Stuart McLean, one of my favorite writers, passed away a week ago now, and I, though I only knew him through his words and his voice on the radio, felt a profound sense of loss when I heard the news. McLean broke all the rules I learned in college fiction classes. His stories leaned unabashedly on sentimentality, and he wrote about the same characters again and again, creating a body of work narrow, but deep. His stories of Dave and Morley, and their kids, their dog, their neighbors, were a well polished mirror back on the irrepressible beauty of our own mundane lives. He wrote stories that celebrated the mundane, the ordinary, and made it feel familiar, and comfortable. He didn’t have the sharp-edged misery of Carver or the fairytale distortion of Cheever. His characters were people, quick to make mistakes, humorously slow to admit them. I’m going to miss the characters, Morley and Sam and Stephanie and Arthur the dog, and Carl and Greta Lowbeer, and especially Dave whose warmth you could feel through the page. He made it seem ok to not know everything, to be inept at being an adult sometimes. That you could mess up and still have worthwhile work and a home and people that loved you. Dave was the kind of guy you could so thoroughly imagine getting a beer with and ribbing him about the turkey incident. He was a Canadian everyman, exemplary but not exceptional, earnest but never acerbic, a beautiful bumbler. That character and the way Stuart told stories about him, about his family, celebrating what it is to experience life’s moments, small and large. There is a quiet thunder in the simple words, time worn stories, that meant so much, still means so much to me as a young storyteller, the idea that hockey practices and errant records and unraveling sweaters were enough to make a life’s work of and that earnestness and compassion win in the end. So, I’m going to miss it all and simply say Stuart, so long for now.
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