Weighty words

Alexander MacLeods short story collection, Light Lifting, opens on the arresting, violent image of Mike Tyson chomping down on Evander Holyfields ear.

The short story collection Light Lifting is so striking and assured, its easy to forget its Alexander MacLeods literary debut.

The story, Miracle Mile, centres on Mike and Burner, two longstanding friends biding their time before they compete in a national-level 1,500-metre race. As the two runners stew in a hotel room, watching TV, icing their throbbing Achilles tendons and generally psyching themselves up, the Tyson image hovers over the proceedings, suggesting things could turn dangerous in an instant. MacLeods stories consistently keep you off balance, wondering where hes headed next.

"Ive read enough stories that I dont like, that are so obvious that you can see the full situation within the first three or four paragraphs, and you could almost guess at how its gonna end," MacLeod says, speaking on the phone from his home in Dartmouth, N.S.

"I was trying to avoid that sensation I was trying to make people feel like there was something going on here that was maybe worth sitting down for another page. I always think of stories not in terms of page length, but in terms of time. So I said, Is it worth another 10 minutes? And I imagine the person sitting in the chair, and I think, Theyll sit for 10 minutes if you just dole it out carefully." Miracle Miles conclusion is worth the wait, freezing on another moment of aggression that stays with the reader long after the storys last line.

Precision and care is in evidence throughout Light Lifting, a collection so striking and assured, its easy to forget its MacLeods literary debut. It has earned a spot on the Giller shortlist and is drawing comparisons to Alice Munro. According to the 38-year-old MacLeod, its been a long journey rather than an overnight success. Some of the stories took 15 years to complete, while he took frequent time-outs to raise his kids, earn degrees and teach creative writing at St. Marys University in Halifax.

Employing a variety of narrative voices from a 12-year-old delivery boy to a twenty-something woman taking swimming lessons to an aging man whos spent his life working on the line at a Chrysler minivan plant MacLeod proves himself a born shape-shifter. Theres stylistic dexterity on display, too, as the author moves gracefully from the humourous, scrappy street-hockey playing scenes in Good Kids to the blunt, lean sentences and elaborate time shifts in Wonder About Parents, a story charting a young couples attempts to cope with the perils of child-rearing. The one through-line is a simmering sense of tension and dread.

"Some people read the book, and they thought there was some psychotic crazy person living in [my] house, because everything seemed like it was fascinated by all this dark stuff," MacLeod says, chuckling at the thought. "But that wasnt really it. I was much more interested, not in overt violence, but more in a sense of fragility. And its not that a monsters gonna come out and get you, its that I wanted to have a feeling of a tenuous uncertainty running through them."

Light Liftings characters are almost always in motion, and their bodies take a beating: the long-distance runners in Miracle Mile receive painful cortisone shots in their tattered feet; the standout tale Adult Beginner I captures the paralyzing sensations of a young woman attempting to conquer a fear of water; and in the title story, a brick-layer recalls the little chunks of stone permanently imbedded in his fingertips.

MacLeods ability to render these wounds in vivid, visceral detail makes you wonder whether hes drawing on real-life experiences.

"Certain elements of my experience are in there, but theyre not my experiences. My experiences are not those stories," MacLeod says, before sharing anecdotes from the Windsor, Ont. upbringing that helped provide the urban setting and some of the more authentic details in his book. Odd jobs laying brick and making deliveries for the local pharmacy proved fodder for two stories, while the union jargon that peppers The Number Three comes courtesy of all the friends and relatives who worked the line at the Windsor Chrysler plant.

"I wanted to call the book Work, but my publisher, somebody in the States told him that if he had a book with the word work in it, no one would want to read it," an animated MacLeod explains, with another warm laugh. "But I didnt want it to be a hardcore communist manifesto book its not a Karl Marx book. Its saying that everybody makes a deal with their life and their work. I was definitely interested in the way task-oriented things like that change us in interesting ways."

The sense of imminent change is what makes Light Lifting such a riveting read. MacLeods characters are introduced at moments where they must make a choice, whether its quitting a dead-end job or dog-paddling into the deep end of a pool. As the narrator of The Number Three notes, "A person is one thing and one thing and one thing. Then he is something else. There is a pivot, a before and after, a shifting."

MacLeod seems poised for a similarly momentous change. Hes humble about his recent literary success, remarking that he never believed his collection would even find an audience. Hes more content to talk about the craft.

"I always tell [my students] theres a Henry James quote a great one which is writers have only one job, and that is to be interesting to the readers. They have to do something to keep the reader there, because the reader could do anything. The reader is doing you a service by listening to you thats the way I pitch it. So, I always stand up for the rights of readers, rather than, I really wanna know about the depths of your inner soul. Thats not what Im interested in."

Alexander MacLeod will be reading in Orillia, Ont., on Nov. 2, Toronto on Nov. 3, Windsor, Ont., on Nov. 5 and 6, Guelph, Ont., on Nov. 8 and Halifax on Nov. 22. Light Lifting is nominated for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, which will be awarded on Nov. 9.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.