[In Goodbye Harold, Good Luck, once again] Audrey Thomas creates compelling images: a man offering a woman a captured hummingbird to hold, another man tearing a tentacle off an octopus and throwing it to a girl who winds it around her wrist "like some horrible bracelet," a set of children's sandals in graduated sizes, a jar full of baby teeth, a message appearing magically on a steamy hotel mirror. Once again we move through her literary landscapes: Ghana, Galiano, Edinburgh, Greece. And once again Thomas shows her command of a variety of styles.

George Bowering has attempted to categorize Thomas's work on the basis of style, suggesting in the Audrey Thomas issue of A Room of One's Own (March 1986) and in his "Introductory Notes" to Fiction of Contemporary Canada that some of her fiction is well crafted and satisfying, "mimetic, if not autobiographical to the extreme" and the rest "self-reflexive and discontinuous," even "daring" and "odd." Needless to say, Bowering prefers the odd to the well crafted. Using a time-honoured tactic, he creates a duality and promotes one over the other. Of course, he knows better, but is attempting a little affirmative action, trying to right an imbalance in the wider Canadian literary world where conventional writing gets more attention than it deserves. Thomas, partly because she is often experimental, partly because she was born in the United States, and partly because she writes in British Columbia, has certainly been undervalued. But it does her an injustice to suggest her work is all one thing or another.

In this collection, the overtly experimental works are, in fact, weaker than those that might be labelled mimetic or autobiographical. Take, for example, the fairy tale "The Princess and the Zucchini": the Prince is turned into a giant zucchini; the princess doesn't buy his "happily ever after" line, so she cooks him for dinner. But she's still in the kitchen, and she's not very nice. The feminist implications are far more complex than "ha, got you"; readers are intended to puzzle. "One Size Fits All," "The Man With Clam Eyes," and "Compulsory Figures" are also intellectually, rather than emotionally engaging. In Goodbye Harold, Good Luck, the successful stories are rather those where the idea of a single or certain reality is strictly qualified, not because the narrator is crazy or prescient or playing games, but because of shifts in point of view, sudden insights, coincidental juxtapositions of similar messages, doubled or layered narration. Often the main narrator is a woman like Thomas, with children, with "ordinary" middle-class problems, fears, and responses.

One story, "Breaking the Ice," is superficially a "woman's magazine" story: divorced woman spends Christmas without her children, doubly depressed because a man she has recently met hasn't called. One of her daughters arrives for New Year's, so does the man with his daughter, and all get along splendidly: it would be easy to call the story banal and superficial. But like Alice Munro, Thomas is not really interested in plot anyway. The romantic conventions in "Breaking the Ice" are heavily qualified by discussions of a cat stalking birds and by the bellowing of mating sea lion bulls on the nearby rocks. The narrator insists to all who are concerned about her that she is "Perfectly all right," noting to herself that this of course means "Perfectly All Wrong." She dresses up to visit the neighbours so they won't suspect her misery. The present unhappy Christmas is overlaid by happy past memories and potentially happy planned future ones. At one point, the narrator considers phoning the man and putting him off because her daughter protests, a thought that produces the potential for an unhappy, rather than a happy ending. The happy lovemaking is overlaid by worry about "Who would leave first?" The story is built out of layer after layer of possibility, like a lacquer box, so that the story is, paradoxically, both profound and superficial. Of course, some readers will see only the happy ending; others will notice that to break ice is potentially to drown in icy water.

Another story, "Relics," begins with a gypsy telling the fortune of a woman visiting the boarding house in Scotland where she lived when she was a student. She discovers that Morag, the woman who used to run it, has been decapitated in a car accident. Her memories of her first lovers are intermingled with her realization of how nasty she and all the students were to Morag, who scraped by, exhausted by the housework. She remembers one moment where Morag tried to talk to her, and hints at the possibility of a different story for both of them.

The title story is about a mother and daughter travelling, a situation common to several stories. In this one, the narrator, Francine, is trying to decide whether to leave her husband, a demanding perfectionist. In a hotel, where Emily, the daughter, has been taking a bath, the words of the title appear "written by somebody's finger or with a piece of soap." This handwriting on the mirror brings out the ghostly story of another unhappy couple, and, indeed, the stories of all the people in that room, to haunt the "real" story.

All the stories are haunted by what we don't see and can't know, even about the lives of those closest to us. "Mothering Sunday," reveals the dark side of mother-daughter relations, as the narrator thinks of her mother: "I have wounded her many times; she has wounded me. We don't talk about this. We send each other letters and greeting cards and presents; we worry about one another. We wonder." Sitting alone in a restaurant on Mother's Day, the narrator thinks of everything that gets left out of the myth: "No blood, no bloody Mary in the nativity accounts. Immaculate conception, immaculate delivery. We mothers know better, sitting here with our legs underneath the table, sitting here sipping our drinks, picking at the expensive food." (Note the stories crammed into the simple phrase "with our legs underneath the table.")

And so I would like to suggest why Bowering's categories don't work. Because women have been on the "wrong side" of the duality for so long, they are more concerned with what gets left out of stories, usually, than with what gets put in. But both sides need to be there:

Francine had seen a button in a women's bookstore.

THEY SENT ONE MAN TO THE MOON WHY CAN'T THEY SEND THEM ALL?

It was funny, but not really. Would Emily grow up hating men? The woman on the train was worried about some adult putting his arm around her daughter; what happened if the opposite were true, never a hug or a kiss?

The same pattern appears in one of Thomas's earlier stories, "Initram" (that is, "Martini" in a mirror), where a separated woman travels to Vancouver to tell her story to her friend Lydia, only to discover that Lydia has also separated. Lydia's story is "both moving and bizarre"; the narrator feels that Lydia has "put something over" on her. The narrator's story has to be postponed, and this is the emotional point of the story.

Putting in both sides, then, does not mean forging a harmonious whole, as in traditional stories. Rather it means revealing how one story exists at the expense of another—indeed, how stories proliferate, endless voices drowning each other out, contradicting each other. The vitality of this collection lies in Thomas's ability to write "mimetic" and "autobiographical" stories that constantly reveal themselves as partial, inadequate, and unresolved: that is, as "self-reflexive and discontinuous."