THE CHROME SUITE

Canadian writer Birdsell (Agassiz, 1991) elevates a mosaic of small moments into a moving composite of small-town life—this time in a slice-of-life about a 40-ish screenwriter who looks back after her lover is killed. In 1991, Amy Barber, who considers herself ``a reasonable facsimile of a civilized person,'' is traveling across Canada with Piotr, a Polish filmmaker she first loved because he was ``like the attraction of a clean page. I thought I could write myself on him.'' Now, however, Piotr has decided to return to Poland, and Amy uses their cross-country journey as an excuse to relive her past. The story's strongest sections are those set in the 1950s and '60s. The point of view switches among Amy's Bible-thumping mother, Margaret; her father, Timothy; Amy's brother, Mel, who's coming of age sexually; and her sister, Jill, whose sudden death brings the sequence to an end. After Jill's death, Amy lives through further trauma and disappointment: Her parents divorce, which, in a small Canadian town during the 1960s, is scandalous; Amy herself is raped at 17, then marries a dreary man who keeps money for himself while she's reduced to shoplifting. Later, she survives his desertion by working in a lounge and beginning to write scripts until eventually she meets Piotr, who will be accidentally shot and killed with his camcorder in hand when a hitchhiker pulls a gun on authorities at a roadblock. Birdsell's larger design is sometimes blurry—she tries to cover too much history too quickly—but her deftness at evoking adolescent lust, adult carelessness, and the permanent sadness inflicted by tragedy and provincialism makes for absorbing fiction.