Each of the 10 stories in George Bowering’s latest collection is prefaced by a photograph. The photos bear some relation to the accompanying stories, but serve more to pique the reader’s interest than to illustrate any particular narrative detail.

The stories themselves are varied in genre, but unified by inventiveness, self-referentiality, and wordplay. Bowering’s protagonists are frequently writers or intellectuals, and his narrative style is highly self-conscious, as if written for a reader as intimately aware of the form and conventions of the short story as he is. There are recurring literary allusions and references to theories of literature and science.

In “An Experimental Story,” these two realms overlap. The narrator introduces the story as an “experiment” meant to determine whether or not a “somewhat corrupted” youth would “revert to a natural innocence upon moving to the sticks.” Although the narrator’s sensibility is distinctly Victorian, the subject of the story – a contemporary teen who moves with his mother from downtown Vancouver to the Okanagan Valley – is completely up to date. The story is at once a metafictional exercise and a deceptively simple, skilfully executed vignette about adolescence.  

“Sworn to Secrecy” and “The Box” play with gumshoe conventions in the same way that “An Experimental Story” plays with scientific objectivity and naturalism. The collection also includes a magic-realist baseball tale involving a leprechaun, two darkly comic short plays, and a probing dialogue between two aging poets.

The Box will appeal to those who enjoy postmodern playfulness. Bowering’s prose is polished and his characters are well-drawn, but the overly clever nature of the stories and the frequent authorial intrusiveness becomes tedious. At their best, however, the stories combine inventiveness and humour with finely realized craft.