In the playfulness is a deeper seriousness

‘Avalanche’ features clutch of characters who can’t seem to manifest their stated social justice beliefs in their actual lives

Toronto writer Jessica Westhead’s great theme is anxiety. Not for nothing was her second novel titled “Worry”; Westhead excels in characters whose defining features tend to be their fear of something, be it disease, some undefinable harm to their children or the state of the world.

Or bears.

In “Pioneers,” one of the 14 stories in Westhead’s barbed new collection, the first-person narrator goes on a camping vacation with her husband and their daughter because cottages are off limits due to COVID-19 restrictions. The woman’s husband, Carl, is enthusiastic about the prospect of the family roughing it like a kind of romanticized troupe of settlers — “It’ll be fun! We can pretend we’re pioneers!” — while she becomes intensely concerned upon learning that there might be a bear in the area.

As the narrator’s anxiety begins to overtake her, she drinks beer to lull herself to sleep, only to wind herself up into fits of agitation when she finds she must exit her tent in the night to urinate.

The fun Westhead is having with her character here is infectious (as perhaps is appropriate for a story with the pandemic in the background), but the surface playfulness belies a deeper seriousness. When the woman goes to light a fire, she becomes agitated because her husband tells her to roll the newspaper into logs, despite the fact that she is the one who routinely lights the fires in the cottages the couple rent in non-COVID years.

The woman, who as a girl engaged in what would today be considered cultural appropriation by sleeping in a plastic teepee and dressing in Indigenous garb at Halloween, prefers to arrange her kindling in a log cabin formation rather than a teepee formation; Westhead subtly insinuates the white family’s association with settlers — pioneers — who have appropriated Indigenous land and participated in structural inequities that have kept Indigenous people down for centuries.

(The woman’s fear of nature is another subtle jab at white shortcomings.)

This is typical of the stories in “Avalanche,” which feature a clutch of white characters, all of them soft liberals, who can’t seem to manifest their stated social justice beliefs in their actual lives.

The library patron in “Moments With Mustafa” thinks she is being open-minded by questioning the Muslim security guard about his background and experiences in Afghanistan, when in reality she is utterly oblivious to the discomfort her incessant hectoring instils in him. In a moment of sublime comedy, she becomes irate at a fellow patron who has the temerity to ask Mustafa when the library is closing.

Similarly, the anonymous email writer in “Gary How Does a Contact Form Work Do I Just Type in Here and Then Hit Send?” The woman is reaching out to an online blogger to thank her for her chickpea curry recipe; her message is replete with uncomfortable racist undertones and a blatant attempt to exoticize the online writer, whose name, Aliyah, is “unique” and difficult to spell. Aliyah’s recipe, the woman suggests, is “a muchneeded dose of tropical sunshine” and the photo online is helpful in convincing readers the food is “authentic.” This kind of clueless attitude makes her husband’s accusation — “Your colonialist roots are showing” — that much more pungent.

The central characters in the collection are united by their absolute lack of self-awareness. The father in “Mister Elephant,” who recognizes an old schoolmate as the local zoo’s elephant trainer, takes his young daughter to see her in the expectation that the grown woman will have fond memories of him, not realizing that she found him creepy and unsettling as a child.

Likewise the protagonist of the title story, a woman who plans to take her young daughter to the Women’s March to demonstrate how independent women can be, seems utterly unaware of the irony behind the fact that she has acquiesced to her husband’s demand that she leave work to take care of their child full time.

The woman fashions a placard for her young daughter that reads, “I am a snowflake. Together we are an avalanche.” It’s a blatant cliché and one that the woman isn’t capable of understanding even in her own life.