reviewed by Suzanne Alyssa Andrew
Toronto Star Sunday, June 8, 2008

In his debut short story collection, The Withdrawal Method, Pasha Malla braves sex, death, prolonged illnesses, fraught familial relationships – even a natural disaster. A polished, confident storyteller, Toronto-based Malla steamrollers through uncomfortable situations and everyday horrors with the sang-froid of a crime reporter. He shares what he sees in graphic, lurid detail and dispassionate language.

In "Being Like Bulls," the collection's most successful story, Malla imagines Niagara Falls as a dried up, post-tourist landfill community of shift-work security guards and mysterious scavengers. Malla's journalistic style adds realism to a town beset with tension. Bar brawls between Canadian and American workers are commonplace. The protagonist, a second-generation Sikh souvenir shop owner, is having a hard time letting go of the family business. He also must cope with the chilling omnipresence of the furtive foragers.

"I'd heard about the way the pickers lived – like animals, apparently," shopkeeper Aagyapal thinks as he tries to rationalize his growing paranoia to his photojournalist girlfriend Kaede. "And these were people with decent jobs only three years ago. It's amazing how quickly human beings can degenerate."

Malla's fictional reportage is also effective in "Timber on the Wheel of Everyone," as a father tries and fails to prove himself a hero to a son recovering from cancer. His neutral tone is also well-suited to historical fiction. Malla shifts convincingly to 18th-century Vienna with "The Love Life of the Automaton Turk," a retelling of the infamous chess-playing machine hoax. "Without a worthy opponent, he began to build simple automated chess pieces with the cogs and wheels of old watches," Malla writes of German inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen. "When prompted, they would walk across the chessboard to the appropriate square."

Yet when Malla tackles domestic situations, such as the young couple in a lacklustre relationship in "The Slough," his aloofness spins the narrative in circles instead of locating his characters' emotional truth. That his protagonist (also named Pasha) is aware of this distancing and suggests rewriting the story as a hipster romantic comedy is clever: "Wouldn't it be nice to write your life into one of those?" he notes. "You could reinvent yourself as someone hapless and amusing, someone whose missteps are enjoyable, not just wrong." But Malla's self-conscious charm isn't enough to clarify a confusing story or make its wispy, pencil-sketch characters come alive.

Malla filters his fiction through a director's lens in "The Film We Made About Dads," a McSweeney's-style update on the morality play – without the bothersome morality. Instead of an everyman character, Malla focuses on everydad, dismissing the experience of fatherhood with dopey ridiculousness in the process: "The dads and their wives went to Niagara Falls where they stared silently into all that water and thought, Hmm."

Unlike in his darker, more complex Niagara Falls story, Malla dispenses with any wider sociological meaning and even cartoons death: "When the dads died, no one knew quite what to say." Although this story is amusing in passing, it needed to hint at something deeper to resonate with readers as something more than whimsy.

While the title of this book references an age-old contraceptive method, it also suggests that withdrawing from direct engagement is a survival mechanism in the postmodern world. It's effective as an overall theme, but as a writing technique this distancing can make it harder to invest in Malla's stories.

Instead of focusing on the kinds of stories and worlds Malla excels in creating, such as his post-apocalyptic Niagara Falls, The Withdrawal Method is too eclectic to ever quite cohere. This collection veers too widely between imaginative territory Malla effectively envisions and surfaces that he merely skims. While Malla offers an invigorating mix of seriousness, humour and candour, he's better as a writer-inventor tinkering with the impersonal mechanics of time and circumstance than as an interpreter of everyday emotions.