More than Survival: A Review of David Huebert’s Peninsula Sinking

 

At a cursory glance, David Huebert’s Peninsula Sinking may appear to be a thematically familiar rendition of traditional Canadian literature, where—much like collections by Alistair MacLeod or Alice Munro—the stories weave together to evoke common CanLit themes: the inevitable struggle to navigate our environment, the loving-yet-exploitative interdependence between human and animal, the chronic urge to escape loneliness and isolation, and the abstract pondering of life and death. What is truly remarkable, however, is that Huebert handles these topics with such ferocious complexity in multi-layered parallels and metaphors that compel readers and critics alike.

With characters living predominantly in the Maritimes and working a range of occupations, this short story collection surpasses the thematic limitations of what Northrop Frye called the obsessive question, “Where is here?” Huebert contemplates the much deeper and more important question, “Why?”—an existential uncertainty far more layered than a simple discussion of geography or identity. Huebert’s characters exist in limbo between desire and fulfillment, between the province they identify as home and the places where they seek to identify themselves. The narrative is so unique and absorbing, it is impressive to consider that this collection is the author’s debut. By far the most well-crafted and rewarding short stories I have read in recent years, Peninsula Sinking places David Huebert at the forefront of an exciting new wave of Canadian fiction.

By far the most well-crafted and rewarding short stories I have read in recent years, Peninsula Sinking places David Huebert at the forefront of an exciting new wave of Canadian fiction.

A recurring fascination in this collection is death, which, as I’ll demonstrate, Huebert explores through various motifs. Death in literature is often portrayed as the antithesis of life, the avoidance of that which defines each character’s daily existence—either on a conscious or unconscious level—as they struggle to survive in their given environment. Defying the traditional representation of survival as the ultimate goal of his characters, Huebert uses corporeal imagery and metaphor to portray the moment of death not necessarily as an attack on the body, but as, at times, a comforting embrace, an epiphany, or a moment of acquiescence and transformation desired sometimes more strongly than survival. Throughout the collection, the author employs various animals as mediums by which human characters explore the frailty and tenuousness of existence. Huebert repeatedly conjures animal-human transmutations and somatic imagery through dream states and fantasies. Whales and horses are the most predominant symbolic animals. In the CBC Short Story prize-winning story that opens the collection, protagonist Heather and her veterinarian partner, Serge, tackle the impending demise of her beloved horse, the eponymous “Enigma.” Enigma is a companion that, as Heather states, had “sensed the subtleties of my body—a nervous twitch, a feint of the reins, a remote fatigue in a calf muscle.” Huebert expertly crafts this deep sense of knowing through the features of physical body. However, the empathy is inevitably one-sided. Heather confesses her wish to live within her “colossal love for that animal,” as she struggles to truly feel Enigma’s pain:

I am thinking, as I have been for days, about what it means to founder this badly, to have to walk on bare bone. I am once again trying to imagine that animal’s enormous pain, thinking if I could only conjure that feeling I could absorb a portion of her agony.

Here, Huebert demonstrates the imbalance in our relationship with animals: even at our most loving and nurturing, humans are unable to reciprocate the empathy we receive; the animal, quite literally, remains enigmatic to us. Ultimately, Heather must inject the horse with a lethal barbiturate to end its suffering. She prepares herself over several days, holding the animal and dreaming she is riding her under water as the horse morphs into a whale. Metamorphosis and fantasy recur throughout Peninsula Sinking, bringing a refreshing ambiguity and complexity to such timeless themes as death and grief. Just before the horse’s last few breaths, Heather recalls a childhood whale-watching trip during which the guide described how whales sleep: “drifting downwards, fully unconscious, colliding softly with the ocean floor. Then rising again, still sleeping, to take air.” This focus on movement and tidal imagery weave through the collection, as characters continually fantasize and dream of various forms of underwater demise, often coupled with transformations between humans and sea creatures.

Huebert demonstrates the imbalance in our relationship with animals: even at our most loving and nurturing, humans are unable to reciprocate the empathy we receive, and the animal quite literally remains enigmatic to us.

There is perhaps no greater symbolic object to link human and oceanic existence than the submarine, a vessel in which humans are surrounded by aquatic life forms while escaping the death that would inevitably occur without such technology. In “Sitzpinkler,” the protagonist Miles comes to terms with the recent loss of his mother and an underlying fear of his own death while on 105-day military deployment in a submarine. Huebert draws on aquatic imagery and metamorphosis through Miles’ secret preoccupation with the 1995 film Waterworld: Miles dreams he could “grow gills of his own” and “swim unencumbered towards the bottom of the sea.” In a continuation of this oceanic symbolism, Miles repeatedly listens to whale songs in the submarine’s sonar panel, pondering nature’s reclamation of a whale’s body when it dies in the ocean:

their massive bodies turn into ecosystems, what scientists call a “whale fall.” Those enormous bodies becoming habitats where isopods, sea cucumbers, hagfish, and lobsters sustain themselves for decades.

Huebert uses the image of this mammal to symbolize the human need for hope of survival in the face of death. The concept of “whale fall” also shows life as symbiotic and cyclical, suggesting a type of intersection between life and death. Huebert manipulates the typical expectations of this popular literary theme (i.e. that survival and death are opposing ends on a spectrum) and offers a unique, less linear narrative. Huebert continues his use of transformation and symbolic animals in “Horse People,” where employees at the Canadian Equine Federation—“country people”—reconcile themselves to a mundane, corporate career “spend[ing] their lives staring at emails and PowerPoints.” Corporeal imagery and symbolic transformations are abundant, with visceral depictions of human and animal bodies, the imagined metamorphosis of horse and infant children, and descriptions of an “isthmus” as “the armpit of the peninsula.” The main character, Trace, is 32-weeks pregnant and struggling to make it through a few more months of insufferable coworkers before her maternity leave. Her comparison of herself to an isthmus—a “fleshy barrier that is not the difference between life and death but between life and life”—echoes the notion of life and death’s inseparability elicited by other stories in Peninsula Sinking. In Trace’s dreams and visualizations during yoga class, her memory of her beloved horse Luna giving birth to a stillborn foal and her own guilt at drinking during pregnancy metamorphose into a nightmare of “the baby floating in utero with hooves and a tail.” She wonders:

Why am I lying here in Shavasana picturing horns and extra digits and a heart beating outside a body? Why am I just now remembering “horseshoe kidney,” a FAS-related condition where the child’s kidneys fuse together? Why am I recalling or possibly inventing the fact that when someone has horseshoe kidney the space where the two organs join is called the “isthmus”?

This recurring use of metamorphosis, dream states, and bodily imagery displays Huebert’s precision and complexity. Symbols come full circle and reconcile in a way that still offers ambiguity and richness to his readers, while Huebert avoids the common flaw of over-telling that is typical of many emerging writers.

Huebert avoids the common flaw of over-telling that is typical of many emerging writers.

The notion of intersecting spaces and the inseparability between life and death also appear in “Limousines.” The marriage of a young couple, Laura and Dale, on the bride’s family farm and their subsequent efforts to conceive are juxtaposed with grotesque scenes of violence and animal slaughter. In one instance, an entire herd of dairy cattle is wiped out with a single strike of lightning, a phenomenon described by Laura as both “awful and lovely.” In another scene, the groom, uncle, and father of the bride are forced to cull the baby piglets and feed them back to their mothers to prevent the spread of a stomach infection. As her father and uncle kill the piglets by smashing their skulls into the concrete, Laura catches Dale faltering moment of crisis and intervenes in the most unexpected way:

Dale raises the piglet slowly. Raises it and holds it high and then brings it down. Dale swings the piglet hard and fast but wavers halfway. Slows the swing so that the piglet doesn’t die, only lies there still spasming with a dent in its head. Dale looks at me then. Meets my eyes as he stands uselessly over the still shuddering baby pig and I choose this time to say that I’m pregnant.

The entire scene is as romantic as it is horrifying, blending a moment of grotesque brutality and slaughter with the announcement of new life. In a subtle parallel that evokes the junction of life and death, Laura vividly describes her mother’s death just after she was born, recalling the loss of “her pulse there on the shoulder of the highway with her husband offering mouth to mouth and 12-hour-old baby Laura wailing in her uncle’s arms.” Huebert uses the symbol of a deceased mother and the image of a human body being cradled—elements recurring in several other stories—to offer a fresh new conceptualization of death as a pivotal moment of embrace. This concept is most explicit when Laura describes the cattle slaughterhouses:

The squeeze chute closes in around them and hugs them, making them feel safe while they ride down the conveyor towards their electric demise. A similar machine can be used to calm hypersensitive people, but when used on humans it’s called a “hug machine.” And isn’t there something nice in that, something sweet in the thought that in their last moments cattle are taken into a set of great metallic arms and hugged to death?

In a brilliant juxtaposition, death is depicted as a moment of calm finality. Perhaps Huebert is demonstrating the absurd hypocrisy of our methods of slaughtering cattle, where we attempt to make the domesticated animal feel comfort and serenity in the last few seconds before we kill it. On a more existential note, Huebert suggests, intentionally or otherwise, that our preoccupation with dying alone may be greater than our fear of death itself; what we desire more than mere survival is the end of loneliness through the comfort of physical contact. As bleak as this image may be, it attests to the sheer weight and emotional impact of these stories. Huebert blends intense moments that verge on melodrama with subtle scenes of human vulnerability and acquiescence.

Huebert blends intense moments that verge on melodrama with subtle scenes of human vulnerability.

The representation of death as a warm embrace and an end to solitude is most aptly displayed in “Maxi,” wherein an aging prison guard named Judy battles years of loneliness and an unsatisfied infatuation with a female inmate. Alone in her apartment, Judy spends her weekends either watching Star Trek on mute and reciting each line to her pet boa constrictor, Sisyphus, or doing what most humans in the digital era do when alone:

watching internet porn not out of desire but out of curiosity. Wanting to know what people do when they are alone in bedrooms or classrooms or sex dungeons. What people do or what they might want to do and never get a chance.

This unmet need for physical human contact spurs Judy’s fascination with a very specific form of death, one that represents her deep desire for that which she might never experience. In one of her darkest moments, Judy feeds Sisyphus a live rodent and fetishizes the suffocating pressure of the 90-pound snake:

I stroke him as he eats. Stroke that lovely calico skin and feel, as always, soothed by the power lurking underneath the coolness of those black and claygreen scales. The mouse is so lucky to die there, in the midst of all that power, in the steady clutch of this beautiful serpent.

This scene not only foreshadows the conclusion of the story, but also parallels an integral moment from her childhood. Judy had asked her polio-addled mother if she had ever felt the urge to escape the body-compression chamber she was encased in:

Her mother shook her head and said no, said it felt good. Said sometimes it’s nice to lie immobile, sometimes it’s nice to be contained. She said she had always felt she was drifting, drifting and fragile and sick. But now she was held by this iron embrace and she felt safe. Safe and, strangely, loved.

Once again Huebert displays a keen ability to subtly tease out thematic elements with physical representations of the body as he weaves minor plot parallels through each story. “Maxi” culminates in one of the most hauntingly-beautiful endings I have read in any recent short fiction.

‘Maxi’ culminates in one of the most hauntingly-beautiful endings I have read in any recent short fiction.

Huebert’s fascination with the materiality of death is on display throughout Peninsula Sinking. “Drift” features a miner who desires “to bore right down into the darkness and let it hold him.” In “How your life,” a young woman imagines the physical effects of committing suicide by jumping off a bridge:

What actually happens to the body when it hits the water? You have heard that unlucky people sometimes survive the 100-plus metre fall. That in order to ensure death you have to land horizontal, like a bellyflop. But you like the idea of diving . . . shredding through the night air towards the gold-speckled blackness below, of parting the ocean and searing straight down towards the harbour floor. Of simply vanishing, there, in the bottom. Of entering something deeper than you.

Existential ponderings like this reoccur throughout Peninsula Sinking, demonstrating the duplicitous nature of the human mind: simultaneously fascinated by and afraid of death. Huebert’s thematic and symbolic elements come together in the final story of the collection, “Peninsula Sinking.” The three-part narrative follows aspiring poet Gavin from adolescence to adulthood in Halifax. This story is easily one of the most enriching in the collection, encapsulating the previous themes while still venturing into new territory. Moving from rural to urban life, Huebert captures the current generation of post-university graduates with great verisimilitude, as his characters navigate an uncertain future in an unstable economy. Against the backdrop of a peninsula that is literally sinking slowly over time due to global warming, Gavin also battles his suppressed shame for a childhood prank gone awry. He spends his entire life negotiating his complex feelings of guilt; his desire to apologize to his victim, Nancy, who is the mother of a friend; and, ultimately, his deep-seated desire for her. Huebert’s motifs of metamorphosis, tidal imagery, and mother figures reach their apex in Gavin’s description of his feelings for Nancy:

He’d been alone in the dark ocean among the lurking mines until Nancy appeared like a beacon . . . and as he watched her swim astride him he saw her legs melt and flick into tail. A tail scaled with glimmering greens and blues, a glowing blur streaking the dark water.

This passage displays Huebert’s great skill as a writer. Minor plot lines, recurring symbols, and subtle imagery allude to deeper themes and vital moments, echoing within stories and throughout the collection as a whole. Despite the distinctness of these eight stories, Huebert’s expertly-placed motifs weave characters’ lives together so intimately that the collection reads more like a novella. Huebert handles the intersection between life and death and the intangible connection between animal, land, and human with such complexity that is near-impossible to convey the layered meanings and themes expressed in the collection. Peninsula Sinking reminds us that mere survival is no longer the focal point of our day-to-day existence. Despite the implicit threat of global warming, we move forward in much the same manner that led us to our current precariousness. What plagues our future generations are the questions of why survival matters, what it means, and what form it will take.