[In the following primarily positive review of Stones, Garebian assesses several stories in the collection.]

Timothy Findley's latest collection of short stories [Stones] can be defined by many elements: a theatricality in imagery and characterization, an evocative sense of Toronto (particularly Rosedale and Queen Street West), a compassion for emotional desperadoes, and an urge for retrospective regeneration—a looking back into the details of a past, a gliding in and out of specific moments in a character's life, a dispersing of details within a compass of shifting moods, varieties of human nature, and the inevitability of story-line.

There are two complementary pairs of stories in Stones. In "The Name's the Same" and "Real Life Writes Real Bad," there are characters we have already met in Dinner Along the Amazon, Findley's first short-story collection that, despite its evident virtues, had a somewhat unfinished quality. In this collection Findley's preoccupations, while repetitive in the two sets of stories, justify his implicit question: Why am I obsessed with you? A tentative answer can be found in the configurations of love and desperation. "Bragg and Minna" and "A Gift of Mercy," the first two stories in Stones, probe the tormented relationship between a husband and wife. "Bragg and Minna" begins with a brief prologue from Minna's journal of despair and the image of three men walking up a hill in Australia. One of the three is Stanley Nob, "the sad, mad poet from Sydney." Another is Stuart Bragg, estranged husband of Minna Joyce, who has just died from cancer. The third is Bragg's homosexual lover. They are preparing to scatter Minna's ashes, and from this image proliferate scenes from a woman's struggle to escape her husband. Minna, whose central anarchy and strange power of compassion are vividly explored in the next story, had been an avowed enemy of "ladyhood." Her life, until she met and married Bragg, was one of "inherited privilege mixed with deliberate squalor." Escaping from Rosedale and its snobberies, she went to Parkdale to do "good works" among "all its resident rubbies and gentle crazies, dressed in all weathers in their summer coats and woollen mittens and all their hair cut straight across in bangs and all with their tam-o'-shanters pulled down over their ears and their eyes as crafty and innocent all at once as the eyes of bears." The sense of place is thrillingly effective, as is the sense of drama. Husband and wife are both writers, though Bragg produces short, terse books at three-year intervals, while Minna writes 11 books before she dies (there are four more in bureau drawers), all told with less ambiguity than Bragg's, "very much the way she had lived."

Minna wants a child desperately, but Bragg, afraid of a genetic curse in the family (he even thinks his homosexuality is a means of frustrating the curse), wishes to avoid procreating. Ultimately, Minna wins. But the marriage is over, and she goes off to Australia with her daughter Stella (born hideously deformed and brain-damaged). Only after Minna's death, when her ashes are scattered over an aboriginal petroglyph (which seems to be an emblem for their freakish child), does Bragg recognize the real monster as himself. The irony is sharp: he, the homosexual outcast in a conservative society, has cast out love from his life.

The pairing of these two stories effectively illustrates the strangeness of Minna's love. "A Gift of Mercy" details the dramatic dichotomy between Minna's compassion for strangers who are plagued by demons and her own lack of articulateness. However, the two stories would have been even better had they been fused into a novella.

Findley is best when he doesn't seek glib symmetry or a series of shocks. "Foxes" (in which a man identifies with a Japanese theatre mask), "The Sky" (in which a paranoid man suffers a breakdown), and "Dreams" (another breakdown story that could have been imagined by David Cronenberg) are all interesting in themselves and all stem from a common desire to discover and touch an essential humanity. But they are melodramatic, more contrived than credible. "Almeyer's Mother" reveals a woman's long-held secret about her father's incestuous urges. The flick of the underside of a young girl's breast is sexually suggestive enough, but Findley almost overplays his hand in describing the family photograph that reveals an "alarming affection" between father and daughter.

Findley's craft is more assured in other stories. The duo of "The Name's the Same" and "Real Life Writes Real Bad" explores the chasm between two brothers, the elder of whom is an alcoholic who repudiates reality and whose almost suicidal despair has an acute psychological root. In these stories, Findley glides in and out of the past, achieving his microcosmic focus through lists and minor details, finding emblems of self-destruction and highlighting the sharp division between untidy real life and neatly ordered art.

The best story is "Stones," yet another about breakdown. The narrator, Ben Max, in his early 50s, shuffles time—the prewar days when his parents were successful florists, and the wartime and post-war days when the family began to feel the stress of the father's dishonourable discharge for cowardice at Dieppe. The stones of Dieppe, which had trapped the tanks and precipitated the slaughter of Canadian forces, become a recurring symbol in Max's memory. In a sense, they turn his father to stone, a man whose positive emotions fossilize as he is spiritually broken. After his death his ashes are scattered like powdered stone in the sea at Dieppe. This is a story that attempts to avoid sentimentality in its re-creation of a troubled political period and an anguished family history. Yet there is an inevitability about its final nostalgic image of Mr. and Mrs. Max walking their children on a Sunday afternoon. The past, Findley shows, doesn't have to lie like heavy stones on the heart.