In the manner of the anthropologist, Michael Hoffman, in his latest collection of short stories, stakes out a small piece of terrain then proceeds to examine the life within its coordinates. The name of this plot is Nectar, a fictional Canadian suburb. With sustained reading, individual plots coalesce into a satisfying picture of a community whose innumerable flaws give it a touching humanity.
Hoffman writes about the minutiae, the motes that float in the air, perceptible only when we pause to take note. In Hoffman's tales, this liminal matter coagulates into forms that demand attention.
So it is in the story "Snow," where the currents of one singularly ordinary day nudge and prod events into resolution. Here the narrator's transnational mind gives us in one time frame -- glimpses of Canada, Africa, a once-thriving herring port in Hokkaido. In stories like this, Hoffman conducts us through the desolate, stripped-bare landscape of characters whose lives aspire to be extraordinary but whose mediocrity prevails. In Hoffman's world of failed writers, amateur enthusiasts, recluses, insipid husbands, and men disengaged from both work and society are narrators of thundering ineptitude, who imagine themselves "literary artists."