Gloria Sawai
A Song for Nettie Johnson
Regina: Coteau Books, 2002. Pp. 308. $17.95
Reviewed by Nora Foster Stovel

A Song for Nettie Johnson put Coteau Books on the map when it beat out Carol Shields's Unless for the Governor General's Award in 2002, as bookstores scurried to restock their shelves. A Song for Nettie Johnson also put Gloria Sawai on the map for many, because it was the first book by this Canadian writer, who was born in Minnesota and now lives in Edmonton, Alberta. But, for those who read stories, it was just the logical conclusion to a distinguished career in short fiction.

Seven of the nine stories collected in the volume had been published previously in journals and collections of short fiction. The final story, "The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts," had been published no less than a dozen times, starting with regional collections, continuing with The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English, edited by Rosemary Sullivan, and Canadian Short Fiction, edited by Margaret Atwood for Oxford University Press, and finishing with publications abroad in Spain, Denmark, and Japan. Sawai was already well established, not only in Canada and the United States, but worldwide, then, when A Song for Nettie Johnson was published.

The blurb on the back cover compares Sawai to Margaret Laurence-perhaps because her fictional town of Stone Creek, Saskatchewan, recalls Margaret Laurence's mythical microcosm, Manawaka. Her collection also recalls Dylan Thomas's verse drama Under Milk Wood because of its poetic quality and Sheila Watson's The Double Hook because of its regional authenticity. Like those memorable works, Sawai's stories range from birth to death and back again. Although it does not have the coherence of sequential collections like Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House or Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, which are connected by a single narrator-protagonist, A Song for Nettie Johnson is unified by the female perspective that underlies all the stories.

The central symbol of stone, recalling Laurence's Stone Angel and Shields's Stone Diaries, is emphasized by Sawai's epigraph from the Bible: "Look to the rock from which you were hewn, the quarry from which you were dug" (Isaiah 51:1). That rocky metaphor, so well suited to the flinty side of Sawai's stories, is countered by Sawai's second, more optimistic, epigraph from George Bernanos: "Grace is everywhere." Both suggest the religious frame of reference of her stories. As the Governor General's Award jury phrased it, "The power of grace illuminates her world."

Sawai's dedication of A Song for Nettie Johnson to her parents, brothers, and children suggests the core of kinship in this collection. The power and the pain of family, of blood relations, challenge and sustain the acute sensibility of the girl-child as she is initiated into the mysteries of the adult world in such sensitive stories as "The Ground You Stand On" and "Hosea's Children." The cover image, "Woman Dancing in Meadow" by Gary Isaacs, portrays a woman rooted to the earth but reaching for the sky-an apt symbol for the central consciousness of these stories.

The opening title story is more of a novella in terms of length, or a poem in several parts in terms of quality of language. The eponymous character, "Crazy Nettie" (69), draws attention to language by the book she cradles on her lap and her habit of controlling words by spelling them. "S-t-o-n-e" (2) is the dominant word for this damaged woman, victim of paternal abuse, who lives in a trailer by the rock quarry, a metaphor for men like her father who have a hole where a heart should be.

Nettie's spelling is interlaced with lines from Handel's Messiah — "And the king of glory shall come in"-sung by Nettie's lover, Eli Nelson, who directs the choir every Christmas. The bird, or angel, from whose viewpoint we watch Nettie and Eli's love blossom, sighs, "'Poor Nettie,'" before flying away to the United States-"because some things are too hard for angels to endure, too human and incomprehensible" (13). Sawai interweaves pain and joy in this poignant saga of redemption.

Some of Sawai's other stories are equally harrowing: while few people can have experienced a memorial with the absurdist humour of her story about the death of the town doctor, few have ever experienced a haircut or a Mother's Day as unnerving as those she recreates here. "Oh Wild Flock, Oh Crimson Sky," one of the two stories never published before, is also one of the best. It could almost have come from Laurence's collection A Bird in the House, so naturally does profundity arise from the mundane. Elizabeth Lund, daughter of the minister, the girl from whose perspective the title story is recounted, rises to the challenge to debate Ivan Lippoway, the school atheist: "Resolved: that there is no God" (172). Questing ways to prove the existence of God, she settles on the beauty of poetry, a beauty that Sawai's prose captures perfectly.

The best part of the final story may be its title, although the whimsical tone flirts with an aura of magic realism. When the first-person narrator greets Jesus on her deck, she introduces herself as "Gloria Johnson" (282), echoing the Christian name of the author, Gloria Ostrem Sawai, and the surname of the eponymous character of the title story, Nettie Johnson, knitting this collection of nine individual stories into a fragile framework.

Intensely regional in their prairie setting, a couple of the stories reflect Sawai's sojourn in Japan. Gloria Johnson, pleased by Jesus' compliments on her "nice breasts" (288), recalls the ancient woman, with "two shallow caves" (289) where her breasts had been, in the Tokyo bathhouse. "Dolphins" begins with the dolphin show in the West Edmonton Mall and ranges outward to the ferrying of dead souls to the afterlife and to dolphins mourning their dead off the coast of Japan, recalling the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in this tale filled with darkness and light.

Gloria Sawai is a new voice in the Canadian medley, and one well worth listening to-poignant and poetic. Hopefully, A Song for Nettie Johnson is just the beginning for this septuagenarian writer.