Rave critical reviews and listed for the 2016 Giller. Fell flat for me. ( )

There is nothing comfortable or comforting in Kerry Lee Powell’s debut short story collection Willem De Kooning’s Paintbrush. These are dark, chaotic tales of lives being lived far from polite society, so close to the margin that poverty and violence are familiar constants. Powell’s characters do whatever it takes to get by. Many harbour ambitions of various sorts, but have strayed so far from the life they intended to lead that the scholarly or artistic accomplishments they once yearned for are nothing more than a dream. A lot of these characters hang out with people they just met and hardly know, because it’s either that or spend their time alone. There is no long-term striving in these pages. Powell’s characters are just trying to make it through the day. The cast includes strippers and bartenders, mothers and fathers, rebellious teens, homeless men and women, aspiring artists and people dying of cancer. The plots most often revolve around work and family. In “Kindness” Renée, a "large" woman in pink, uses her accounting and promotional skills to help Macy revive his tavern and attract a new clientele, but is subsequently banned from the tavern she helped save when her eccentricities become untenable. In “The Spirit of Things” young Christoff escapes from a career spent in servitude in his abusive father’s delicatessen for life as a guitar player in a metal band, only to find that artistic control can be just as rigid and oppressive as other kinds of control. And in the title story a couple go on vacation in Los Angeles, where the wife is traumatized by the roller-coaster at the amusement park. Then in the airport on their way home, the husband, Boyd, is attacked for no apparent reason by someone who knocks him down and beats him. The head injury he suffers renders him an emotional cripple, unable to respond reasonably or predictably to the world around him, and his wife is left with the thought that they have both been “infected” by “a new way of seeing.” Powell’s genius is for circular and surreal action scenes that on the surface seem to go nowhere and in all directions at once, until upon reflection you realize that she is revealing to us a raw and ungainly truth about modern life that is not easy to fathom or accept. Admittedly this kind of fiction, in which anything goes and often does, is not for all tastes. But for 250 pages it provides a bracing, dizzying ride through a grotesque landscape that, once you have visited, you will not soon forget. ( )