Part of living in a city is dealing with the extreme public realm and density created and the “crazy” people that populate its edges. When everyone piles around a table on a sweaty summer evening and begins to share stories about the “guy swearing to himself on the bus this morning” or “the woman who walked into the coffee shop today petting an imaginary dog” they vocalize those events for a number of reasons: fear, humor, pure disbelief. More often than not the initial reaction is to dismiss this people as “crazy,” to offer them as cartoonish and unreal and further remove them from our own lives. Yet, those same sweaty people must return again and again to public spaces and interact with those same crazy people day after day.

Superficially, The Incident Report deals with the abnormalities of strangers, the presumed homeless freaks and extreme neurotics that visit a public library on a daily basis. The narrator is a female librarian in downtown Toronto who tells her story through a series of vignettes. The hook is that each of these vignettes is presented as an “incident report,” a sheet that each librarian has to fill out any time something off-center goes on his/her shift. The book then opens with stories about the “crazy” patrons – the man who spends a day stripping electrical wire; the woman who overreacts about the wrong colored binders; the woman who gifts the narrator a condom as she leaves the library. These stories are colorful and intriguing, giving brief snapshots of a very public space caught in the flux of daily traffic.

Yet, Baillie never allows the reader any distance from the “crazies”. In one sense, the incident reports allow the narrator to box off the incidents, keeping them contained and manageable; this becomes especially apparent when one of the people in the library begins to fixate on her and the reader can see the reports as a defense mechanism, a mode of normalizing and controlling the world around her.

Interestingly though, the narrator weaves these reports next to her own description of herself and her life, her family, her job – she lists the mundane tasks she has to carry out daily, describes her boss, re-tells stories about her father. Further, the structure of the book then creates a fragmentary story that deepens the paranoia and loneliness of both her and the “crazy” strangers. Each person exists only in brief bursts, tiny portraits; the reader is given simply the incident in question without even reflection or judgment from the narrator. This same objectivity is applied to herself – there is very little emotional reflection from the narrator on her own life, but rather a straight-forward story of her own life’s events. By conflating the narrator and the characters of the incident reports, the text begins to blur the borders between sanity and craziness. The distance between the regular people and the “freaks” breaks down and the two become indistinguishable. Suddenly, the reader is asked what incidents they caused that day, each day.

The most affecting parts of the text balance the act or work (and its safety in routine) with the constant threat of violence. Work, for the narrator, is all encompassing. It is the narrating structure of the book and provides the setting for almost all of the text. Again, work at the library (like most work) also provides rules and spaces that the narrator can hide within – there is a desk designated for library staff that separates her from the patrons; there is a code of conduct that the narrator refers to often (the Manual for Encounters with Difficult Patrons, for example); there are set hours to leave and return to. All this is set against the fear of the unknown, the uncontrollable person, the threat of violence that the narrator keeps falling under by the mysterious library patron. Despite all the rules and structure of the library, it is the chaos of the city that sideswipes the narrator, the public space outside of her building that provides the climax of the story. Ultimately, the incident reports to do not border and blockade the events they describe, only frame and present the events with the casual dispassion that the world in motion carries.

When the reader leaves The Incident Report, he/she is left with what constitutes an incident. While the book dances along its existence as an archive without really reflecting on it, the reader feels the impact of a life recorded much more keenly, especially given the violence of the end. With that, the realization seeps in that the reader is at the center of daily incidents, causing them in fact and slowly the notion sinks in that somewhere, on a sweaty patio, a stranger is talking about them.