The prose is excellent and highly readable. It sounds casual and unrehearsed, like the author is simply writing down their internal monologue. However, there’s such a wide range of characters contained in this collection of short stories this can’t be the case. These, seemingly off hand, reflections also convey rich narratives of surprising depth even though the stories are rarely more than 20 pages of double spaced text. It’s impressive and very skillfully done. The language isn’t overly pretentious and the author does a good job of effacing her own style and personality from the writing. There’s the occasional glimpse of the writer behind the characters. For example, any beige substance is usually referred to as ‘dun’ coloured and body parts are often called by the physiological name for the bone within them - mandible, clavicle.
In spite of the broad variety of characters there’s a distinctive aesthetic to the stories. It’s a bit like Wes Anderson films. It’s identifiable and somewhat dreamlike but as opposed to being cute and quirky, it’s dark, nightmarish and misanthropic. Sometimes this goes a little far for my tastes. Everyone’s a dysfunctional drug addict or alcoholic. All marriages are empty and loveless. All sex involves extensive anal fingering or dildoing. The story that best exemplifies this is The Locked Room. It’s so outlandish but retains an ostensibly realistic setting unlike A Better Place, which is explicitly other worldly and much better for being so. The Locked Room felt self-consciously weird and disgusting and this made it cartoonish, shallow and meaningless. Malibu also falls into this category. As do Mr Wu, An Honest Woman and The Surrogate in less gratuitous and definitive ways. They all had a slightly inauthentic ring. This isn’t always the case by any means. The boyfriend in The Weirdos is odd and wonderfully unpleasant in an entirely believable and interesting way. The self-obsessed hipster in Dancing in the Moonlight is also brilliantly observed. Even if his abysmal negotiations in acquiring an ottoman are a bit of a stretch. Most of the other stories were engaging, credible and well written. Her younger characters have a richer texture than her older ones. A good example of this is An Honest Woman where the only thing less plausible than the narrative is the behaviour of the old man. I suppose that could be because the author is younger but some of her best characters are male and she’s not a man!
I really enjoyed reading this largely for the excellent prose. The narratives can be a little too self consciously gruesome or downright unlikely, which is also the case for a few of the characters. Nonetheless, the stories are rich and create a powerful ambience. When good characters and narrative combine it’s fantastic as the writing is of a uniformly high quality.
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