reviewed by Suzanne Alyssa Andrew
Toronto Star Sunday, May 2, 2004

As is the recent trend in contemporary short fiction, the stories in Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat are interconnected. A man whose hair is coiffed into the shape of a hat appears in each, and if they’re read in sequential order, enough clues are gradually exposed to understand his character.

Unfortunately, it’s a clumsy writing workshop use of the technique, in comparison to the nuanced impressions others have achieved.

In her 2002 debut collection Dead Girls (McClelland & Stewart), Nancy Lee weaves her first collection with sinews of violence and disruption as an entire community struggles to cope with the mysterious disappearances and serial killings of downtown sex-trade workers.

In Hair Hat, people repeatedly comment on how strange it is for a man to have hair shaped like a hat.

Hair Hat isn’t lacking in drama, but Snyder’s storytelling formula is so tightly wound she leaves no space to meander and fully explore emotional complexity. She builds her stories like prefab houses, telling each one in the first person, using similar timing and a jolting rhythm.

"Flirtations," about a couple who attends a party together is a good example. It begins in media res - say a quick hello to the characters because you’re already in the main action, watching the protagonist flirt with someone who is not her boyfriend. A flashback or two later, she figures out why, pukes on her own shoes. Everything wraps up with an uncomfortable marriage proposal.

Snyder’s characters are often rushed through sparsely wrought scenes and memories, only to get carelessly walloped with abrupt tragedies, as in the drownings in her first two stories, "Yellow Cherries" and Tumbleweed." More compelling, "Queenie, My Heart," looks at obesity, grief and urban loneliness, but sprints towards a tidy, empty closure: "It was a night for doing the least and so I closed my eyes."

The protagonist in "Missing" runs away from the story’s action scene, sans significant revelatory pause, after meeting her biological grandfather for the first time: "When we see the missing, at last, do we turn in the opposite direction, or do we stand and wait, stand and wait, stand and wait."

Several of Snyder’s stories waver between funny and serious, a territory where experienced writers such as Lorrie Moore produce both, but new authors often yield neither.

Snyder can come close. Her story, "Personal Safety Device" is a sarcastic rendering of a university student’s love life with twist of lemony realism at the end. It’s packed with cutesy observations: "I soon learned he was a teetotaller, and soon after learned what teetotaller meant," and precious admissions: "I have since thrown out the evidence of my wishful, hopeful, all-consuming, incredibly boring search for hot boys."

But instead of consistently building the comedy right into the story’s action where the situational, I Love Lucy laughs are, Snyder tends to foist self-conscious humour onto dialogue and turns of phrase. Sometimes that technique is chuckle-inducing, but most of the time it sounds forced.

Snyder also has some lazy writing tics that should have been red-lined by her High School English teachers, nevermind by the editors at one of the largest publishing houses in Canada. Hair Hat is pocked with clichés.

The book begins with the line: "I woke up screaming bloody murder." Pivotal moments throughout the book are reduced to "If only I could find a way to tell her," and "Don’t let your imagination run away with you." Other phrases, such as, "He was ripe with dignity" are more non-sensical than poetic.

Snyder enjoys rehashing her (already) simple thoughts to ensure we understand them: "This was something I’d had around me for awhile: corpulence, excess, a comforting girth" and "Disgust could be read there, disdain, annoyance" and "Is there any mystery in fortune really? Is there any mystery in luck?"

In her defense, at least those last two sentences feature question marks in them, a refreshing punctuation appearance, since Snyder has such an allergy to the interrogative even her teenagers fail to upspeak.

Meanwhile, her adult characters are as wooden as ventriloquist’s dummies when made to say "Is he really at Grandma’s," or "What do you want."

If all of the repeated words in Hair Hat were trimmed away, and its hastily styled plots, uniform story construction, and limited scope were made over, it would be an entirely different book - one that fully reveals the potential Snyder displays in the occasional austere or inventive image: Yonge Street appears "greasy and beleaguered," an insecure woman realizes she needs to be "two inches smarter" and a mother is described as having a "placidity that passed for kindness."

These moments, like the repeated glimpses of the hair hat man, can only offer hints of the pleasantly whimsical read this debut could have been.