Proprioception is also the sense that we don’t usually notice, but quite often become hyper-aware of when it’s hampered, as when one gets an ear infection and loses the sense of balance, becoming dizzy. Or when one loses sight in one eye and distance becomes suddenly difficult to gauge (say between one step and the next on a staircase). We also become more aware of our bodies moving through time/space when our perception is distorted while drunk or high or lost. 

Wicks gets the importance of capturing proprioception in fiction and the instant but pleasantly disorienting immersion it can provoke in the reader. This sense makes a setting multi-dimensional, like a pop-up story book or three-dimensional Scrabble. It situates the reader in the midst of a scene and creates a kind of narrative tension as we experience the disturbance and euphoria of being momentarily lost. 

Take these sentences from the short story “Midnight Toast”:

“His head tilts backwards as he takes in the twelve-foot ceilings, floor to ceiling covered in velvet wallpaper. He runs a hand along the wall and feels the softness on his fingertips. The air, thick with marijuana smoke, people dancing and singing, hands running up and down bodies . . . Ben needs another beer or two before he can settle in here.”

Ben has left his girlfriend at another New Year’s Eve party with her university friends, where he has suffered a crisis of plummeting self-esteem. He doesn’t tell her he’s leaving. He goes to another party thrown by a hippy neighbour. The wild abandon of the dancing, the freedom from self-doubt and being untethered from the perceived judgement of his girlfriend and her academic friends at the other party disorients him. Ben puts his hand on the wall to feel the texture of the velvet wallpaper and to orient himself with the soft texture. The high ceilings seem to provoke a metaphorical vertigo. And the dancing itself, which is all about touch, suggests a collective, inclusive sexual thrill, in direct contrast to the staid and stable relationship with his steady girlfriend, with whom he watches T.V. after work at Sobey’s for him, and study for her: “In the evenings they’d settle in to watch Get Smart or Doctor Who or Gilligan’s Island reruns on her father’s old Sony TV. It was a comfortable, stable existence.” The shows are reruns, even the TV is old. What hope does this couple have? 

Here leaps from story to story through time, bungee cord spelunking through decades, following the inhabitants of a Victorian Mansion known as Canada House, or 74 Circular Road, more than a century old. Wicks employs flashbacks, bouncing from the past to the present while changing narrative perspectives or points-of-view. The house already has a storied history that Wicks loosely follows. For instance, Joey Smallwood had offices there!

As such the house functions as a kind of body, and proprioception is the movement through time of the various lives that glide through the disorienting staircases and apartments and rooms off rooms and the turret and attic. There is a fast pivoting action that moves us deftly through the decades but manages to sink deep into the experiences of each protagonist.

Take this micro-moment from “Homemade Bread,” a description of the preparation of eating a sandwich—here is what the tomato feels like when held in the hand: “The cool skin is as smooth as a skimming rock.” Even an inert tomato is alive with motion in this description. 

And a paragraph about eating a sandwich: “He sucks in the juice of the tomato and the salt of the bologna and the tartness of the mayo like a vampire draining blood from a body. The sandwich makes him immortal.” And the penultimate sentences of the same story: “Fred lifts his face to a place in the sky that is brightening. A blue patch, with white clouds the texture of his mother’s homemade bread.”

But Wicks has more than one superpower! Another superpower is her ability to capture the dynamics of intimate relationships, between mothers and daughters; siblings; friends; and lovers. She adroitly sows intensity and flux into this emotional terrain, as they both flower and wither. 

Perhaps my favourite story in this collection (though it is the cohesion of the multiple narrators through time, bound by the body of the house that makes Here so in-depth and masterful, and therefore not really important to pick a favourite…nevertheless…) is “Verisimilitude.” 

Spoiler alert: this story has a shocking ending. But the ending, like all the best endings, is both surprising but foreshadowed and earned. 

Wicks’ talent for diving deep into the psychology of intimate relationships is in glorious evidence here. “Verisimilitude” is a terrifying dissection of the emotional mechanics of gaslighting. Sigmund Freud has said that the ego is not the master of the house, and that much of what goes on happens in the basement, the unconscious. 

Gavin, the antagonist of the story, is gaslighting the first-person narrator who is in love with him. He goes hot and cold, toying with her, provoking in her a kind of vulnerability that makes him a sort of master of the house. When he is cold after flirting or lovemaking the narrator thinks: “Then, I am enveloped in darkness. Anchorless, without gravity, looking down at my own body, wondering what I did wrong.” The reader, too, feels the terror of the lack of gravity, the disconnect from the body that houses her.

Lisa Moore is the author of the bestselling novels Alligator, February, and Caught; the story collections Open and Something for Everyone; and a young adult novel, Flannery. Her books have been finalists for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, CBC Canada Reads, the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. Lisa lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.