Grandview Drive by Tim Blackett

Grandview Drive

by Tim Blackett

Harbour Publishing, 2023; 224 pages; $22.95

Review by Jessica Key

Is a person who has survived being struck by lightning twice lucky or unlucky? Unlucky, because well, they were struck by lightning. Twice. But lucky, also, to have survived it. These are the kinds of questions posed in Tim blackett’s stunning debut story collection, Grandview Drive, which ruminates on loss, loneliness, and longing, and the intangible, sometimes even invisible, connections that surround them. These are themes that are universal — grief is something that will unfortunately touch every one of us at many points in our lives and Blackett makes death come alive through subtle wit and unique yet believable characters as they wind in and out of each others’ lives.

In the opening story, a man fixates on the people who live in the houses along his commute from work. He distracts himself from heartbreak by imagining himself inserted into their homes and lives, including an epic love story with one of them, and when he is caught in the act of his voyeurism, a tragic accident occurs during his escape.

“I feel like you think you don’t deserve to be loved.” A devastatingly lonely concept, for a lonely character, who on the surface had the opportunity to fix both her own loneliness and that of another, should she only have believed she was worthy of it. This decision seems so simple when written out like that, and the dramatic irony is that’s the catalyst for many of the events in the other stories. But, of course, trauma doesn’t work that way and romantic relationships don’t fix years of internalized — and familial and societal — messaging about ourselves.

Not all of the grief explored in the book is to do with death — there is also the loss of potential, what could have been. In “The World in a Minor” a six-year-old asks: “Grandma, what’s rage?” They are revealed to be a musical prodigy, but, much like many of their famous predecessors, are unable to control their explosive temper.

Like grief itself, moments in the book are occasionally shocking — the opening of one story involves a woman admitting to a TV therapist that she eats a small amount of her deceased husband’s ashes every day. The quirks of grief. A mother, watching, contemplates her own grief and how unlike consuming an urn full of ashes, it stretches out, unfinishable: “Again and again they’re showing her pinch, press, taste, masticate, smile — her little eyes half-closed — swallow. And I’m thinking she doesn’t want any help, they should leave her alone, let her finish the rest of it, of him.”

In grief and in loneliness, fantasy and reality become blurred. In another story, a writer begins to inhabit his characters, both he and the reader unsure for a while where he exists in place and time. The “What If” game is familiar to anyone who has experienced regret.

While each of these sixteen stories stand on their own, they sing when considering the collection as a whole. Each story informs another, building and giving context the way each eulogy does at a memorial. The person lost was more than a co-worker, a friend, a son, a softball teammate who won the championship game last season — they were all of those things and more. This collection is full of metaphors much less clumsy than the one I just made in the previous sentence, and shows an emerging writer with a talent worth paying attention to.