Ice Age is a collection for adults, by which I mean that these characters have usually lived long enough to know -- though not to behave -- better.
While his narrator in Fair Enough may be disaffected, Young is not. He cares enough about these lives to be merciless as he describes them. Call the stories summer reading for those who haven't forgotten the winter.
Young's stories often revolve around embittered, alienated men. Usually, this is at least partly their own fault, and they are kept alert to their failings by clear-eyed women. If they are redeemed, it's by their own sardonic self-awareness. The settings differ -- Mexico, Vancouver, Ireland -- and each is vividly and succinctly drawn, but most of the stories in Ice Age share a single emotional world.
In this world, speech is a dangerous substance, both vulnerable and volatile. Dialogue usually signals conflict, often between husband and wife, sometimes between men and women in more temporary partnerships. Flirting is sparring.
In The Garden of the Fugitives, a family habitually communicates its most critical information by letter, with ghoulishly amusing consequences. In the title story, a newspaper being read upside-down could stand for the problem most of Young's characters face. In Dream Vacation, even writing a note to say "I've gone out" becomes so impossibly fraught that the character resorts to drawing pictograms instead.
The best stories in Ice Age maintain Young's mordant gaze, but their humour becomes something more profound than self-laceration. It is a way to point to, if not always to reach, the possibility of intimacy. Rumours of Human Sacrifice begins with verbal -- and even physical -- duelling and infuses it with the very-odd-couple affection between a surrogate mother and son. Clodagh is the mother. Her wit is dry, sometimes scabrous, but her affection is palpable.
Last of the Silent Movies has a wry, parable-like quality. "The night the Palmers killed themselves," the story begins, "the Newcomb Theatre was sold out." It ends in much the same key: " 'Slow and steady wins the race,' Avril said. 'What race is that?' he said." The slight distance that Young creates allows the dead couple their absurdity and their tragedy.
These stories are animated by the movement of thought, by the way it jumbles together the momentous and the mundane. Young's characters think and speak in a mixture of clichés and startling moments of lyrical insight.
In Dream Vacation, the scent of
an outdoor market is "overpowering, a frightening smell of cells breaking down." The story's protagonist struggles to use scientific language to impose order on his shapeless existence.
Young seems to struggle to bring these stories to a close. They may telescope suddenly shut, or simply stop. The ending of The Big Money feels inconclusive rather than open-ended, as though it were a chapter taken from a larger work. The otherwise excellent Rumours of Human Sacrifice is marred by a rushed, heavily symbolic last scene.
Young's style owes something to the hard-boiled prose of postwar American writers. His stories move confidently. Their pacing is swift yet attentive. They tend to be strongest when the material is most difficult. Mole evokes the terrible availability, even mundanity, of acts of violence. The almost elegiac tone suits the long suffering of its characters, left beautifully understated. The less spoken, the more said.
Young is also a poet. Maybe that has taught him to be economical with language, or maybe it's his awareness of how much can go wrong once words get involved. In any case, the short stories in The End of the Ice Age are the perfect length. In 10 to 15 pages, there is space for everything a story needs to do, if you know how to do it like Terence Young does.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
Contrary to the codes of cliché, there’s more to men at midlife than Ferraris and pharmaceuticals. In his fifth book, the excellent short story collection The End of the Ice Age, Terence Young trains his sharp eye on the tricky state of being between young and old. His meaningful stories catalogue an array of possible experiences that reach beyond the platitudes so heavily relied upon by lazy advertisers, and reveal more nuance than can be expressed in 30 seconds.
Not every man has a so-called crisis, not every man acts out upon reaching a certain age. Some don’t even notice they are aging at all. In the book’s title story, an unnamed he is informed by his lover, an unnamed she, “Your problem is you still don’t think you’re old.” Indeed, he observes, he does feel like he’s younger than everyone else, even those who are officially younger, but he’s perplexed as to why he should consider it a problem. With this character who feels immune to getting older, as if he alone is capable of resisting the march of time, Young alludes to our tendency to feel self-important. He shows, however, that the clock is undeniably ticking, unstoppable, literally and figuratively. The lover is too absorbed in her compulsive reading to ever check the time. Instead, she repeatedly asks Mr. Ageless to check for her. Even if he doesn’t get the message, the reader does. And with a deft switch to the present tense for the last sentence of the story, Young reminds us time stops for no one, not even his own characters.
Resentment and redemption figure importantly in “Fair Market Value.” Ted, married with two children, has an epiphany when his childhood home unexpectedly goes up for sale: the reason “he’s never been truly happy all these years” was his parents’ sale of the place and his subsequent departure from it. To right the wrong, he buys it. Ted’s decision constitutes a move to a new town for his family. It quickly becomes his wife and children’s turn to bear a grudge; she for the costly and time-consuming renovations the old house requires and they, more significantly, for the uprooting. Both kids talk of buying back their own old house when they are old enough, and the cycle of indulgence and injury is firmly set in motion.
Other themes treated to Young’s precision include mortality angst (“Fair Enough,” “That Time of Year,” “Last of the Silent Movies”), the search for meaning in one’s existence (“Dream Vacation,” “Suburbs Going Down”), the unease of bumping into a past lover (“Mole”), and becoming what you purport to abhor (“Infestation”).
Young’s sense of humour is sharp and often delightfully morose. A bizarre roadside accident in “The Garden of the Fugitives” involving a windsurf board, a gun, some beer bottles and a moving van is a case in point. Young’s style is concise and uncomplicated, but nothing feels incomplete, nothing feels unsaid. He can, in only a few words, evoke feelings intrinsically understood. His description of the awkwardness of a party buffet, for example: “It’s not easy to balance a beer and scoop up a spoonful of rotini at the same time.” One sentence and the reader is there, in the character’s skin, wishing to grow a third arm adapted for efficient rotini scooping.
Men the world over will continue to age and, undoubtedly, the cheap jokes will persist. But for a reminder of midlife’s true and diverse face, men of middle age and those who love them can always come back to their copy of The End of the Ice Age. As long as they can recall where they left it.
Mark Paterson’s story “Spring Training” won the 5th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Author of the short story collections A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine and Other People’s Showers, Mark is currently writing a novel called With the Lights Out.
The following review by Julian Gunn appeared in both The Times/Colonist and The Ottawa Citizen
The End of the Ice Age
By Terence Young
Biblioasis, $19.95
- - -
"They thought I would save them from their lives, and when they saw it wasn't their lives I cared about, they got angry," muses the narrator of Fair Enough early on in The End of the Ice Age, Terence Young's second collection of short stories.
An award-winning Victoria, B.C. writer and teacher, Young is also a poet and the co-founder of The Claremont Review, a journal for young writers. The End of the Ice Age is a collection for adults, by which I mean that these characters have usually lived long enough to know -- though not to behave -- better.
While his narrator in Fair Enough may be disaffected, Young is not. He cares enough about these lives to be merciless as he describes them. Call the stories summer reading for those who haven't forgotten the winter.
Young's stories often revolve around embittered, alienated men. Usually, this is at least partly their own fault, and they are kept alert to their failings by clear-eyed women. If they are redeemed, it's by their own sardonic self-awareness. The settings differ -- Mexico, Vancouver, Ireland -- and each is vividly and succinctly drawn, but most of the stories in Ice Age share a single emotional world.
In this world, speech is a dangerous substance, both vulnerable and volatile. Dialogue usually signals conflict, often between husband and wife, sometimes between men and women in more temporary partnerships. Flirting is sparring.
In The Garden of the Fugitives, a family habitually communicates its most critical information by letter, with ghoulishly amusing consequences. In the title story, a newspaper being read upside-down could stand for the problem most of Young's characters face. In Dream Vacation, even writing a note to say "I've gone out" becomes so impossibly fraught that the character resorts to drawing pictograms instead.
The best stories in Ice Age maintain Young's mordant gaze, but their humour becomes something more profound than self-laceration. It is a way to point to, if not always to reach, the possibility of intimacy. Rumours of Human Sacrifice begins with verbal -- and even physical -- duelling and infuses it with the very-odd-couple affection between a surrogate mother and son. Clodagh is the mother. Her wit is dry, sometimes scabrous, but her affection is palpable.
Last of the Silent Movies has a wry, parable-like quality. "The night the Palmers killed themselves," the story begins, "the Newcomb Theatre was sold out." It ends in much the same key: " 'Slow and steady wins the race,' Avril said. 'What race is that?' he said." The slight distance that Young creates allows the dead couple their absurdity and their tragedy.
These stories are animated by the movement of thought, by the way it jumbles together the momentous and the mundane. Young's characters think and speak in a mixture of clichés and startling moments of lyrical insight.
In Dream Vacation, the scent of
an outdoor market is "overpowering, a frightening smell of cells breaking down." The story's protagonist struggles to use scientific language to impose order on his shapeless existence.
Young seems to struggle to bring these stories to a close. They may telescope suddenly shut, or simply stop. The ending of The Big Money feels inconclusive rather than open-ended, as though it were a chapter taken from a larger work. The otherwise excellent Rumours of Human Sacrifice is marred by a rushed, heavily symbolic last scene.
Young's style owes something to the hard-boiled prose of postwar American writers. His stories move confidently. Their pacing is swift yet attentive. They tend to be strongest when the material is most difficult. Mole evokes the terrible availability, even mundanity, of acts of violence. The almost elegiac tone suits the long suffering of its characters, left beautifully understated. The less spoken, the more said.
Young is also a poet. Maybe that has taught him to be economical with language, or maybe it's his awareness of how much can go wrong once words get involved. In any case, the short stories in The End of the Ice Age are the perfect length. In 10 to 15 pages, there is space for everything a story needs to do, if you know how to do it like Terence Young does.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
From ABC Bookworld: (Read it online here)
The End of the Ice Age (Biblioasis $19.95) Review
from Cherie Thiessen
Dirty realism was a label attached to a group of American short story writers in the early 1980s. Their work reflected the lives of the impoverished and blue-collar workers of small town America in a bare, unsensational style.
Terence Young probably would not appreciate being compared to its proponents like Raymond Carver because most of his characters in The End of the Ice Age are not blue-collar. They are primarily unemployed—but that’s because they’re pursuing degrees at university, or are financially endowed, or have been fired.
Young’s minimalist style and stark realism are nonetheless Carver-like. His stories are also gritty and precise, with touches of poetic prose, without much resolution. If you’re one of these old fashioned folk who want to like the protagonists in your stories, you’re in trouble.
For instance, if you want to know whether bartender Boone will actually kick-start his life in The Big Money, you’ll have to write your own story. If you want to know what is going to happen to the relationship between the once champion squash player and his girlfriend in Dream Vacation, dream on.
If you want to see some light at the end of the tunnel for the nameless protagonist in Fair Enough, forget it.
These are people you want to shake; shout in their faces, “What’s wrong with you!” This is what Young does so well: he offers static with a sneer. But the process is uplifting because he uses poetry and deft phrasing to flesh out his characters. There are terrific lines to savour.
The unnamed narrator in Fair Enough describes a woman he’s hitting on at a wake: “Girl jock finally meets middle age, teeth like a perfect hand of cards.”
Young describes a pugilistic partygoer: “Buzz-cut has been watching and he’s angry on the other guy’s behalf, the sort of person who borrows battles when he can’t find any of his own.”
The author of four previous books, including The Island in Winter, nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, Terence Young has also co-founded The Claremont Review, a journal for young writers. His work defies labels.
The End of the Ice Age (Biblioasis $19.95) Review
from Cherie Thiessen
Dirty realism was a label attached to a group of American short story writers in the early 1980s. Their work reflected the lives of the impoverished and blue-collar workers of small town America in a bare, unsensational style.
Terence Young probably would not appreciate being compared to its proponents like Raymond Carver because most of his characters in The End of the Ice Age are not blue-collar. They are primarily unemployed—but that’s because they’re pursuing degrees at university, or are financially endowed, or have been fired.
Young’s minimalist style and stark realism are nonetheless Carver-like. His stories are also gritty and precise, with touches of poetic prose, without much resolution. If you’re one of these old fashioned folk who want to like the protagonists in your stories, you’re in trouble.
For instance, if you want to know whether bartender Boone will actually kick-start his life in The Big Money, you’ll have to write your own story. If you want to know what is going to happen to the relationship between the once champion squash player and his girlfriend in Dream Vacation, dream on.
If you want to see some light at the end of the tunnel for the nameless protagonist in Fair Enough, forget it.
These are people you want to shake; shout in their faces, “What’s wrong with you!” This is what Young does so well: he offers static with a sneer. But the process is uplifting because he uses poetry and deft phrasing to flesh out his characters. There are terrific lines to savour.
The unnamed narrator in Fair Enough describes a woman he’s hitting on at a wake: “Girl jock finally meets middle age, teeth like a perfect hand of cards.”
Young describes a pugilistic partygoer: “Buzz-cut has been watching and he’s angry on the other guy’s behalf, the sort of person who borrows battles when he can’t find any of his own.”
The author of four previous books, including The Island in Winter, nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, Terence Young has also co-founded The Claremont Review, a journal for young writers. His work defies labels.
The Vancouver Writers Festival
Oyster: a review by Lachlan Murray (read it online here)
A biographical coincidence led to my initial interest in Victoria writer Terence Young. Young teaches English and creative writing at the private school in Victoria I attended for five years in the 1970s. My internment was well before Young’s tenure, and the place I attended — essentially an unreconstructed English boys’ school — was much different from the current version of the school, from what I can gather. Although Young himself attended one of Victoria’s public high schools, I’ve been curious whether any of the weirdness of that 1970s private school, or the fossilized, roadside attraction Englishness of 1960s and 70s Victoria, permeate his work. To find out, I’ll probably have to read his 2004 novel, After Goodlake’s, set in 1960s and contemporary Victoria. However, Young’s latest book, the short story collection The End of the Ice Age, does evoke the hermetic quality I remember so well from my teen years in Victoria — at the time, a city with a significant number of inhabitants who felt a connection to an England that had ceased to exist.
At the end of “The Garden of the Fugitives,” a story that includes a bizarre and entertaining geometry of events, the main character looks at an enlarged photograph of bodies frozen in Pompeii’s ash. “‘These people,’ he said, pointing to the huddled plaster forms. ‘What’s their story?’” The moment serves nicely to illuminate the enigmatic main character and his amusingly dysfunctional family, at some level all strangers to one another, and to illuminate the collection as a whole. In twelve skillfully wrought and engaging stories, Young reveals the story of “these people,” characters living inside the plaster casts of outward appearance and behaviour, which to some extent means all of us.
Most of these characters are men, adrift in the quiet wreckage of middle aged lives, or younger men given a direct perspective on the hazards of middle age, while headed toward the rocks themselves. Even so, the collection doesn’t feel overly male, or diminished by a preoccupation with aging boomer angst. The center of consciousness may be most often male, tending toward middle aged, probably because that’s where the author feels most comfortable and feels he can be most effective. But it’s a promontory or a hub from which to look out, at women, at other men, at children, at family members, at the old. In “Mole,” we’re given as much insight into Christine, and the societal constraints faced by the intelligent, beautiful woman, as we are into the narrator Dennis, with his acute observations on first loves. Nadine, although absent physically throughout much of “Dream Vacation,” fills the mind of Steven, as he struggles with a life made increasingly dissolute by independent wealth. Throughout, woman don’t just reflect the struggles of male protagonists, they have their own separate albeit related struggles. And unlike the men, they seem to be winning their battles. To suggest that women form the moral center in the collection would be to oversimplify, however, and on occasion women behave badly also. But the female characters do show the way toward breaking free of hermetic lives, or at least coming to terms with them. Although in places like Victoria — never directly named, but recognizable in at least two of the stories — and the small-town Ontario of Alice Munro’s fiction, those plaster casts can be a little more ossified, a little harder to break free of.
Young’s ability to create an engrossing world in ten or fifteen pages, one that convincingly constructs a range of characters, is impressive. A seamless flow backward and forward through time, the deft plucking of the right detail, a spare prose that doesn’t read thin, and conversational exchanges that ring true are some of the qualities that allow the stories to achieve their effect. Rolex makes a watch called The Oyster. The Oyster’s precursor was called The Hermetic. Like the famous watch, Young’s stories exhibit a compact richness. Their progression is the skilled insertion of the blade that pries open the watch case, the oyster’s carapace, the hermetically sealed outer shell that people routinely present to one another. Revealed are the complex and vulnerable inner workings in motion.
A biographical coincidence led to my initial interest in Victoria writer Terence Young. Young teaches English and creative writing at the private school in Victoria I attended for five years in the 1970s. My internment was well before Young’s tenure, and the place I attended — essentially an unreconstructed English boys’ school — was much different from the current version of the school, from what I can gather. Although Young himself attended one of Victoria’s public high schools, I’ve been curious whether any of the weirdness of that 1970s private school, or the fossilized, roadside attraction Englishness of 1960s and 70s Victoria, permeate his work. To find out, I’ll probably have to read his 2004 novel, After Goodlake’s, set in 1960s and contemporary Victoria. However, Young’s latest book, the short story collection The End of the Ice Age, does evoke the hermetic quality I remember so well from my teen years in Victoria — at the time, a city with a significant number of inhabitants who felt a connection to an England that had ceased to exist.
At the end of “The Garden of the Fugitives,” a story that includes a bizarre and entertaining geometry of events, the main character looks at an enlarged photograph of bodies frozen in Pompeii’s ash. “‘These people,’ he said, pointing to the huddled plaster forms. ‘What’s their story?’” The moment serves nicely to illuminate the enigmatic main character and his amusingly dysfunctional family, at some level all strangers to one another, and to illuminate the collection as a whole. In twelve skillfully wrought and engaging stories, Young reveals the story of “these people,” characters living inside the plaster casts of outward appearance and behaviour, which to some extent means all of us.
Most of these characters are men, adrift in the quiet wreckage of middle aged lives, or younger men given a direct perspective on the hazards of middle age, while headed toward the rocks themselves. Even so, the collection doesn’t feel overly male, or diminished by a preoccupation with aging boomer angst. The center of consciousness may be most often male, tending toward middle aged, probably because that’s where the author feels most comfortable and feels he can be most effective. But it’s a promontory or a hub from which to look out, at women, at other men, at children, at family members, at the old. In “Mole,” we’re given as much insight into Christine, and the societal constraints faced by the intelligent, beautiful woman, as we are into the narrator Dennis, with his acute observations on first loves. Nadine, although absent physically throughout much of “Dream Vacation,” fills the mind of Steven, as he struggles with a life made increasingly dissolute by independent wealth. Throughout, woman don’t just reflect the struggles of male protagonists, they have their own separate albeit related struggles. And unlike the men, they seem to be winning their battles. To suggest that women form the moral center in the collection would be to oversimplify, however, and on occasion women behave badly also. But the female characters do show the way toward breaking free of hermetic lives, or at least coming to terms with them. Although in places like Victoria — never directly named, but recognizable in at least two of the stories — and the small-town Ontario of Alice Munro’s fiction, those plaster casts can be a little more ossified, a little harder to break free of.
Young’s ability to create an engrossing world in ten or fifteen pages, one that convincingly constructs a range of characters, is impressive. A seamless flow backward and forward through time, the deft plucking of the right detail, a spare prose that doesn’t read thin, and conversational exchanges that ring true are some of the qualities that allow the stories to achieve their effect. Rolex makes a watch called The Oyster. The Oyster’s precursor was called The Hermetic. Like the famous watch, Young’s stories exhibit a compact richness. Their progression is the skilled insertion of the blade that pries open the watch case, the oyster’s carapace, the hermetically sealed outer shell that people routinely present to one another. Revealed are the complex and vulnerable inner workings in motion.
Publication: Broken Pencil
Author: Loney, Matthew R
Date published: October 1, 2010
The End of the Ice Age by Terence Young, $19.95, 165 pgs, bibliloasis.com
Evolutionary shifts mark the territory of Terence Young's second collection of short stories, The End of the Ice Age. Each character feels as though they're looking at the Earth anew, like disoriented creatures emerging from their burrows after the spring thaw: But they are at home in their quotidian cloudiness, and perhaps do not even wish to leave it. It is the reader who materializes from the fog by way of Young's prestidigitation: The world has changed, that's certain, and this newness is approached with trepidation.
This haze works in the collection's favour, especially in such standout stories as "That Time of Year" where time freezes and the fears of a woman swimming naked with her husband are cleaved open in a collage of "what-ifs." Culminating in a petty argument about past lovers, the story exposes this woman's anxiety as a hypothermic symptom that ultimately brings us to sympathize with her.
"Rumors of Human Sacrifice" and "Infestation" pit humanity against their natural counterparts, up-ending our notions of primitivism and freedom: "People will fuck up anything if you give them enough time." Young requires the reader to work at piecing together the fragments he unearths, often leaving substantial gaps between the sections of literary bone; we risk assembling a hydra if we rush the process.
Yet the devices he uses gradually become more familiar as the collection progresses, until what once were impressive feats become practiced sleights-of-hand. A smart, pithy and important collection that begs a second (or third) reading, Young's The End of the Ice Age opens a crevasse in Can Lit short-story telling - we fall in, amused, bewildered and transfigured. (Matthew R. Loney)
Author: Loney, Matthew R
Date published: October 1, 2010
The End of the Ice Age by Terence Young, $19.95, 165 pgs, bibliloasis.com
Evolutionary shifts mark the territory of Terence Young's second collection of short stories, The End of the Ice Age. Each character feels as though they're looking at the Earth anew, like disoriented creatures emerging from their burrows after the spring thaw: But they are at home in their quotidian cloudiness, and perhaps do not even wish to leave it. It is the reader who materializes from the fog by way of Young's prestidigitation: The world has changed, that's certain, and this newness is approached with trepidation.
This haze works in the collection's favour, especially in such standout stories as "That Time of Year" where time freezes and the fears of a woman swimming naked with her husband are cleaved open in a collage of "what-ifs." Culminating in a petty argument about past lovers, the story exposes this woman's anxiety as a hypothermic symptom that ultimately brings us to sympathize with her.
"Rumors of Human Sacrifice" and "Infestation" pit humanity against their natural counterparts, up-ending our notions of primitivism and freedom: "People will fuck up anything if you give them enough time." Young requires the reader to work at piecing together the fragments he unearths, often leaving substantial gaps between the sections of literary bone; we risk assembling a hydra if we rush the process.
Yet the devices he uses gradually become more familiar as the collection progresses, until what once were impressive feats become practiced sleights-of-hand. A smart, pithy and important collection that begs a second (or third) reading, Young's The End of the Ice Age opens a crevasse in Can Lit short-story telling - we fall in, amused, bewildered and transfigured. (Matthew R. Loney)
Publication: The Fiddlehead,Spring 2011
Prairie Fire Review of Books, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2011)
The End of the Ice Age
by Terence Young
Emeryville, ON: Biblioasis, 2010, ISBN 9781897231913, 166 pp., $19.95 paper.
Reviewed by J.M. Bridgeman
Terence Young’s The End of the Ice Age is a collection of twelve short stories about family dynamics and mid-life crises, bookended by two stories of not quite evading the knowledge of impending doom. The epigraph, “Gods – how the darkness gathers!,” from The Last Days of Pompeii, suggests that the book is not going to be a bundle of laughs; however, the stories do have a variety of bi-coastal settings and narrative voices ranging from those of teens to seniors. The string that keeps the rows parallel seems to be that most of the characters have no work to give their life structure and/or meaning. They are students or adults on vacation, unemployed, or retired. It is as if each story is an attempt to answer the father’s question in “Dream Vacation”: “It’s like your life is over. What are you going to do now?” (20)
“The Garden of the Fugitives” is stylistically perhaps the most complex of the stories, with several characters – father, mother, sister Jane, narrator Blair and his girlfriend Kate, and younger brother Cam and his new fiancée Sophie. The story centres on a dysfunctional family near Boston sending letters of disapproval over to Europe with Blair to try to intervene in Cam’s spontaneous engagement. The parents are not the “unconditional love” ideal. Blair describes them as controlling their children by “disaffection”: “The threatened withdrawal of their love was a weapon” (40–41). Before he can get on the plane, Blair is in an accident that leaves him in a coma for six months. His forced withdrawal from the tangled garden seems to reconfigure the family. So the writer has used plot to initiate character development, to inform theme. He also uses symbolism, the disputed meaning of a holiday snapshot of Pompeii, to suggest that this family may still be just as petrified as the one in the Garden of the Fugitives – “parents and children taking shelter against a wall in the orchard while the sky is raining down fire and ash upon their heads” (49).
Young also makes effective use of detail to suggest character transformation. In “The End of the Ice Age,” the 37-year-old narrator who thinks everyone is older than he is has found a more mature loving partner. She reflects to him the pivotal story of his life, his childhood fear of the law school for the law school students, which it seems he has misheard as “lost” school and “lost” students. As he uses the blow dryer to clear the bathroom mirror, “He liked to watch the steam retreat across the surface of the glass, a time-lapse recreation of the end of the ice age” (61). The image suggests that things can warm up, that there is hope of growth even for delayed adolescents, for adult children.
Two stories told by teens, “Suburbs Going Down” and “Rumours of Human Sacrifice,” ask who will look after the abandoned children of divorce. The challenges of adjusting to monogamy and suburbia are explored in “Fair Enough,” “Fair Market Value,” “Infestation,” and “That Time of Year.” The difficulties moving from adolescent to adult responsibilities underlie “Mole” and “The Big Money.”
In the final story, “Last of the Silent Movies,” Avril sets up two of her clients with a celebratory meal for their sixtieth wedding anniversary only to find that the husband has timed it to coincide with a planned murder/suicide. As she watches Charlie Chaplin’s black sheep among the flock in Modern Times, the Palmers are sitting on the balcony railing ready to float backwards down into the heather. Avril’s reality, lost within a piece of art with an evocative title, is entangled with the couple’s reality in the imagery, the sheep and the heather.
In the same way that the end of the ice age can also imply melting ice caps and drowned coastlines, it is possible that these are stories about aging told from an adolescent viewpoint and that Young may be demonstrating how people delude themselves. However, although the collection seems haunted by the spectre of dying, the gathering darkness is not always death itself. Perhaps “littler deaths,” losing innocence, or escaping extended adolescence (into delayed maturity), or finding meaning in work, or maturing libido, leave some room for seeds of hope to survive, for a fleeting happiness to flourish. !
J.M. Bridgeman writes from British Columbia. [email protected]
by Terence Young
Emeryville, ON: Biblioasis, 2010, ISBN 9781897231913, 166 pp., $19.95 paper.
Reviewed by J.M. Bridgeman
Terence Young’s The End of the Ice Age is a collection of twelve short stories about family dynamics and mid-life crises, bookended by two stories of not quite evading the knowledge of impending doom. The epigraph, “Gods – how the darkness gathers!,” from The Last Days of Pompeii, suggests that the book is not going to be a bundle of laughs; however, the stories do have a variety of bi-coastal settings and narrative voices ranging from those of teens to seniors. The string that keeps the rows parallel seems to be that most of the characters have no work to give their life structure and/or meaning. They are students or adults on vacation, unemployed, or retired. It is as if each story is an attempt to answer the father’s question in “Dream Vacation”: “It’s like your life is over. What are you going to do now?” (20)
“The Garden of the Fugitives” is stylistically perhaps the most complex of the stories, with several characters – father, mother, sister Jane, narrator Blair and his girlfriend Kate, and younger brother Cam and his new fiancée Sophie. The story centres on a dysfunctional family near Boston sending letters of disapproval over to Europe with Blair to try to intervene in Cam’s spontaneous engagement. The parents are not the “unconditional love” ideal. Blair describes them as controlling their children by “disaffection”: “The threatened withdrawal of their love was a weapon” (40–41). Before he can get on the plane, Blair is in an accident that leaves him in a coma for six months. His forced withdrawal from the tangled garden seems to reconfigure the family. So the writer has used plot to initiate character development, to inform theme. He also uses symbolism, the disputed meaning of a holiday snapshot of Pompeii, to suggest that this family may still be just as petrified as the one in the Garden of the Fugitives – “parents and children taking shelter against a wall in the orchard while the sky is raining down fire and ash upon their heads” (49).
Young also makes effective use of detail to suggest character transformation. In “The End of the Ice Age,” the 37-year-old narrator who thinks everyone is older than he is has found a more mature loving partner. She reflects to him the pivotal story of his life, his childhood fear of the law school for the law school students, which it seems he has misheard as “lost” school and “lost” students. As he uses the blow dryer to clear the bathroom mirror, “He liked to watch the steam retreat across the surface of the glass, a time-lapse recreation of the end of the ice age” (61). The image suggests that things can warm up, that there is hope of growth even for delayed adolescents, for adult children.
Two stories told by teens, “Suburbs Going Down” and “Rumours of Human Sacrifice,” ask who will look after the abandoned children of divorce. The challenges of adjusting to monogamy and suburbia are explored in “Fair Enough,” “Fair Market Value,” “Infestation,” and “That Time of Year.” The difficulties moving from adolescent to adult responsibilities underlie “Mole” and “The Big Money.”
In the final story, “Last of the Silent Movies,” Avril sets up two of her clients with a celebratory meal for their sixtieth wedding anniversary only to find that the husband has timed it to coincide with a planned murder/suicide. As she watches Charlie Chaplin’s black sheep among the flock in Modern Times, the Palmers are sitting on the balcony railing ready to float backwards down into the heather. Avril’s reality, lost within a piece of art with an evocative title, is entangled with the couple’s reality in the imagery, the sheep and the heather.
In the same way that the end of the ice age can also imply melting ice caps and drowned coastlines, it is possible that these are stories about aging told from an adolescent viewpoint and that Young may be demonstrating how people delude themselves. However, although the collection seems haunted by the spectre of dying, the gathering darkness is not always death itself. Perhaps “littler deaths,” losing innocence, or escaping extended adolescence (into delayed maturity), or finding meaning in work, or maturing libido, leave some room for seeds of hope to survive, for a fleeting happiness to flourish. !
J.M. Bridgeman writes from British Columbia. [email protected]
Pacific Rim Review of Books Fall 2010
TERSE STORIES OF MIDDLE-AGED ANGST
Eric Spalding
The End of the Ice Age is a collection of twelve stories by Victoria-based author Terence Young. The book jacket suggests that these stories will bring to mind the works of Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson. My own point of reference would be Richard Ford. As with this latter author, Young focuses on introspective middle-class men trying, not always successfully, to deal with their homes, the women in their lives, the passage of time and related matters.
The stories are diverse. Some of them are told in the first person, others in the third; some are set in the present, others in the recent past. The locations vary from Canada and the United States to Mexico and Ireland. Also, although most of the stories do adopt the perspective of middle-aged men, some focus on younger men and, in “That Time of Year”, on a woman. What remains constant among all of the characters is a sense of being out of place. Often, the narrator feels disconnected from the people around him or nostalgic for happier times.
An example of this nostalgia is my favourite story in the book, “Mole.” In this story, the protagonist is in the library when he spots an ex- girlfriend from twenty years before poring over CDs. Young is effective at conveying the deliberations people go through in such situations: “Did she see me? Should I approach her? How will she react if she does?” The narrator eventually does talk to the woman and the exchange that they have is typical of many conversations in the book. The characters say few words, but what they say is often not what they intended to say, and they end up misunderstanding each other and misinterpreting each other’s intentions. At the end of many of the stories, the main character winds up alone with his thoughts.
In most of the stories,Young successfully captures a memorable thought, a dramatic moment or a change in someone’s life. “The Big Money”, for instance, focuses on a twenty-year-old man’s encounter on a Greyhound bus with a stranger who gives him advice that completely changes his career plans. This story resonated with me, because like many people I’ve had casual encounters with strangers who left a durable impression on me. I also liked the
ingenuity of another story, “The Garden of the Fugitives”, in which Young describes a car accident as a sequence of events that makes sense as it happens but that baffles the police officers who show up after the accident is over: how did those beer bottles wind up in the ditch, what is a gun doing on the road, and why were the two victims of the accident together in the first place?
Each story gives the appearance of being carefully thought out. For many stories, I had the impression that Young had initially written a much longer work only to cut it down to some essential core. In this respect, I often sensed that there was more to the characters than what appeared on the page. At other times, however, as in “Dream Vacation” or “The End of the Ice Age”, I felt l was reading excerpts from longer works. In these instances, I thought that Young could have expanded the stories, because they ended just as I was just getting to know the protagonists.
Like the stories themselves, the style throughout the book is very pared-down and direct. There are no florid figures of speech here. The opening lines of “Mole” for instance have a laconic, film-noir resonance to them:
"The usual library crowd: a few welfare mothers; this young couple with their first kid; a history buff with his cane and his Nazi belt buckle. I was no better than any of them. I’d scammed a research grant from the city, a story I’d fed the Archives Development Committee about the opium trade, links to early families, pioneer wives in particular. Sexy stuff. I talked about spinoffs, tours of Chinatown. Interactive stations. That was the word I used: stations. Even some poems set in concrete. Poems! Six months rent plus expenses, a year if they liked it. Ended up I never wrote a word, at least none they could use."
(p. 129)
Young’s writing is in keeping with the type of works that his editor, John Metcalf, seems to favour. I recall reading in Metcalf’s An Aesthetic Underground: A Literary Memoir how much he likes the type of sparse, to-the-point realistic fiction that The End of the Ice Age exemplifies. Indeed, what I’ve read of Norman Levine, a favourite author of Metcalf’s, seems similar to what Young has done in his book. Sometimes however I felt that the writing was too concise and controlled, the characters too silent. Occasionally, I wanted the author to provide more details in setting up his scenes. I also wanted the characters to be more loquacious – to speak as if they had not weighed their every word, as if they were not offering up their every sentence for careful analysis by the person whom they were speaking to.
In these terse stories, Young puts middle-class men in dramatic situations that will resonate with the many readers who have had to deal with similar issues in their lives.
Eric Spalding writes from British Columbia’s Fraser Valley where he teaches Communications and Media Studies
Eric Spalding
The End of the Ice Age is a collection of twelve stories by Victoria-based author Terence Young. The book jacket suggests that these stories will bring to mind the works of Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson. My own point of reference would be Richard Ford. As with this latter author, Young focuses on introspective middle-class men trying, not always successfully, to deal with their homes, the women in their lives, the passage of time and related matters.
The stories are diverse. Some of them are told in the first person, others in the third; some are set in the present, others in the recent past. The locations vary from Canada and the United States to Mexico and Ireland. Also, although most of the stories do adopt the perspective of middle-aged men, some focus on younger men and, in “That Time of Year”, on a woman. What remains constant among all of the characters is a sense of being out of place. Often, the narrator feels disconnected from the people around him or nostalgic for happier times.
An example of this nostalgia is my favourite story in the book, “Mole.” In this story, the protagonist is in the library when he spots an ex- girlfriend from twenty years before poring over CDs. Young is effective at conveying the deliberations people go through in such situations: “Did she see me? Should I approach her? How will she react if she does?” The narrator eventually does talk to the woman and the exchange that they have is typical of many conversations in the book. The characters say few words, but what they say is often not what they intended to say, and they end up misunderstanding each other and misinterpreting each other’s intentions. At the end of many of the stories, the main character winds up alone with his thoughts.
In most of the stories,Young successfully captures a memorable thought, a dramatic moment or a change in someone’s life. “The Big Money”, for instance, focuses on a twenty-year-old man’s encounter on a Greyhound bus with a stranger who gives him advice that completely changes his career plans. This story resonated with me, because like many people I’ve had casual encounters with strangers who left a durable impression on me. I also liked the
ingenuity of another story, “The Garden of the Fugitives”, in which Young describes a car accident as a sequence of events that makes sense as it happens but that baffles the police officers who show up after the accident is over: how did those beer bottles wind up in the ditch, what is a gun doing on the road, and why were the two victims of the accident together in the first place?
Each story gives the appearance of being carefully thought out. For many stories, I had the impression that Young had initially written a much longer work only to cut it down to some essential core. In this respect, I often sensed that there was more to the characters than what appeared on the page. At other times, however, as in “Dream Vacation” or “The End of the Ice Age”, I felt l was reading excerpts from longer works. In these instances, I thought that Young could have expanded the stories, because they ended just as I was just getting to know the protagonists.
Like the stories themselves, the style throughout the book is very pared-down and direct. There are no florid figures of speech here. The opening lines of “Mole” for instance have a laconic, film-noir resonance to them:
"The usual library crowd: a few welfare mothers; this young couple with their first kid; a history buff with his cane and his Nazi belt buckle. I was no better than any of them. I’d scammed a research grant from the city, a story I’d fed the Archives Development Committee about the opium trade, links to early families, pioneer wives in particular. Sexy stuff. I talked about spinoffs, tours of Chinatown. Interactive stations. That was the word I used: stations. Even some poems set in concrete. Poems! Six months rent plus expenses, a year if they liked it. Ended up I never wrote a word, at least none they could use."
(p. 129)
Young’s writing is in keeping with the type of works that his editor, John Metcalf, seems to favour. I recall reading in Metcalf’s An Aesthetic Underground: A Literary Memoir how much he likes the type of sparse, to-the-point realistic fiction that The End of the Ice Age exemplifies. Indeed, what I’ve read of Norman Levine, a favourite author of Metcalf’s, seems similar to what Young has done in his book. Sometimes however I felt that the writing was too concise and controlled, the characters too silent. Occasionally, I wanted the author to provide more details in setting up his scenes. I also wanted the characters to be more loquacious – to speak as if they had not weighed their every word, as if they were not offering up their every sentence for careful analysis by the person whom they were speaking to.
In these terse stories, Young puts middle-class men in dramatic situations that will resonate with the many readers who have had to deal with similar issues in their lives.
Eric Spalding writes from British Columbia’s Fraser Valley where he teaches Communications and Media Studies
