#ShortStorySeptember: Single Stories by Barnes, Bellow, Enright, P. Fitzgerald, Mackay, and Norman
Thanks for all the contributions to Short Story September thus far! I usually review whole collections, but today I’m highlighting individual stories I read either as stand-alones, in an unrelated volume, or as a taster from a book I might finish some other time. A few really surprised me for being so dissimilar to other work by the author. These six seem to illustrate different techniques or situations that short stories are good at exploring, thus my headings. (Beware mild spoilers in most of these brief responses.)
The Pastiche
“Homage to Hemingway” by Julian Barnes (2011)
[from Through the Window]
The protagonist is a literature instructor and failed novelist whom we see undertaking three different teaching gigs (in rural Wales, the Alps, and the American Midwest), like the triptych of expatriate Americans waiting for trains in Hemingway’s “Homage to Switzerland,” which is specifically referenced here. He believes fiction is “omnivorous and essentially amoral” and hopes to inspire his students to “reflect on life’s influence on art, and then art’s influence back on life.” This is, of course, a huge theme across Barnes’s oeuvre. Luckily, Barnes doesn’t attempt mimicry of Hemingway’s style, which really wouldn’t suit him at all, but I enjoyed the barbs his students throw. For example, Kate describes Hemingway as “the ultimate dead white male … celebration of machismo. Boys with toys.” This wasn’t very memorable but has me hankering to track down and reread Barnes’s full-length story collections. (Public library)
The Character Study
“Leaving the Yellow House” by Saul Bellow (1958)
[Penguin Modern: 36]
I wouldn’t have recognized this as Bellow’s writing were his name not on the cover. I think of him as a chronicle of Jewish city-dwellers; this is the story of a woman in a tiny town in the American West. Everyone in Sego Desert Lake knows that Hattie is an alcoholic. She’s now in her early seventies and pretty much has bourbon running through her veins. When she gets her car stuck on train tracks while driving drunk and breaks her arm in the ensuing kerfuffle, she and her acquaintances are forced to think seriously about what’s going to happen to her. She looks back on her two marriages and her relationship with India, who used to own her house – I never did work out who India was to her; a friend? an employer? – as she sets to the task of writing her will. Who deserves to have the house in turn? The title has a double meaning and also points to the final leave-taking of death. Hattie is not a very likeable character but has a certain admirable dignity, like Olive Kitteridge or Hagar in The Stone Angel. I liked her fancy that her whole life has been filmed and she’ll soon be able to revisit any moment she chooses. A melancholy slice of mid-century Americana. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
The Shock Ending
“Pillow” by Anne Enright (2008)
[from Taking Pictures]
Alison, from Ireland, is part of a set of international roommates at her American college. Li is always asking her questions about what things mean or how they work. The first lines have her querying “What is a homosexual?” With this Enright sets us up to think that Li has a crush on Alison. First, the roommates find out that Li is her surname and really they should call her Ping. And then one morning Alison wakes up struggling to breathe because Ping is trying to smother her with the title object. I gasped aloud! The incident seems to come out of nowhere but I guess illustrates how easy it can be to hide mental illness. I kind of wish it wasn’t the Chinese girl who ended up being unstable, though. I’m not sure short stories are where Enright shines; I read the first two stories in this volume but won’t finish it. (Public library)
The Visual Pun
“The Axe” by Penelope Fitzgerald (1975)
[from The Means of Escape]
An office worker recalls having to make redundancies, including of his dignified clerical assistant, W. S. Singlebury. He feels even worse about it when the man invites him to visit his home. This faux report to the Company boss chronicles a growing sense of unease as he returns to work and finds the fired man still in the office, gruesomely injured and leaking blood all over. Fitzgerald has playfully imagined Singlebury getting the axe, literally, and then haunting the man responsible. I’ve never experienced such gleeful mischief from Fitzgerald – I only knew her austere historical novellas – but sure enough, this originally appeared in The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
The Family Drama in Miniature
“The Worlds Smallest Unicorn” by Shena Mackay (1999)
[from The Worlds Smallest Unicorn and Other Stories]
Fan’s brother-in-law, Teddy, has just returned from Hong Kong and she’s not happy about it: “now here was this succubus squatting in her kitchen, expecting to be fed.” She sees in the newspaper that an old flame of his, a singer, has died and he sets out for the funeral, passing a circus billet advertising the title act. (Since it reproduces what was on the tacky poster, I can let Mackay off for the grammatical gaffe, though it doth offend the eyes!) It seems to be a metaphor for anything that’s too good to be true, such as Fan’s affair with Teddy years ago. Her adolescent daughters’ banter and the South London environs are highlights in this one, but so far the book is not living up to the collection I read by Mackay last year, Dreams of Dead Women’s Handbags. (Secondhand – Slightly Foxed, Berwick)
The Relationship Study
“Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad” by Howard Norman (1989)
[from Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad]
The narrator is dishonourably discharged from Canada’s air force for faking an emergency beach landing during a practice flight in 1943. “We’ve come up with a new, Asshole category,” the colonel declares as he dismisses him. Still, this amiable joker hopes his pluck will endear him to Imogene Linny, who has a kissing booth for would-be soldiers on the Halifax wharf. She recognizes him from his prank and says, “You can kiss something, but it ain’t, I guarantee you, my lips.” In the two decades that follow, he keeps tabs on Imogene as she marries into a hotel empire and he works on the greyhound tracks. After all, he paid his dollar at that booth but never got his kiss. This could have gone creepy but Norman keeps it quirky and sweet instead. His novels, too, often feature Atlantic Canada, oddballs, and hotels. (Secondhand – Hay Cinema Bookshop)
Are any of these authors, and their stories, familiar to you?
Which of these six story types do you prefer?
Book Serendipity, March to May
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. People frequently ask how I remember all of these coincidences. The answer is: I jot them down on scraps of paper or input them immediately into a file on my PC desktop; otherwise, they would flit away! Feel free to join in with your own.
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- A sister named Fiona in The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright and Leaving Home by Mark Haddon.
- A parent burns a dirty magazine in Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell and The Blood Year Daughter by G.G. Silverman.
- Sabbath chains, Gaelic sermons, and psalm singing on the very pious Isle of Lewis in John of John by Douglas Stuart (set in the 1990s), then Findings by Kathleen Jamie (essay from the early 2000s). I doubt any of the above can still be found there, though we did note “Respect the Sabbath” signs on playground equipment on our 2022 trip.
- A single mother who won’t answer the phone because she’s afraid of who/what it might be in Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates and The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker.
- An orphaned narrator named (Eva) Luna in Eva Luna by Isabel Allende and Fountainville by Tishani Doshi. Then I came across a dog named Luna in Transcription by Ben Lerner! And the main character in one story of Baby in a Box by Sarah Braunstein starts going by her nickname, Luna.
- There’s a Muriel Rukeyser poem in the anthology Night Feeds and Morning Songs (ed. Ana Sampson) and Rukeyser is a character in Sophie Ward’s Our Better Natures, which I was also reading at the time.
- Eating boiled ham in Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (and boiled turkey in The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker).
Checking a hotel room for bedbugs in Transcription by Ben Lerner and Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy.
- A young person writing in shorthand in I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and First Class Murder by Robin Stevens.
- A character named Emmie in Transcription by Ben Lerner and (no surprise here) Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory by Barbara Yelin.
- Noting that roses are not suited to a particular climate in The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson and Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl.
- A Welsh character named Owain in Fountainville by Tishani Doshi and Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd.
- The Secret Garden is discussed/mentioned in Reading My Mother Back by Timothy C. Baker and Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth, and mentioned in The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson.
- The protagonist is emotionless at their mother’s deathbed in Like Mother by Jenny Diski and Leaving Home by Mark Haddon.
- (Apologies: this one is grim.) A young woman is sexually assaulted with a bottle in The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine and The Truth about Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent (both Irish novelists).
- A husband is involved in a deliberate (suicidal) crash in Show Me Where It Hurts by Claire Gleeson and one story of I Am the Ghost Here by Kim Samek.
- Ali Baba’s cave is used as a metaphor in The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King.
- A brother- and sister-in-law have an affair in the two Portuguese novels I read on my Portugal holiday, The Migrant Painter of Birds by Lídia Jorge and The Piano Cemetery by José Luís Peixoto.
- A woman describes her discovery of orgasm in The Half Life by Rachel Beanland and The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel.
- ‘There are two kinds of people…’ thinking in The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich and one story of It Will Come Back to You by Sigrid Nunez.
- Money is hidden behind a boiler in The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich and The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius.
The surname Callaway in The Half Life by Rachel Beanland and Calloway in The Watersmith by Yance Wyatt.
- Louise Erdrich, whose The Mighty Red I was reading at the time, is mentioned in The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting by Robert Irwin.
- A minor character named Genevieve appears in Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen and The Watersmith by Yance Wyatt.
- The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich is the second novel I’ve read within eight months (after The Wedding People by Alison Espach) in which a reluctant bride is saddled with a groom named Gary.
- A mountain lion sighting in The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich and Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer.
- A character has a love of Agatha Christie novels in The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel and Buckeye by Patrick Ryan.
- A character with the nickname Kitten in Nonesuch by Francis Spufford (particularly funny because it’s for a thug) and Kitten by Stacey Yu.
- Reading two queer novels with an academic writing course setting at the same time: Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly.
- A remark about the rare beauty of black hair with blue eyes in Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly and My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy.
- An STD is evidence of a husband’s infidelity in The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain and A Beautiful Loan by Mary Costello.
- Bottles being used to hold picnic meals / foraged blackberries (noted because these days it would be plastic pots for everything) in Zami by Audre Lorde (the 1940s) and The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain (the 1960s).
Kismet is a character name in The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich, so I was primed to notice the word being used in Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (it’s a synonym for fate).
- A writer who faces the wall to work in The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain (Ted Hughes, that is) and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein (referring to Alice B. Toklas!).
- A painting of an Arctic tern features in The Migrant Painter of Birds by Lídia Jorge (on the cover) and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly.
- Hot milk is drunk in The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson, Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly (with Ovaltine), Nonesuch by Francis Spufford, and Kitten by Stacey Yu.
- William James is mentioned in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy and Wise by Frank Tallis.
Algerian Muslim men appear in A Beautiful Loan by Mary Costello and Moveable Feasts by Chris Newens.
- A pet cat was found on the shore in The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson and Kitten by Stacey Yu.
- Bringing cherries to an invalid in Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly.
- Sex with a woman who has a mastectomy scar in Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly and Zami by Audre Lorde.
- A sighting of a kingfisher as auspicious in Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly and Transcription by Ben Lerner.
- The idea that former lovers leave a mark on people in Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Zami by Audre Lorde.
- Pet cat(s) do themselves a mischief by getting into paint supplies in Zami by Audre Lorde and Kitten by Stacey Yu.
- A Sandymount, Dublin setting in A Beautiful Loan by Mary Costello and Hood by Emma Donoghue.
- An Irish family where the mother and one daughter move to the USA and the father and other daughter stay behind in Hood by Emma Donoghue and The Truth about Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent (both Irish novelists).
- The concept of a “funeral cake” in The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly.
- A character regrets wearing eye makeup on an emotional occasion in The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly.
My second Irish novel of the year that takes place over one week: Hood by Emma Donoghue (after One by One in the Dark by Deirdre Madden).
- A cat of confusing gender: Grace is male in Hood by Emma Donoghue and Bob is always referred to as “it” in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy.
- The idea that it’s rare for a woman to a) be a good storyteller (in The Torrents of Spring by Ivan Turgenev) or b) tell a punchline with a straight face (in The Correspondent by Virginia Evans – at least the man gets called out on his sexist opinion in this case). I also noticed the use of the word “caprice” in both books (and also in Turgenev’s First Love) because it’s unusual and I like it.
- Another grim, grim one: reading two books at the same time in which a woman is / women are drugged and raped while unconscious (A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot and Women Talking by Miriam Toews).
- I read two short stories in quick succession about a peasant porter who carries a broom: “A Real Durwan” by Jhumpa Lahiri (from Interpreter of Maladies) followed by “Mumu” by Ivan Turgenev.
- An older woman insists that she still is/has a little girl inside in The Correspondent by Virginia Evans and A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot.
The number 7 has magical significance for the author in Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt and A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot.
- A couple meets when they see each other reading the same book in an outdoor location: A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes in Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave; and The Great Gatsby in Sunset Park by Paul Auster.
- Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For is mentioned in Hood by Emma Donoghue; I was reading a Bechdel book, The Secret of Superhuman Strength, at the same time.
- Gnats are irksome in Sunset Park by Paul Auster and Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
July Releases: Speak to Me & The Librarianist
I didn’t expect these two novels to have anything in common, but in fact they’re both about lonely, introverted librarians who have cause to plunge into memories of a lost relationship. (They also had a couple of random tiny details in common, for which see my next installment of Book Serendipity.) Tonally, however, they couldn’t be more different, and while the one worked for me the other did not at all. You might be surprised which! Read on…
Speak to Me by Paula Cocozza
I adored Cocozza’s debut, How to Be Human, so news of her follow-up was very exciting. The brief early synopses made it sound like it couldn’t be more up my street what with the theme of a woman frustrated by her husband’s obsession with his phone – I’m a smartphone refusenik and generally nod smugly along to arguments about how they’re an addiction that encourages lack of focus and time wasting. But it turns out that was only a peripheral topic; the novel is strangely diffuse and detached.
Susan is a middle-aged librarian and mother to teenage twin boys. She lives with them and her husband Kurt on a partially built estate in Berkshire full of soulless houses of various designs. Their “Beaufort” is not a happy place, and their marriage is failing, for several reasons. One is tech guru Kurt’s phone addiction. Susan refers to each new model as “Wendy,” and for her the last straw is when he checks it during the middle of sex on her 50th birthday. She joins a forum for likeminded neglected family members, and kills several Wendys by burial, washing machine, or sledgehammer.
But as the story goes on, Kurt’s issues fade into the background and Susan becomes more obsessed with the whereabouts of a leather suitcase that went missing during their move. The case contains letters and souvenirs from her relationship with Antony, whom she met at 16. She’s convinced that Kurt is hiding it, and does ever odder things in the quest to get it back, even letting herself into their former suburban London home. Soon her mission shifts: not only does she want Antony’s letters back; she wants Antony himself.
The message seems a fairly obvious one: the characters have more immediate forms of communication at their disposal than ever before, yet are not truly communicating with each other about what they need and want from life, and allowing secrets to come between them. “We both act as if talking will destroy us, but surely silence will, more slowly, and we will be undone by all the things we leave unsaid,” Susan thinks about her marriage. Nostalgia and futurism are both held up as problematic. Fair enough.
However, Susan is unforthcoming and delusional – but not in the satisfying unreliable narrator way – and delivers this piecemeal record with such a flat affect (reminding me of no one more than the title character from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun; Susan even says, “Why do I feel scared that someone will find me out every time I tick the box that says ‘I am not a robot’?”) that I lost sympathy early on and couldn’t care what happened. A big disappointment from my Most Anticipated list.
With thanks to Tinder Press for the proof copy for review.
The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt
Bob Comet, a retired librarian in Portland, Oregon, gets a new lease on life at age 71. One day he encounters a lost woman with dementia and/or catatonia in a 7-Eleven and, after accompanying her back to the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, decides to volunteer there. A plan to read aloud to his fellow elderly quickly backfires, but the resident curmudgeons and smart-asses enjoy his company, so he’ll just come over to socialize.
If it seems this is heading in a familiar A Man Called Ove or The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen direction, think again. Bob has a run-in with his past that leads into two extended flashbacks: one to his brief marriage to Connie and his friendship with his best man, Ethan, in 1960; the other to when he ran away by train and bus at age 11.5 and ended up in a hotel as an assistant to two eccentric actresses and their performing dogs for a few days in 1945.
Imagine if Wes Anderson directed various Dickens vignettes set in the mid-20th-century Pacific Northwest – Oliver Twist with dashes of Great Expectations and Nicholas Nickleby. That’s the mood of Bob Comet’s early adventures. Witness this paragraph:
The next day Bob returned to the beach to practice his press rolls. The first performance was scheduled to take place thirty-six hours hence; with this in mind, Bob endeavored to arrive at a place where he could achieve the percussive effect without thinking of it. An hour and a half passed, and he paused, looking out to sea and having looking-out-to-sea thoughts. He imagined he heard his name on the wind and turned to find Ida leaning out the window of the tilted tower; her face was green as spinach puree, and she was waving at him that he should come up. Bob held the drum above his head, and she nodded that he should bring it with him.
(You can just picture the Anderson staginess: the long establishing shots; the jump cuts to a close-up on her face, then his; the vibrant colours; the exaggerated faces. I got serious The Grand Budapest Hotel vibes.) This whole section was so bizarre and funny that I could overlook the suspicion that deWitt got to the two-thirds point of his novel and asked himself “now what?!” The whole book is episodic and full of absurdist dialogue, and delights in the peculiarities of its characters, from Connie’s zealot father to the diner chef who creates the dubious “frizzled beef” entrée. And Bob himself? He may appear like a blank, but there are deep waters there. And his passion for books was more than enough to endear him to me:
“Bob was certain that a room filled with printed matter was a room that needed nothing.”
[Ethan:] “‘I keep meaning to get to books but life distracts me.’ ‘See, for me it’s just the opposite,’ Bob said.”
“All his life he had believed the real world was the world of books; it was here that mankind’s finest inclinations were represented.”
Weird and hilariously deadpan in just the way you’d expect from the author of The Sisters Brothers and French Exit, this was the pop of fun my summer needed. (See also Susan’s review.)
With thanks to Bloomsbury for the proof copy for review.
Would you read one or both of these?
Summery Reading, Part I: The Greengage Summer & Sunburn by Watson
Brief thoughts on a first pair of summer-themed reads: coming-of-age stories about teenage girls who trade England for somewhere more exciting – France or Greece – for a summer and awaken to the complications of sex when let down by the adults in their lives. Both: 
The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden (1958)
We wanted to read something by Godden in my book club’s women’s classics subgroup, and decided on this almost purely for the evocative title. Cecil is the second of five children who run amok at a French hotel while their father is botanizing in Tibet and their mother in hospital with an infected horsefly bite. Hotel staff and hangers-on are engaged in all sorts of shenanigans – affairs and casual molestation of the maids, for instance – and the children, caught up in the thrill of it, attach themselves to Eliot, the English lover of Mademoiselle Zizi. The adults get Cecil and her older sister, Joss, drunk on champagne. Joss is the belle of the ball and attracts an inappropriate suitor; Cecil gets her first period and tells Eliot, of all people. It’s a familiar message in mid-century fiction, I suppose: loss of sexual innocence leads to disaster. I found this quite melodramatic, with a sudden ending; it didn’t live up to the terrific premise. I was similarly underwhelmed by Black Narcissus. (University library)
Sunburn by Andi Watson; illus. Simon Gane (2022)
We open in suburban London in what appears to be the 1950s. Sixteen-year-old Rachel is offered a lucky escape from a summer of working at the butcher shop to stay with her parents’ friends, the Warners, at their home on a Greek island. Their life is a heady mix of languorous shopping, swimming and nightly parties. There’s a big contrast between the sophisticated expats and the local peasantry. When Rachel meets Ben, a fellow English teenager, it seems like her idyllic summer is complete, but things sour between them. Over the course of the book, Rachel realizes that not all grown-ups can be trusted. The plot took a twist I wasn’t expecting, which is always refreshing, but I should probably have been ready for it based on the depictions. The graphic novel is all in shades of blue, with white and light brown accents, as befitting the Greek flag and scenery. A problem I had was that most of the characters look the same – the artist has just the one way of drawing faces, so Rachel, Mrs. Warner and Ben have pretty much identical features. I would have catalogued this in YA. (Public library)
Both at least had a steamy summer atmosphere! My next seasonal read, picked up from the library today, will be One Midsummer’s Day by Mark Cocker, which is all about swifts. We have a pair nesting in our eaves again this year – hurrah! – and have been enjoying watching their (albeit diminished) screaming parties tear down the streets on warm summer evenings.
Any “summer” or “sun” books for you this year?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 