1 Lawrence Mathews. The Sandblasting Hall of Fame. Oberon Press, Ottawa, 2003, ISBN 0 7780 1234 4 (cloth), ISBN 0 7780 1235 2 (paper)

2 AT THE END of "Proof," one of the nine stories in Mathews's impressive debut collection, the narrator crosses a bridge: "it seemed, oddly, despite the gradually increasing brightness in the sky, that I was passing from one kind of darkness to another ..." Most of Mathews's characters are similarly caught in a surreal, Arnoldian universe, merely existing between two equally dead worlds. In "The Fjord," for example, Hanrahan (who appears in three stories), though a graduate student, is working as a night clerk in a cheap Vancouver motel; he's "the right age and class to know that sooner or later the right job will come along, at more or less the right money. Hanrahan's is perhaps the last generation of Canadians to be able to luxuriate in this belief." The belief, however, is unfounded, as Hanrahan in the other stories is no less unfulfilled. At the end of "Fjord" he is "moving deeper into a continent, no doubt toward some archetypal dead end." And at the end of the ironically titled "Hanrahan Saved" he knows that his attempts to find Sharon, an enigmatic former student, "will hit dead ends."

3 Few of Mathews's characters, however, succumb to the bleakness of their condition. They are "saved" from despair by a merciful bent for self-deception. Blind to their own foibles, they are nonetheless trenchant observers of the idiosyncrasies and possibilities of others: the rogues' gallery of characters in "Proof" is a delicious case in point. Silas Berry "never spoke of any desire to get a better job, to complete his degree, to make for himself a life better than the one he was living." He is a "cheerful robot," and so is the narrator. In "Flower Heaven," Crystal is "salvageable." In "The Sandblasting Hall of Fame," Angela Oregano is "redeemable."

4 Two stories stand out from the others; they are gentler, less clothed in irony, and somehow sadder than the rest. In both "An Absence" and "Baseball" the narrator recalls time spent with his father. In the latter, the two travel to Montreal to watch an Expos game (the Expos win, "sure sign of an apocalypse"); in the former, the same narrator sleeps in his father's apartment in Vancouver, after his father has died. The narrator is himself a father by now, and the two stories present a deeply contemplative essay on the nature of the father-son world, an examination of the place "where absence begins."

5 The Sandblasting Hall of Fame is about absence. Existence is about all there is to hope for. Mathews's characters are uniformly "disoriented and uncertain." They are advised to "Love not the world." They are convinced that "There is no present." And yet they survive. They are always stepping back to take stock, to see to what extent some kind of analysis will help them through an impossible impasse. "I have to make sense of my life," says Hanrahan in "Hanrahan Agonistes." "That justifies pretty much anything these days." It even seems to justify the dead ends.