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Out on Main Street: And Other Stories
Book by Mootoo, Shani
128 pages, Paperback
First published May 3, 2002
4 people are currently reading
204 people want to read
About the author
Shani Mootoo
17 books197 followersShani Mootoo, writer, visual artist and video maker, was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1957 to Trinidadian parents. She grew up in Trinidad and relocated at age 24 to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 21, 2021
This was not my favourite of Mootoo's work, and I think that's mostly because it's a short story collection. I much prefer full length stories or short stories that connect more cohesively, whereas this seemed randomly strewn together. None of the stories were particularly impactful for me, but at the very least they were encased in Mootoo's phenomenal writing style. I look forward to reading more of her work. I think I've now read 4/7 of her books.
October 26, 2021
Not all book acquisitions are created equal. For the tried, (supposedly) true, and ultimately conventional standards, I venture forth for sake of testing that which is oh too used to having its credibility go entirely unquestioned beyond the pitter patter back and forth allowed in the bloodless halls culled by generations of ideological conformity and socioeconomic stability. For the queer, the non WASP, the woman, I go out in the expectation of not having suitable reserves of habitus to draw upon to truly appreciate the work that I've chosen to face, hoping that, in exchange, I'll be entertained, or find something I didn't know I was missing, or at least gain a glimpse of a world that I am better able to acknowledge the existence of but will never truly belong to. Picking up this work of Mootoo's with faintly recalled letterings of one of the author's longer works racketing around my skull was an act that signaled as much my desire to delve into the non-cishet beyond what is touted in academia and the bestseller's lists as it was to push me once again into certain regions that are not my preference, such as the shorter work and the even shorter story. In terms of the results of the read, it's rather unfortunate that, to me, the prose is barely above workmanlike, the voice never really comes together in each beyond a borderline rote telling of the tale, and too much of the whole was what I had read rendered in far better forms elsewhere. Certain pieces would have benefitted from being committed to a while longer, but whether that's a valid critical estimation or expression of my already specified bias towers the lengthier tracts remains to be seen.
In terms of the stories, the first, "A Garden of Her Own," introduces a holism in a credible manner but wanders a tad too close to stereotype, while the last, "The Upside-downness of the World as it Unfolds," was the strongest sinking the teeth into the tangled mass of Indo-Caribbean diaspora in the land of deculturized yoga and white Hindu "converts" but didn't quite fulfill its potential. As for the rest, I felt as if I were being fed the customary pieces of information about India, migration, communal normativity vs individual coming to terms, without it ever coming together into a definable curve of narrative or, if nothing else, prose. Going into this, I was also hoping for encountering a queerdom that found itself at various points down of the line of its reconciliation with itself at every story iteration, rather than reading the same fraught tale of coercive heteronormativity over and over again. The titular tale went some way into exploring intersectionality under kyriarchy, but in a way that felt as if I were watching someone solve math equations, rather than recount a living whose ways of bleeding were multifarious under the decrees of the status quo and whose resources were therefore of singular vitality and strength. All in all, I have to wonder what this would have been had Mootoo not felt the need to spoon feed her writing to her (likely largely white) audience. Less fun fact listing and more integrated showing, I'd imagine.
I have the author's more lauded Cereus Blooms at Night on hand, so I'll be going for that when I'm in the mood for taking chances with a piece that will hopefully benefit from being more suited to my novel-oriented tastes. It's not everyday once gets an author with this mélange of thematic interests so close and yet so far from my own, so I might as well invest a tad more into someone who doesn't have the benefit of being thrust in my face every time I peruse a shelf marked as 'literature.' With two months of the year left, I have a limited amount of time to continue my trek through more contemporary reads of this sort, and while I didn't strike gold with this chance purchase in that vein, I'm hoping to come across at least one or two before 2021 is through. It won't be long before my challenge reading plans suck me back 50 or more years ago, and I'd like to push my boundaries a tad more before I return to works that are good for amping up my personal reading cred but not, however "transgressive" they are purported to be, so great for disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed. Or, in other words, decentering the lodestone of reality and granting a reader a picture beyond what is required for passing one's tests. As demonstrated by this review, such experiments aren't always successful, but I wouldn't be able to trust my capabilities for critical analysis as much as I do were I to forgo them entirely.
In terms of the stories, the first, "A Garden of Her Own," introduces a holism in a credible manner but wanders a tad too close to stereotype, while the last, "The Upside-downness of the World as it Unfolds," was the strongest sinking the teeth into the tangled mass of Indo-Caribbean diaspora in the land of deculturized yoga and white Hindu "converts" but didn't quite fulfill its potential. As for the rest, I felt as if I were being fed the customary pieces of information about India, migration, communal normativity vs individual coming to terms, without it ever coming together into a definable curve of narrative or, if nothing else, prose. Going into this, I was also hoping for encountering a queerdom that found itself at various points down of the line of its reconciliation with itself at every story iteration, rather than reading the same fraught tale of coercive heteronormativity over and over again. The titular tale went some way into exploring intersectionality under kyriarchy, but in a way that felt as if I were watching someone solve math equations, rather than recount a living whose ways of bleeding were multifarious under the decrees of the status quo and whose resources were therefore of singular vitality and strength. All in all, I have to wonder what this would have been had Mootoo not felt the need to spoon feed her writing to her (likely largely white) audience. Less fun fact listing and more integrated showing, I'd imagine.
I have the author's more lauded Cereus Blooms at Night on hand, so I'll be going for that when I'm in the mood for taking chances with a piece that will hopefully benefit from being more suited to my novel-oriented tastes. It's not everyday once gets an author with this mélange of thematic interests so close and yet so far from my own, so I might as well invest a tad more into someone who doesn't have the benefit of being thrust in my face every time I peruse a shelf marked as 'literature.' With two months of the year left, I have a limited amount of time to continue my trek through more contemporary reads of this sort, and while I didn't strike gold with this chance purchase in that vein, I'm hoping to come across at least one or two before 2021 is through. It won't be long before my challenge reading plans suck me back 50 or more years ago, and I'd like to push my boundaries a tad more before I return to works that are good for amping up my personal reading cred but not, however "transgressive" they are purported to be, so great for disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed. Or, in other words, decentering the lodestone of reality and granting a reader a picture beyond what is required for passing one's tests. As demonstrated by this review, such experiments aren't always successful, but I wouldn't be able to trust my capabilities for critical analysis as much as I do were I to forgo them entirely.
February 9, 2015
Shani Mootoo is one of my favourite writers, but despite having devoured almost all of her fiction, until recently I had yet to read her very first book, a collection of short stories called Out on Main Street that was published way back in 1993 (I was only 8 years old!). It’s one of the books that I’ve had a copy of for a while, but had never gotten around to reading.
So, Out on Main Street is definitely an uneven collection: it feels like someone’s first book, for better or for worse. It’s not bad by any means, but it’s not amazing either. For anyone who’s new to her work, I would suggest starting with another one of her books, the amazing Cereus Blooms at Night—her first novel—or her most recent, Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab. Both showcase Mootoo’s talent much better than this book, where you can only see seeds of what makes Mootoo presently a really fantastic writer. Mootoo is definitely testing the waters and getting her sea legs, as you might say, in this book of short stories. A few of the pieces fell kind of flat for me: they didn’t feel fully formed, or felt like they were missing something.
That doesn’t mean, however, that there weren’t some standout stories in Out on Main Street. In particular, the title story is great. Written in an Indo-Trinidadian dialect, as if right out of the mouth of the narrator, “Out on Main Street” of course refers to “out” in more than one way. It packs a lot into a small space, investigating the cross-overs of privilege and oppression and intersectionality way before that term was current. Our precocious protagonist is a butch Indo-Trinidadian woman out in Vancouver’s little India with her femme girlfriend. Alliances and enemies are made and remade inside an Indian sweet shop, the women quickly turning from outsiders to allies to outsiders again...
See the full review here: http://wp.me/p2tLy0-pr
So, Out on Main Street is definitely an uneven collection: it feels like someone’s first book, for better or for worse. It’s not bad by any means, but it’s not amazing either. For anyone who’s new to her work, I would suggest starting with another one of her books, the amazing Cereus Blooms at Night—her first novel—or her most recent, Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab. Both showcase Mootoo’s talent much better than this book, where you can only see seeds of what makes Mootoo presently a really fantastic writer. Mootoo is definitely testing the waters and getting her sea legs, as you might say, in this book of short stories. A few of the pieces fell kind of flat for me: they didn’t feel fully formed, or felt like they were missing something.
That doesn’t mean, however, that there weren’t some standout stories in Out on Main Street. In particular, the title story is great. Written in an Indo-Trinidadian dialect, as if right out of the mouth of the narrator, “Out on Main Street” of course refers to “out” in more than one way. It packs a lot into a small space, investigating the cross-overs of privilege and oppression and intersectionality way before that term was current. Our precocious protagonist is a butch Indo-Trinidadian woman out in Vancouver’s little India with her femme girlfriend. Alliances and enemies are made and remade inside an Indian sweet shop, the women quickly turning from outsiders to allies to outsiders again...
See the full review here: http://wp.me/p2tLy0-pr
January 30, 2008
thesis text? what?
January 7, 2026
Yuh know, one time a fella from India who living up here call me a bastardized Indian because I didn’t know Hindi. And now look at dis, nah! De thing is: all a we in Trinidad is cultural bastards, Janet, all a we. Toutes bagailles! Chinese people, Black people, White people. Syrian. Lebanese. I looking forward to de day I find out dat place inside me where I am nothing else but Trinidadian, whatever dat could turn out to be.
― Shani Mootoo, Out on Main Street and Other Stories
It's Shani Mootoo so obviously I wanted to like it. The woman is an amazing writer. However, there is not much to recommend this book. It pains me to write this, but Out on Main Street was a struggle to get through.
― Shani Mootoo, Out on Main Street and Other Stories
It's Shani Mootoo so obviously I wanted to like it. The woman is an amazing writer. However, there is not much to recommend this book. It pains me to write this, but Out on Main Street was a struggle to get through.
January 20, 2021
2021 Reading List
April 10, 2022
*3.5 stars
March 31, 2025
I didn’t like every story in this book but most of them were really good.
November 18, 2025
really awesome actually
January 5, 2026
engl 110 favorite book - absolutely enjoyed reading it
February 10, 2012
Excerpted from the full review:
"Out on Main Street, the first short fiction publication of Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian writer Shani Mootoo, is a collection of nine stories with origins that are both Caribbean and Canadian, diasporic and contintental, here and there. Work like this represents nothing so much as it does a bridge, symbolizing, representing and contextualizing histories and customs only guessed-at or generalized. Mootoo’s epigraph (unattributed, presumably her own quotation) to the collection admonishes gently against the broad sweep of nostalgic generalization:
Which of us, here, can possibly know the intimacies of each other’s cupboards “back-home”, or in which hard-to-reach corners dust balls used to collect?
(Or didn’t?)
One’s interpretation of fact is another’s fiction, and one’s fiction is someone else’s bafflement.
There is no apparent taint of pomposity in Mootoo’s prose… no setting forth of her fiction as canonical or authoritative on any section of the Indo-Trinidadian diasporic experience. Perhaps she is writing strongly from remembrance, as do many Caribbean writers no longer living in the Caribbean. It seems more likely that her remembrances of Trinidadian rituals, customs and rites, specifically those pertinent to religious and cultural Indo-Trinidadian minutiae, are infused with the startling (though not unwelcome) presence and immediacy of Canada."
You can continue reading my full review of Out on Main Street at Novel Niche.
"Out on Main Street, the first short fiction publication of Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian writer Shani Mootoo, is a collection of nine stories with origins that are both Caribbean and Canadian, diasporic and contintental, here and there. Work like this represents nothing so much as it does a bridge, symbolizing, representing and contextualizing histories and customs only guessed-at or generalized. Mootoo’s epigraph (unattributed, presumably her own quotation) to the collection admonishes gently against the broad sweep of nostalgic generalization:
Which of us, here, can possibly know the intimacies of each other’s cupboards “back-home”, or in which hard-to-reach corners dust balls used to collect?
(Or didn’t?)
One’s interpretation of fact is another’s fiction, and one’s fiction is someone else’s bafflement.
There is no apparent taint of pomposity in Mootoo’s prose… no setting forth of her fiction as canonical or authoritative on any section of the Indo-Trinidadian diasporic experience. Perhaps she is writing strongly from remembrance, as do many Caribbean writers no longer living in the Caribbean. It seems more likely that her remembrances of Trinidadian rituals, customs and rites, specifically those pertinent to religious and cultural Indo-Trinidadian minutiae, are infused with the startling (though not unwelcome) presence and immediacy of Canada."
You can continue reading my full review of Out on Main Street at Novel Niche.
March 9, 2013
A 1993 collection of short stories by then Vancouver author Shani Mootoo (who now lives in Toronto). It was put out by Vancouver's Press Gang Publishers. Stylewise, I thought "Nocturnals" was the most interesting story.
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May 11, 2018Fiction M8259o 1993
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews