Marcie of Buried in Print and I are rereading Shields’s short stories for the first quarter of 2024: one volume per month from the Collected Stories. My review of the first one, Various Miracles (1985), is here. The Orange Fish followed four years later. It’s a shorter book – 12 stories rather than 21 – but again opens with the title story, which features a gentle slide into absurdity. The members of a select group think their possession of an orange fish lithograph makes them special, and the sense of being chosen enlivens and rejuvenates them. But when the artwork becomes widely available, it devalues their joy in it. This reminded me of a statistic I’ve often heard: experiments show that people don’t want to be earning a particular amount of money; they want to be earning comfortably relative to others.

“Today Is the Day” stands out for its fable-like setup: “Today is the day the women of our village go out along the highway planting blisterlilies.” With the ritualistic activity and the arcane language, it seems borne out of women’s secret history; if it weren’t for mentions of a few modern things like a basketball court, it could have taken place in medieval times.

European settings recur in a few stories, and there are more third-person POVs than first-. And surprise! A character from Various Miracles is back: Meershank, the writer from “Flitting Behaviour,” stars in “Block Out.” Here Shields inverts the fear of writer’s block: for this prolific scribbler it’s a welcome break. “The suffering of the throttled was his, and he felt appropriately shriven, haunted, beset and blessed.”

In both “Collision” and “Family Secrets,” Shields muses on the biographer’s art, asking what passes into the historical record. The former involves a brief encounter between Martä and Malcolm, a visiting consultant, in Eastern Europe. I loved the mischievous personification: “Biography, that old buzzard, is having a field day, running along behind them picking up all the bits and pieces.” In “Family Secrets,” the narrator remembers that, before marriage, her mother took a year off teaching for “sickness,” and wonders if it was actually a pregnancy, hidden as assiduously as two amputations in the family. “Lies, secrets, casual misrepresentations and small failures of memory, all these things are useful in their way. History gobbles everything up willy-nilly”. Ernest Hemingway also makes a fun cameo appearance in this one.

I had three favourites: 1) “Hinterland” has a married couple visiting Paris at a time of terrorist activity. (There’s a fantastic list of the random things Roy might have thought of while fleeing the bomb threat, but didn’t.) The combination of that and a museum setting of course made me think of The Goldfinch. But it seems like the greater threats here are ageing and potential breakdowns within the family. “Milk Bread Beer Ice,” the last story in the collection, is also travel-based and contrasts the wife’s love of words with this marriage’s fundamental failure of communication. 2) “Hazel,” one I mistakenly read last month, is an example of Shields’s abiding interest in happenstance and how it changes a life’s direction.

And my overall favourite, 3) “Fuel for the Fire,” a lovely festive-season story that gets beyond the everything-going-wrong-on-a-holiday stereotypes, even though the oven does play up as the narrator is trying to cook a New Year’s Day goose. The things her widowed father brings along to burn on their open fire – a shed he demolished, lilac bushes he took out because they reminded him of his late wife, bowling pins from a derelict alley – are comical yet sad at base, like so much of the story. “Other people might see something nostalgic or sad, but he took a look and saw fuel.” Fire is a force that, like time, will swallow everything.

Being a significantly shorter collection than Various Miracles, The Orange Fish seems to contain less filler and so struck me as stronger overall. There were only maybe one or two stories that I was less engaged with, and the themes of art, biography, coincidence, marriages and writers reminded me of works by some of my favourite authors, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt and David Lodge.

My original rating (c. 2008):

My rating now: