REVIEWS

A Day Does Not Go By

"A Day Does Not Go By features stories that transform ordinary, quotidian life into something uncanny, mysterious, and moving. This is a promising debut by a writer to watch."
–Guy Vanderhaeghe

"Sean Johnston's words are deceptive, moving two different speeds at once. The voice in your ear seems laconic and lowgear, but possesses a seething momentum – look up and you've traveled light years. Perception and venom and compassion and mood swings – clearly Mr. Johnston has bitten the head off a few weasels in his day."
–Mark Anthony Jarman, author of 19 Knives and Ireland's Eye

"Clean, quick and refreshingly free of the pseudo-philosophical cant that clogs the arteries and ultimately does in so much supposed serious Canadian literature, the stories in A Day Does Not Go By are best at what they aren't: pretentious, over-written or boring."
–Ray Robertson, Toronto Star, November 10, 2002

"In A Day Does Not Go By, Sean Johnston arranges his themes – the fear of betrayal, the fragility of love, the haplessness of old age, the inadequacy of language – into 27 short vignettes . . . The best stories in A Day Does Not Go By are deceptively complex. Johnston uses a minimalist prose style to depict sometimes-unremarkable happenings that are then transformed into resonant meanings. Shards of intimacy, despair, compassion, and brutality emerge via this uncanny banality."
–Karen Luscombe, Quill & Quire

"In his debut collection, A Day Does Not Go By, Sean Johnston at first glance deploys the kind of affectless and apparently artless prose made famous by Raymond Carver (in a direct line of descent from Ernest Hemingway) and badly imitated ever since . . . Johnston's writing, by contrast, manages to suggest that invisible deeper knowledge and thus draw us into the [existences] of ordinary people who live often marginal, struggling lives . . . Johnston's characters are able to locate their feelings in a way that's beyond the numbness of Carver's . . .  A Day Does Not Go By won the David Adams Richards Award for Fiction last year and [won the ReLit Award for Short Fiction] - a sign that Johnston's quiet prose is getting deserved notice."
–Patricia Robertson, Books in Canada

"Where many short story collections suggest a scraping together of mismatched bits and pieces, Sean Johnston's collection (winner of New Brunswick's David Adams Richard Award for emerging fiction) has the rare virtue of uniformity in style and theme. In this, it resembles such early classics as Joyce's The Dubliners, and Hemingway's In Our Time." –Joan Givner, The Malahat Review (Malahat Review )

"Sean Johnston has an original approach to the short story genre . . . Literature, like all other creative endeavours, evolves and grows and (one hopes) progresses, and the short story has come a long way from the days of de Maupassant and Somerset Maugham, whose stories, whether comic or tragic, were like polished mirrors held up to life. In Johnston's stories, the mirror has shattered, and you pick up the fragments carefully, at risk of cutting yourself in the process."
–David Rozniatowski, Prairie Fire

"It's as if Johnston has sat inside his characters' heads and took notes about their memories, their lusts and their random thoughts . . . His observations and perceptions of human relationships are brilliant and frank, and lend to the endearing quality of his stories . . . Bravo to Johnston for such a concise and honest portrayal of human condition, desire and reaction."
–Radha Fisher, The Nexus Camosun College Newspaper, November 12, 2002

". . . reminiscent of Hemingway. . . The characters in these stories are often bewildered by circumstance and try to grasp onto such concepts as duty and routine as one would a life preserver. I found many of the details in these stories to be heart-breaking . . . As in the magic realism of "We Can't Go On Like This," in which a baby is born out of an automatic bank teller, nothing in any of these stories is ever quite familiar, but the experience of reading them alters our perception and challenges our preconceptions. This is a talented writer."
–Richard Cumyn, judge's statement for the David Adams Richards Award

All This Town Remembers

Review from The Winnipeg Free Press, November 5, 2006
Who, in the end, owns grief? Is it an intimate, personal experience, or can it be co-opted by the community at large? And when does the act of grieving become an exercise in selfishness?

Sean Johnston does not pretend to be able to answer these questions. But if the Saskatchewan native’s moody debut novel All This Town Remembers is any indication, Johnston lays admirable claim to appreciating the underpinnings of such sorrow.

The town in question is Asquith, Saskatchewan, where the citizenry is abuzz at the arrival of a CBC film crew. The subject of the film is Joey Fallow, a high-school hockey star whose death twenty years earlier has become a defining moment in the town’s identity.

Less than impressed with the excitement is Adam Stieb, Joey’s teammate and best friend. Recuperating from a workplace accident, Adam views himself as “the man with the broken brain,” with a memory “full of gaps like air.”

Adam’s life is one of chronological challenge; “there was no rhyme or reason to what he remembered, and the things he did know…were either more important to him than they should be, or he was too cold to them.”

What Adam does clearly remember is the accident that took Joey’s life. The town’s elevation of Joey to local icon somehow rankles Adam, and he sets about alienating his neighbours with his distaste for what he sees as “endless celebrations of the one dead boy.”

Johnston, 2003 winner of the Relit Award for short fiction for his collection A Day Does Not Go By, displays a true aptitude for creating muted poetry from the mundanity of prairie life. Sentences such as “Her hair smelled to him of beer and bruises” pepper the plot with memorable imagery, yet never overwhelm with pretension.

Johnston is not overtly concerned in deeply examining the despair a single devastating event can immediately inflict upon a mass community. Such an exploration already exists in Russell Banks’ emotionally resonant novel The Sweet Hereafter, a spiritual cousin to All This Town Remembers in both setting and atmosphere.

What more interests Johnston is the effect of time upon such memories, whereby the incident becomes less an occasion of grief, and more a part of the public consciousness. It evolves into something that nourishes the community, but such an evolution denies those immediately affected by the initial event any sense of ownership of their own emotions.

It is this clash between private mourning and public adulation that drives Adam (and Johnston) to try and better define what the memory of Joey’s death should mean. But memory is slippery, especially in Adam’s instance, and cannot be inherently trusted; “To imagine, you revise—it’s the same as anything and begins innocent enough—but you think of yourself as more than you were.”

Johnston has delivered a haunting celebration of the nuances and vagaries of memory, and a cautious examination of small-town insecurities. In its own subdued fashion, All This Town Remembers heralds the arrival of a sterling new voice in Canadian prairie fiction

–Corey Redekop (access online at shelf monkey)

Review from Books in Canada
Memory loss, death, and the struggle to hang on in the present obsess Adam Stieb, the protagonist in this novel set in Asquith, Saskatchewan. The former hockey player left town at nineteen to find work on oil rigs; a dozen years later, a debilitating accident left him brain injured-“mental” as he sarcastically calls his current state. He lives with Ellen, a teacher who loyally stands by her man as he tries to piece his life together, literally, by organising clippings about his life. 

Although the land is flat and the winters brutal, there is more to this small town than Adam’s story suggests. At times it seems as if there’s a grief-and-loss competition at work, a feeling exacerbated by “the movie” being filmed by the CBC. Big news in a town where work is scarce, the film depicts a bus accident that killed the town’s star hockey player twenty years ago. Joey Fallon was Adam’s friend and Ellen’s boyfriend; the accident also left the popular hockey coach quadriplegic. Adam’s drunken, resentful statement to the press, that “all this town wants is death,” turns his neighbours against him, worsening an already bitter situation. 

Slowly, clumsily, Adam determines to make peace with fate. Several scenes in Johnston’s narrative capture the agony of a man trying to reclaim the easy agility of his former self. The things Adam does remember-snatches of poetry, the plots of stories he has read-reveal him to be much more than the small town athlete he used to be; this is a literate man in a chilly climate, where life means learning one’s limitations. Ellen long ago discovered that as a dancer she was not the best, only the “best of one,” just as Adam learned he was not NHL material. Stubbornly, Adam wills himself to concentrate on the triumphs in everyday life: a little boy, glimpsed from the window of a doctor’s office, jumps into a puddle, his fists in the air “like a hero.” Ellen sees him too, uniting them in a moment that offers hope in a tough landscape. 

–Nancy Wigston