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Review #1:
Rebecca Rosenblum provided, on her blog. Calling the collection “an easy book to like,” she also said:
I think the best stories in this collection are the ones that remind me of expertly focussed spotlights. From a man whose relationship is probably disintegrating while his father’s love life takes off (“May the Road Rise”–great title) to a guy who sees his childhood friend resorting to violence (maybe) (“Hit”), there aren’t a lot of resolutions here, or many answers.
If you are familiar with the term tolerance for ambiguity, you probably learned it in a psychology or education class, but a reader of my acquaintance uses it to describe a reading style. Readers with a high tolerance for ambiguity don’t mind not having much backstory in a piece of fiction, provided we have some sense that there is a logical one. In a good story, we’re fine with not knowing why things happened, nor what the outcome is–if the author can shape the piece so that it works without those things.
“Six Million Million Miles” was, to me, the perfect story for the ambiguously tolerant (like me), because Bryson counters the randomness of writing any story about a few moments in anyone’s life with how random anyone’s life actually is.
Review #2:
The second review was in the summer 2010 issue of On The Danforth magazine.
The reviewer found the book “a haunting work of hardship, adultery, neuroses and passion” and called it “a quick read, but definitely not light.”
Review #3:
The third review was by Spencer Gordon, on his blog [now gone?], and also appeared in Broken Pencil #47.
Here’s what Mr. Gordon had to say:
In The Lizard and Other Stories (Michael Bryson’s third trade paperback), the style is conversational and colloquial; his subjects usually plainspoken men and confused adolescents. While not exactly gritty or subversive, Bryson’s allegiances do seem rooted in the contemporary, urban, and working-class. Unsurprisingly, some of these stories first found homes in collections such as Matthew Firth’s Grunt & Groan, Nathaniel Moore’s Desire, Doom & Vice, and Zsolt Alapi’s Writing at the Edge. The abundant dialogue (loaded with realistic exchanges and banal asides), light descriptive passages, and frequent paragraph breaks means the book moves at a breakneck clip. When this is done well, as it often is, we forget we’re reading (participating in the artifice, so to speak) and slip under the spell of Bryson’s minimal narrative strategy.
“The Adulterer” is the best story in this collection. It’s a single paragraph running only three pages, but damn – its structural adventurousness and unsettling emotional manipulations beat together in the memory like some sinister metronome. “The Book of Job” – a curiously entertaining mixture of Native American and Hebrew legends – shimmers with welcome strangeness, disrupting the familiar march of Bryson’s more conventional offerings. And the story “Flight – the second in a trio of 9/11 stories – is extremely effective in its fragmentation, depicting the spiritual and physical grasping of characters living on the crumbling precipice of history.
However, aside from a number of glowing moments, and the aforementioned gems, the majority of stories tend to bleed into one another, providing an insufficient quantity of memorable or resounding passages. At times, their narrators seem to have a hard time maintaining the right balance between superfluous and essential detail. Moreover, four vignettes (short, unnamed italicized sections – think Hemingway’s In Our Time) crop up throughout, detailing the coming-of-age of some unnamed boy. If they’re meant to be stand-alone, I’m not sure how effectively they illumine or redefine the stories they intersect, and if they’re supposed to be stages of a single piece, they fail at delivering a climactic pay-off, or even a memorable impression of character.
It must be said, though, that this may merely be a problem of editorial direction (and yes, I’m breaking a sacred reviewing rule in saying so). Bryson is a careful and talented writer, and when he gets rolling, the results can be magical. Losing a few of the flabby stories, as well as the vignettes, and including a few more adventurous pieces (such as can be found in his Only a Lower Paradise, for example), would rocket this collection into must-have territory. (Spencer Gordon)
Review #4:
This review appeared in the Maple Tree Literary Supplement #7 (online, now gone).
Michael Bryson’s stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies for over a decade. He is the author of two previous collections, Thirteen Shades of Black and White (Turnstone Press, 1999) and Only A Lower Paradise (Boheme Press, 2000). In the words of the book jacket, The Lizard and Other Stories “probes hearts in conflict”; “Love and the frailties of existence are the obsessions of this collection. The stories showcase absurdity, humour and tremendous sensitivity.” The stories in this collection certainly speak to the twin obsessions spelled out in this blurb. The collection ends with a trilogy of stores, “Hard Core Life,” “Flight,” and “Isn’t It Pretty to Think So” that speak to and explore different ways of grieving about the events of September 11th. Indeed, many of the stories in the collection seem haunted by this international tragedy. Bryson is at his best when he is most specific. Take this opening of the short story “Hit,” for example:
John put me up to it. I must have been sixteen or seventeen. Grade eleven or twelve. John[,] my best friend, the team’s leading scorer. I could make third line centre, he told me. I didn’t make it past the first cuts. This was no heartbreak; I was small, had no appetite for raised elbows and would never be able to dig the puck out of the corner quick enough for the coach. But John pleaded my case until the team said it would dress me for its exhibition games. On my third shift[,] I was flattened by an over-eager two-hundred pound fifteen-year-old. I remember lying on the ice, my insides crushed, a sharp pain pulsing in my guts as the team trainer skidded across the ice toward me. “You’ve got to learn to take a hit, son,” he said as [he] knelt beside me. Later[,] I managed to pick up an assist on one of John’s two goals. I had a bruise on my hip the next day the size of a watermelon. I told the coach I wouldn’t be back. (7)
With very few words, in short emphatic sentences, Bryson sets up some of the tensions in the often-strained friendship between the narrator and his friend John, one that reminds us of Dustan’s and Boy’s in Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy. Bryson’s attention to human relations also recalls the stories in Michael Redhill’s collection Fidelity, but what makes Bryson’s stories unique is his writing style. His minimalist approach is not for everyone, and it takes getting used to, yet his style contributes significantly to the facets of postmodern and urban environments to which his stories repeatedly turn.
It is difficult to identify with the many unattractive characters in The Lizard and Other Stories, though, in the context of postmodern writing, character identification is perhaps less important. The copy editing can benefit from a rereading. Bryson gives us a lot to think about: he is quite skilful in writing stories, and his writing reverberates with literary echoes. In sum, Bryson delivers a solid and ultimately promising collection.
Review #5:
Matthew Firth's review appeared in Front & Centre #24. Quotation: “Bryson’s stories are always full of life, even if those lives are a little, well, fucked up.”
Review #6:
Review by Bev Sandell Greenberg. Included in Vol 10 Issue 2 of The Prairie Fire Review of Books.
Toronto writer Michael Bryson’s latest collection of sixteen short stories offers an intriguing look at contemporary urban relationships—how people meet, why they break up, and the redemptive power of love. Most of the stories in the collection have been previously published. In fact, “Sandwich Factory” was nominated for the Journey Prize and “Six Million Million Miles” was included in 05: Best Canadian Short Stories.
Bryson is well known in literary circles as the founder and editor of The Danforth Review, an online literary magazine published between 1999 and 2009. He has published two previous short story collections, Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and Only a Lower Paradise (2000).
Some of the stories in this collection centre on friendship. One of the most poignant pieces, “Hercules,” tells about two construction workers, a young wayward man and a long-time employee who mentors him. Only after Hercules’s death does the young man begin to appreciate the extent of Hercules’s positive influence. In the story “Flight,” two men have been friends since high school, but one is always more popular with the girls. As the two friends reach adulthood, jealousy sets in, altering the nature of their relationship.
Each story crackles with intensity. One of Bryson’s talents is the ability to describe a setting in a few sentences. In “Flight,” he states, “The hotel was part of an American chain that linked metropolitan areas around the world like a global charm bracelet. The hotel had a round marble lobby ringed with red, white and blue curtains. In one corner, Coke competed with Pepsi . . .”
Interspersed within the collection are four brief vignettes about an unnamed boy and his parents. These stories offer a note of innocence in sharp contrast to the final three pieces with their post-9/11 settings.
Occasionally, Bryson adds a dollop of humour to his wry observations. In the title story, “The Lizard,” a young man is haunted by his memory of swallowing a salamander on a dare when he was six years old. Thereafter, thoughts of the lizard often come to mind—usually during the adult protagonist’s romantic moments.
Throughout the collection, Bryson schools us in the ambiguities and complexities of male/female relationships in the twenty-first century. It’s an unblinking commentary on the tug-of-war of influences on men and women trying to survive life in the big city.
Though the relationships sometimes falter, there are also stories presenting the opposite view. As a result, Bryson’s collection provides a satisfying, thought-provoking read about the search for love on the urban landscape.
Review #7:
A website called Weird Canada reviewed The Lizard in 2014. Here’s what Joshua Robinson had to say …
As curator of The Danforth Review, Toronto’s Michael Bryson contributes much more than merely thoughts on page. His short works in The Lizard and Other Stories hint at the subtle contradictions inextricably interwoven into the dual fabric of perception and interpretation; of love cast against the existential enmities of loneliness, power, and tragedy.
Love — as told through the experiences of characters running from home, searching for meaning, and struggling to regain a sense of direction in an increasingly hostile ethos — is that great binding force that exists both subjectively and objectively, residing in the fragile middle-ground where that nascent sense of fulfilment lingers right before the pin drops, and the bright and swirling grand illusion of complete happiness gives way to a loneliness born of a powerfully tragic misconstruction of what one truly needs to feel most alive.
This is a collection of short stories that speaks of the inner-battling between pride and compliance; of the ebb and flow of a constantly compromising world with others and within oneself. Where love, and indeed our sense of place, is hardwired and whittled by our reflections on those around us: of how we place ourselves next to them, of how we mentally superimpose our stories on the lives of those very others. Transcendence when grounding is needed; life, opaque and incommunicable, yet we persevere, and draw together the fragments of former selves to construct a new form, one that will exist to precede the next reconstitution; constantly changing, constantly emerging from the wakes that we create.
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