‘Gloriously untethered’
The Typing Lady and Other Fictions
by Ruth Ozeki
Toronto: Viking Canada, 2026
$38.00 / 9780735249813
Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski
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William Wordsworth famously said he wished to give his poems a “certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.” The notion applies only too well to The Typing Lady, a first collection of “short fictions” by celebrated U.S. writer and sometime resident of Cortes Island, Ruth Ozeki: hardly a story goes by without the ordinary blossoming into the extraordinary. But not always. Wordsworth’s fellow writer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, sought the opposite: he wished to treat the supernatural as if it were ordinary. Again, at points in these eleven stories Ozeki arguably does exactly that.
Both of these threads permeate the remarkably diverse stories (some reworked from earlier versions.) Repeatedly, the author turns her nimble, fresh, lightly ironic writing style to teasing the remarkable out of the mundane. The very first story, the eponymously titled “The Typing Lady,”triggers the rest. As if channeling Borges, Ozeki writes the story from the point of view of a writer who observes another—typing—writer. The identities both merge and pull apart. Both are, and are not, Ozeki herself: the typing lady is, like Ozeki, “oldish, in her fifties or sixties, Asian-looking with black-framed glasses and gray-streaked hair.” When, in a public reading, this character is asked why she turned from novels to short fiction, like Ozeki she admits “she’d always admired the form and wanted a new challenge….”
Sometimes the cast of strangeness can be even wickedly ghoulish, as provocative as the line in a limerick in the “Typing Lady”— “She carved out her heart, / And took it apart.” Where facts are staid, the words surrounding them are not: the apparently stable protagonist of “Leafblower” is so furious with the noise of a yard worker and his machine, “She thinks about hurling rocks at him… cutting him off at the knees with his Weedwacker.” The image is devilishly funny—but also just devilish. This power of the imagination to swath the ordinary with the macabre is nowhere more intense than in “The Problem of the Body.” In this case the protagonist is in many ways like Ozeki—but perhaps not in all: after engaging in a conversation with a young man about fungi, she finds her imagination seized by the image of a “zombie fungus”: “A soft nimbus of light gathers around him, and… a slender fruiting body sprouts from the top of his head….”
Even when not immersing her reader in an aureole of imagined ghoulishness, but recording a commonplace event, Ozeki seems to delight in delicious horror. In the provocatively (and misleadingly) titled story, “The Death of the Last White Male,” the author describes a hawk’s attack on a white rooster: “The hawk blinked, unimpressed, then dipped its head and sank its beak into the rooster’s breast, extracting the bright red heart.” The macabre words of the title inflect the mood of the whole story. The effect is perhaps even more extensive in “Ships That Pass,” where a young girl in a sordid little flat in Vancouver finds her entire imaginative life dominated by the denizens of the alley, amongst them an asthmatic prostitute and a redoubtable Chinese woman: “she had to pass Mrs. Wong, squatting outside with her sleeves rolled up, doing something wet and violent to food. She scrubbed black soil from white radishes as fat as thighs… decapitated turtles for longevity.”
To echo the effect on the psychological level, Ozeki repeatedly has her normally controlled characters topple towards the unhinged. The narrator in “The Typing Lady” sets the tone, seeing herself as “paranoid, hallucinating, or high on drugs.” The speaker in “Immortal”—who eats plastic (and not just some plastic, but all plastic)—may (or may not) be deranged. But a cardinal in “The Leafblower” flaps its increasingly self-destructive and demented way through the entire story. Such unhinged behaviour, though sometimes adjacent to ironic extravagance, is coloured entirely differently in the only story in the collection that, arguably, is entirely without ironic leavening. “One Art” is steeped in infatuation. From the moment that Ozeki’s protagonist first interacts with her literature professor to the point many years later when she looks back on the relationship, she is all but submerged in emotion. Whether bashing a hole through a wall or suffering mutely, the narrator feels always on the edge—and sometimes over it: “These thoughts juddered through me like voltage arcing through a body.”
While in most stories Ozeki thus spikes the ordinary with the extraordinary, she occasionally inverts the relation: most remarkably, in “Dead Beat Poet” (pun intended), the eponymous poet—dead—engages matter of factly in humorous dialogue with the narrator. In “Where Ambition Goes to Die” the author does something similar: in the process of ironically taking pot shots at the neo-hippy culture of Cortes Island and its “earth muffins,” the speaker, without batting an eye, speaks directly about the “ghost” that interacts with his novelist wife.
Or so we believe. Repeatedly, protagonists question their own memory: “Is that true? Even as I write this sentence, I question its veracity.” With that emerges a second major linking feature of these short stories: the unreliability of memory. The human experience, as vividly felt and vividly imagined as it is in this stories, is also, Ozeki suggests, floating on an uneasy sea of uncertainty. The protagonist of “The Anthropologist’s Kid” remembers a childhood incident of betrayal with incandescent clarity. Many years later, however, he encounters Fatima, his boyhood friend, and apologizes for his behaviour. Her response strikes to the heart of Ozeki’s world of certainties: “I don’t remember dancing with you…. I certainly don’t remember anything about a kiss.” Likewise, in “Feelings,” the protagonist’s equally intense childhood memory—again involving betrayal and broken friendship—falters and fades: “time passed, and over the decades the details faded.”
In both of these cases, Ozeki suggests, poignantly, that even the most real experiences and the most intense emotions have no reliable substance. The particular affliction of Alzheimer’s is first evoked in “The Typing Lady” where a mother “tries to write a memoir, but has Alzheimer’s so there was much more that she forgot.” It is in “Leafblower,” though, possibly the most memorable story in the collection, where Ozeki documents the progressive decline into dementia of a wonderfully charismatic old woman. Most wrenching, though, is the way the author documents the experience of the speaker of “One Art.” Not only does the protagonist question her memories of the love affair, but, before our very eyes, sees her beloved dissolve: “My memory is going; I am trying to remember her one last time before I forget.”
While Ozeki’s treatment of memory loss cuts to the quick of her sense of the human experience, her treatment of a third unifying element is, tonally, at the opposite end of her literary craft. The book is a-clatter with old typewriters—not just any typewriters, but vintage typewriters, typewriters of diverse models, colours, and purposes. Some of them are mentioned incidentally; some of them are crucial story elements. All of them, however, because they are so relentlessly present, Ozeki uses to play with her reader’s perceptions of her craft. “Here,” she seems to say, “just when you felt comfortably immersed a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, I am unsettling your sense of ‘reality’.”
Unsurprisingly, given the book’s title, Ozeki makes enormous hay with the typewriter in the initial story, “The Typing Lady.” Details abound. On the one hand, we have a “matte-black 1947 Remington Rand.” On another, we have a “watermelon-pink Olivetti Lettera, made in Italy in 1972.” And so on, and so on. In “Leafblower” we see “an ancient manual typewriter, a Remington Rand.” In “Immortal” an “old Smith-Corona.” In the “Ships that Pass,” a character named Cayenne has as “her prized possession, a portable pink Olivetti.” And these are just a few examples. (Readers of a certain vintage will find these names hugely resonant, not just intriguing bits of arcana.)
In some ways, of course, this is all just play. We all like ‘easter eggs’ in our story lines. In other ways, though, the clatter of typewriters is a direct evocation of a hugely significant fact for the author and a fourth unifying principle: words. Typewriters type words. Of course, they do. Cayenne prizes her typewriter because she is writing a novel. She may be writing a contrived “bodice ripper” that she will never finish, but she is still a writer. In “Dead Beat Poet,” the ghost-cum-“Beat” poet, when not quoting Ginsberg, says to the protagonist—a derailed writer recently fired from her job in a publisher’s office—“Steal a typewriter. Hunker down in the corner of a smoke-filled bar….”
It is not incidental that these stories are thick with characters who write—poems, stories, and novels. These may be children: in “Feelings,” when Kai breaks off with her best friend “she typed many things… short stories, poems.” Some writers may be incidental characters, like an old boyfriend (in “Leafblower”). Equally their lives may connect deeply with the desire to shape words into fiction. “She was still trying to write that novel back then. I mean you were,” says the husband of the ghost-like version of his wife. The protagonist in “The Problem of the Body,” a novelist, feels almost trapped by the expectations put on her as a writer, while the protagonist of “One Art” has “taken time off to see the world because I wanted to be a writer.”
More significantly, this last woman feels drawn, magnetically, to her literature professor because she feels deeply about “language—our words and their histories, the essential objects that had made my world and shaped me into what I was.” Correspondingly, this story, and many others, are interwoven with quotations from poems, in this case from Old English, from Blake, from Hopkins. The words from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” and what they say about loss, seem all too appropriate to her love affair, but they are only a fragmented echo of the poem that Ozeki has used as an epigraph to the whole book.
Indeed, it is almost as if Ozeki employs this loyalty to “the word” to weigh a protagonist’s soul. Blessed are those who feel the power of the word. Importantly, the intense romance in “One Art” begins with a name, the protagonist’s own (never stated directly). Her new professor “went to the blackboard and wrote my name in chalk, then added beneath it: ‘sorrow, repentance, regret.’ ‘As in rue,’ she said, ‘from the Old Norse hryggr, meaning “grieved.”’ My name was never the same after that.”
Old English compound words in particular haunt the protagonist of “Leafblower”: “It’s a lovely word, really. ‘Leaf’ from the Old Norse lauf and the Old English léaf.” And so on, the start of her obsessive word “hoarding.” Very much a kindred spirit in Ozeki’s world is the speaker of “Immortality”: “I love these words: semicrystalline and amorphous.” Indeed, the whole, emotionally fraught storyline in “Feelings” comes from the meanings around “compassion”: “It comes from the Greek word pathos, meaning ‘suffering’, and com meaning ‘with’.”
From there, the story follows a surprising trajectory. Of course it does. A mere childhood misadventure goes starkly adrift.
Fittingly, the last story in the volume ends with a two-word sentence: “Gloriously untethered.” From the grave, both Wordsworth and Coleridge, in considering these stories, are unlikely to disagree.
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Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. You can visit his website here. [Editor’s note: Theo reviewed recent books by Collette Colligan and Gregory Mackie, Patricia Bovey, David Gurr, Carla-Jean Stokes, Gail Sidone Šobat, Alan Twigg, and Ian Williams for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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