Jo Cannon's Insignificant Gestures: A Review by Sara Lippmann

No matter who we are or what we look like or where we’ve been or why  we’re here, if we have a human heart it’s going to break—if it’s not already broken. Anguish permeates the twenty-five stories in PANK contributor Jo Cannon’s debut collection, Insignificant Gestures (published in November by Pewter Rose Press).

As a physician who has practiced in Africa as well as in her native England, Cannon has witnessed vast pain and suffering, and understands first hand what it’s like to be an outsider; she draws from these places to create compelling fictional worlds. Hers are stories of loneliness, otherness and exile. With a healer’s compassion and a writer’s perception, Cannon creates characters on the fringe—outside the mainstream looking in, longing for some swatch of belonging, a thread of connection.

Her collection opens with the title story, told from the point of view of an English doctor, who is recollecting time spent as District Health Officer of Malawi. Cannon engages the full range of senses to render the harsh landscape, where health care is dire and aid workers feel helpless despite knowledge and degrees. Details—from the crush of a cockroach underfoot to the snap of a Fanta can—pop, stand out, lodge in memory. The doctor inherits Celia, a servant, with the job. Eventually, the narrator’s resistance subsides and the two become companions although deeper feelings remain unexpressed. “Beginnings start like this, with insignificant gestures—a woman’s hand touching the back of a chair,” he remembers ruefully, a decade later.

Chance encounters drive much of Cannon’s work. In ‘Rictus,’ a   mother plunged into depression and marital estrangement following the death of her child becomes awakened and unstuck by the random friendship of a goofy  and colorful jogger. Less interested in the whys of happenstance, Cannon wraps her wonderfully rich prose around the question: now, what?

Her tales of Africa are unflinching in their vision. ‘Needle-Stick Baby’  presents a world ravaged by war, children evacuated because of the danger:

The city went bad so fast, with burnt-out cars piled into roadblocks and bullet holes in every wall.

Originally published in PANK, ‘Mercy is Sick Today’  shows incredible restraint and precision. Sentimentalism has no place here, as the reader becomes privy to the gravity of Mercy’s illness while the young narrator, Mercy’s sister, is left grasping for understanding:

Tomorrow she will get up, eat and tell me everything. But today Mercy is sick and we lie on the mat with our arms around each other, staring dark into dark.

Cannon’s England-set stories swirl with  disorientation and contain elements of the surreal. ‘Alphabet Diet’ follows a  young obese man as he remarkably sheds fat and discovers himself, and Cannon’s ear for dialog is on full display in ‘New Look,’ when an aging cross-dressing male desperate “to be seen,” visits an obgyn for a pap smear; to the cashier at the women’s clothing store, NEW LOOK, the narrator says:

“I went for a smear test yesterday. The doctor couldn’t do it.”
For a moment she’s perplexed, then catches my mood and laughs with me, her hand  over her mouth.
“What did he say?” Her tone is gossipy, fascinated.
“She said, not everybody  needs one.”
Her laughter floats me out of the shop and back to my  flat. As I open the door I start to sing, proud of my baritone.

This is perhaps my favorite story in the entire collection.

In ‘One Hundred Days,’ an African living in exile in England has “built a fence of mirrors around the past;” in so doing, he’s lost the truth of his own reflection and his past.

Cannon is a courageous writer, taking on weighty topics like abuse and  domestic violence, politics and terrorism, climates of fear and xenophobia.  She examines the London subway bombings in “Daddy’s Girl” through an array of disparate lenses. There is nothing she shies away from. These are stories meant to tug on the reader’s heartstrings and they do effectively, almost all of the time.

Earnestness, however, runs the risk of turning heavy-handed. Cannon goes to  lengths providing back-story for every character, which isn’t always needed; “Fairy Story,” for example, would be strong enough to evoke a powerful emotional response without the mother’s history. Once in a while, Cannon’s clever analogies serve as writerly garnish, failing to deepen the narrative. (“His forehead beneath wispy nicotine stained hair is crinkled like cellophane.”)

Overall, however, Cannon applies her lush style and incredible generosity  of spirit to a universal theme: the fallible humanity in all of us. This she sums  up beautifully in ‘The Spaces Between,’ when an English doctor reflects on  her time in Africa where everything seemed foreign save one crucial, common  denominator: “Only the human body was familiar, suffering and anguish the same.”

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Sara Lippmann is a writer in Brooklyn.