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Scrabble Lessons
by Leslie Vryenhoek
Lantzville, BC: Oolichan
Books, 2009, ISBN: 978-0-88982-259-7, 184 pp., $18.95 paper.
Leslie Vryenhoek may have come to writing later than some, but has she ever made up for lost time! Most recently, "Letitia's Cold Footsteps" won her the Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem. Name almost any literary magazine, and Vryenhoek's poetry or fiction will have placed in their contests--Geist, Cahoots, This Magazine, The Antigonish Review--and there are more.Scrabble Lessons, her first book, contains stories that cut to the bone, and sometimes even deeper. From the opening paragraph of the title story, it's clear that Vryenhoek knows how to work an extended metaphor:
My mother and I were playing Scrabble in San Diego when my father launched into his glorious, fatal somersault.
For months afterward, I gathered and laid the details of that afternoon end to end, rearranging them, hoping the hard consonants might fall together into some ordered play of circumstance. (11)She uses the mechanism of sliding tiles throughout the piece, guides the story as it spills its way across the pages. The narrator, a sick child confined to hospital, learns to play Scrabble during visits from her mother. The game provides a device, not only for the story, but for the mother and daughter to pass the time. The lessons of Scrabble, of course, are the lessons for a life.
Three games daily, my mother serious, determined to pass along the sum total of her gaming wisdom to me, her captive and sometimes willing pupil. She taught me you don't win by grand sweeping gestures, and you don't win by holding on to your best letters, or wishing for more consonants, or hoping for better options. You win by working with what's on your pew and getting the most possible out of each turn. (17)
The stories are peopled by characters I believe in. Heck, I feel as if I know them--have maybe even been some of them. There's the couple who find each other in a creative writing class, the toughies in the home for pregnant teens, the speaker on the fundraising circuit who's been there, done that. Vryenhoek sketches entire situations in the space of a sentence: "I should be thinking about studying, especially since I promised myself I wouldn't eat until Lee came home for supper, and especially since that loaf of bread has to last us all week." (35)
The meat of these stories lies in relationships, often in relationships that no longer work the way they're supposed to. Some of the stories are bizarre, even surreal. Still, only one story had a character I couldn't believe in--at least not on a level beyond the allegorical. But the character appears in what is probably the most absurd story in a book that goes out on some pretty interesting limbs.
Maybe it's her experience as a technical writer that makes Vryenhoek write so well, but it's hard to find a story that doesn't have a knockout opening, one that doesn't pull me in for more. "Roger stops eating on a Tuesday at the end of August." (111) Right away I want to know about this Roger guy. Why does he stop eating, and why at the end of August? Or another that opens with this bit of dialogue, "It wasn't me." (78) Well, if it wasn't you, I wonder, who was it? What did they do? Or, "If there'd been anyone else at home, she never would have let him in." (138) Any one of these could serve as a story prompt, each of them working as such terrific bait.
But it's not only the start-ups that make us putty in her hands. Like somebody reminding you to sit up straight, she snags us along the way, butting in and making us want to keep reading. This in the middle of a page: "But I gave up on it after I saw all that blood." (86)
Many of the stories are populated by characters people might think of as losers. They drink, they swear, they panhandle. But in Vryenhoek's hands, they're real, with nary a stereotype in the mix. One of them is 23-year-old Curt, living in his sister's basement as part of his promise to get sober and stay out of jail. When he cuts loose and reaches for freedom, his decision is so wobbly-crazy, it's exhilarating.
Another of the mother's admonitions in the story "Scrabble Lessons" is as follows: "Big words," she told me once, "are what pompous people and your father think will save them." (17)
Leslie Vryenhoek's clear, uncluttered stories are proof that pompous words are unnecessary not only in Scrabble, they're also unnecessary in good, solid writing.
Heidi Greco admits to a longtime relationship with Scrabble, having played for many years with family, friends, and even some former friends.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.