Carrie Snyder's Hair Hat By Jeet Heer National Post (June 3, 2004) The stranger, a mysterious outsider whose appearance upturns the social order, is a perennial cultural figure, showing up in everything from Homer’s Odyssey (where Ulysses often wears disguises on his travels) to spaghetti Westerns (the taciturn and squinty gunman so often played by Clint Eastwood). In a penetrating 1908 essay, the German social theorist Georg Simmel explained why the stranger is such a potent archetype. The stranger, according to Simmel, combines the contradictory characteristics of nearness (in space) and farness (in point of origin), thereby inviting us to situate ourselves. Identity is only created by contrast. By offering us an outside perspective, the stranger creates the possibility for both objectivity and confession. Simmel’s somewhat abstract ideas can be more easily grasped when we read Carrie Snyder’s debut short story collection, Hair Hat. The eleven stories in this engaging volume are united by a recurring character: an odd older man who (in almost all the stories) is seen wearing his long hair in the shape of a hat. Although the tone and tempo of the stories vary widely, the “hair hat” man repeatedly functions in the role of the stranger, a cipher whose inexplicable quiddity forces truth to the surface. Aside from this unnamed figure, Synder’s cast is strikingly diverse, ranging from a young girl sent to stay with her in-laws to an obtuse park attendant filled with sexual longings he won’t admit. We also meet a grad student wavering on whether to commit herself to a relationship as well as a grandmother enjoying a day with her daughter’s infant son. One common trait shared by most of these characters is that they are so immersed in the minutia of everyday life that they don’t think deeply about their problems. Synder has a keen ear for the little lies people tell, to themselves and others. She is especially mindful of how ritual behavior works as an anesthetic. The encounter with the hair hat man therefore shocks her characters out of their daily slumber. He is a reminder of the odd things in life that they have buried in the back of their minds. Some react to him with horror and puzzlement, while others are overcome with a desire to let loose tightly held feelings. In time the oddness of the hair hat man becomes normalized, but the seemingly ordinary characters stand revealed as very dark and complex people. As the strange becomes familiar, the familiar grows strange. Before becoming a full-time writer, Carrie Synder worked as a copy editor for the National Post. In that capacity she was occasionally called upon to untangle my sometimes jangled prose. A good copy editor has to have a jeweler’s eye for language, an ability to pick out tiny imperfections that escape more obtuse observers. Perhaps as a result of these copy-editing years, Synder’s prose has a bracing precision and clarity. “The man’s walnut face was troublingly familiar,” begins one description of a meeting. “Under other circumstances, I would have let him slip by in a crowd, but there was no crowd, only a scattering of muffled students, and he was advancing on me like a little engine, steaming over the slabs of stone that marked the middle of campus, a gathering place with concrete vats of flowers in the spring. It was March, too early for flowers, and skiff of filthy snow adorned everything around us, lumpy reaches of ice awaiting the unsuspecting foot. His boots hit a patch, and he skidded and danced quite daintily for a beaverish fellow.” In this passage, the metaphors (“walnut face” and “beaverish”) are vivid but unobtrusive. They don’t slow us down as we read, but describe the man sharply enough so we can visualize the scene. The word “daintily” in the last sentence is nicely deployed: we don’t expect it to be there, it just pops up out of the blue, so we are as surprised as the narrator by what she is describing. The narrative structure of the book is as confident as the prose. Like the movie Pulp Fiction, the seemly discrete stories in this book eventually turn out to be interlocking and recursive. Through the course of this collection the stories fold-back on themselves, with some events revisited from another point of view. More importantly, the focus of narrative interest goes through a subtle change. At first, like the characters in the book, we are intrigued by the puzzle of the hair hat man. Yet as we learn more, it slowly becomes apparent that this mystery man is himself trying to find the answer to an unsolved personal problem. Like the oracles of old, the hair hat man answers our halting queries with an even more fundamental riddle. With its sharp-edged prose and daring plot turns, Hair Hat is an unusual first book. The missteps and callowness of a young writer are only rarely visible. At times, she does tend to be a bit overly explicit in displaying her moments of epiphany. Sudden revelations are among the hardest moments to handle in prose fiction, and in a few of the stories they spring up a bit too quickly, like the teary confessions extracted by Oprah Winfrey. (But perhaps this is not such a problem: one of Synder’s characters makes a spirited defense of Oprah). At its best, however, Hair Hat is anything but conventional. Carrie Synder made a genuine gamble with this book and it pays off. The stories manage to be spooky without relying on any heavy-breathing melodrama. The little drops of strangeness in the plotting only serves to heighten the realism of the characters and setting. This is especially evident in the portrayal of the hair hat man. Initially he seems like purely an emblem of the grotesque. Yet, his plausibility grows through the course of the book, so that we see the strange and the familiar reinforce each other. This is exactly what Georg Simmel argued in theory, but Hair Hat makes such ideas convincing.