Elisabeth Harvor published her first collection of short stories in 1973; her second, If Only We Could Live Like This Forever, appeared over a decade later after a literary silence fed by marital dissolution and years of therapy. The lovely artifacts of this generative down-time appear in Harvor’s poems, Fortress of Chairs (1992). And with her new collection of fiction, Let Me Be the One, favourite Harvor subjects – sexual repression, the sad watch women keep over their imperfect bodies, intrafamilial sex – are carried over. As with earlier characters, there are innocents, nurses in training (Harvor was one), and those experiencing grim post-divorce hindsight. Family members carnivalize the household hierarchy, as when brother and sister play husband and wife, or an embittered son becomes critical father to his own mother. Typically, women examine and re-examine loneliness.

These subjects drive today’s sharpest fiction when they stream with irony and when language is precise yet full of itself. Harvor’s stories, though, are cool and wordy. Imagery is provocative but often repetitive as when, in two stories, women try on black strapless evening gowns belonging to other, shapelier women. As well, there are peculiar echoes of earlier Harvor stories that seem more recycled than intertextual. Deliberate narrative links or an imagination bereft of new possibilities?

Harvor ends with the fragmented “Through the Tall Grasses,” which scans a woman’s psychoanalysis and the scraps of dark memory she recovers, including sex with a brother, rejecting parents, and unwanted enemas. While this is a strong story, the outer limits of prose-ish poetry Harvor used in 1992 clarified the same murky depths. With her return to fiction, restraint dulls Harvor’s emotional acuity.