When I think of successful literary portrayals of devastated lives, I think of Raymond Carver, Dorothy Allison, Greg Hollingshead. After reading Broken Windows, I will also think of Kanata, Ontario writer Patricia Nolan.

Broken Windows is a tour de force. Nolan’s sharp, spare language paints imperfect lives, inexplicable situations, and unwelcome feelings involving love or family. And they are recorded so mercilessly, with a hawk’s eye for detail and irony, that they often make me laugh. Nolan skillfully shows how darkly humorous and devastating life can be.

Although not deliberately linked, the stories share a black humour and sense of hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) tragedy: an outcast satisfied with her one-legged brute of a husband loses interest when he stops tormenting her; an impotent man allows himself to be picked up at an airport bar on his way to oversexed Aunt Livvy’s funeral; a widow collapses of a stroke while purchasing a macaw for her impoverished neighbour.

Nolan works language like a jigsaw puzzle, piecing together sentence after sentence until they fit snugly into a complete picture. She tolerates no frills or descriptive padding and while she doesn’t shy away from dark emotions, her preference is to suggest violence rather than to make it explicit. She tends to slip strange words into otherwise normal grammatical sentences, a device that slightly twists the phrasings to give her characters more peaked emotions and more oppressive desires and memories.

She keeps us on the edge of her characters’ neuroses and tragedies by juxtaposing memory and fantasy with the present-time, creating a rapid-fire feeling that keeps us close to the narrator, as if clinging to her for protection. At the end comes relief from these carnival rides, but no resolution. Nolan offers no truisms for consolation to the brutal lives witnessed.

The characters often feel irreparable pain and confusion, but also seem satisfied that things are not as they should be. Nolan convinces us that these are indeed interesting times we live in, and that she is a very talented writer.