Perfect for a quiet night in alone

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

by Richard Yates

Richard Yates’s level of perception is so deep, and brought to the page with such grace, that even his most poignant and gloomy stories fill mewith joy. This collection of shorts is such a work. Each story in this remarkable little volume is carefully observed, each a study in loneliness. And yet Yates is able to lead the reader through them without feeling the same pain as his characters. His skill as an observer of the human condition is such that you feel connected to these sad characters, but able to sympathise from a distance at the same time. You feel like their psychiatrist: calculating a diagnosis, while understanding their character on every level.

And that does not mean that these stories come off as cold or distant. Just that Yates’s style affords you a kind of objectivity. It is not true objectivity – you still feel something for the lonely teacher who never quite hits it off with her class – but it is objective nonetheless. Yates has lifted the lid on these people’s homes so that you might look in on their lives. You can see and feel them with the professional detachment of a counsellor.

The collection is also a canny, if demographically narrow, perspective on twentieth century America, as is Yates’s Revolutionary Road. The intriguing social experiment of American modernity is portrayed with Yates’s characteristic pathos and clarity. For that alone, these stories are excellent.

The ballast of great American literature

The Ballad of the Sad Café

By Carson McCullers

The first book I reviewed on this blog was The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, over two years ago. I knew I’d return to her writing some day, so I was delighted to find a copy of Sad Café for sale in a charity shop, charging 10p. It’s probably the most undervalued book I own!

What a brilliant collection of stories this is. The novella that lends its title to the entire collection is a perfect study of Miss Amelia, her hunchbacked companion Cousin Lymon and her ex-husband Marvin Macy. The novella contains some wonderful descriptions of these characters: as is true with friends in life, you feel as if you know them deeply and yet they remain enigmatic at the same time. You can’t ever know someone completely. McCullers gives us just enough of her protagonist, Miss Amelia, to understand her motivations in life. And yet the author holds something back, making Miss Amelia mysterious and unfathomable in the final analysis. It makes for an intriguing story.

As with Wedding, the stories here are filled with exquisite evocations of place and time. Sad Café occurs in a small, wood shack of a town, dusty roads, nosy residents. McCullers puts you in the middle of it – in the café itself, among the moonshine swillers and the hefty wooden furniture. The other stories are equally capable of dropping the reader into their setting, perhaps none more so than A Domestic Dilemma, in which a man confronts his wife’s alcoholism. Arguably a much crisper representation of suburban domestic horror than The Women’s Room, albeit from the husband’s perspective, this story manages to suggest that the home is no cruise ship. The husband sees his wife’s problem, tries to protect their children from it and even tries to help his wife. And yet the heartbreaking conclusion is his apparent admission that he can’t do much for her and that perhaps this is the way it is. The story is a much more nuanced way to address the domestic question than The Women’s Room. It is not combative from the outside; it merely shows from the inside of these characters how awful the social structure of marriage and family can be.

Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland is a brilliant title, and the story contained within it just as good. The tale is a brief exploration of one simple observation: that some people lie for the sake of lying. We all know someone who does this and, while McCullers can’t answer why people do it, she outlines its effect on those around them. Enlightening observational stuff, McCullers. Will it be another two years before I find you again?

Carry on storytelling

The Things They Carried

By Tim O’Brien

When I recently told a friend the title of the book I was reading, he said, “That sounds like something a creative writing class would study.” He’s right – this book is on writing and literature class syllabuses around the world. I came across one of the stories years ago in such a class. And while I am usually resistant to ‘poster books’ held up by writing tutors as examples to follow (because that’s largely missing the point of creative writing), my rule does not apply to The Things They Carried.

In fact, hardly any rules apply to this outstanding piece of work. It is fiction, memoir, history and reportage all at the same time. I cannot imagine a more effective way of describing a soldier’s journey through the Vietnam war and its impact on his life. O’Brien’s achievement is in realising that any story about war is exactly that – a story, with artifice and design laced through it by the nature of telling. And so he writes self-reflexively about war storytelling, both among friends and in books.

His descriptions of the battle zone and combat itself are succinct and frank. There is not a spare word anywhere. To use a cliché, he really tells it like it is. O’Brien’s characters are clear distinctive and, of course, authentic – even the ones he made up. But perhaps the most moving aspect of this book is the contrast between the war zone and the outside world, both before and after. O’Brien describes his youth and his comrade’s post-war depression in what has to be the most effective way I could ever think of. The tale of his friend’s life after the war is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read.

The earth moved

after the quake

By Haruki Murakami

Alan Bennett, stridently opposed to library closure, may use curious language to make his arguments, but the fact is that libraries bring a great deal of joy. Most recently, my library brought me joy’s Japanese herder, Haruki Murakami.

When a friend remarked that the recent quake and tsunami in Japan will inspire a great deal of cultural production from that country over the coming years, I was reminded that Murakami had written a collection of stories after the 1995 Kobe earthquake. The same evening I passed my library, which is running a Murakami promotion, and there in the window sat the very same book, after the quake. A few moments later, after an impulse-loan, I was striding down the high street with the book in my hand. Had the library have been a bookshop requiring money, I would have passed on. So, yes, libraries rule OK.

As does Murakami. His perfect and delightful prose is so absorbing that it took me no time to devour this little collection. The book includes a handful of stories about characters affected in one way or another by the earthquake in Kobe. We’re not talking about the endeavours of rubble-scouring firemen or the horror of trapped victims. Murakami is more interested in the deeper, psychological impact of the quake. So he talks of a woman who fears the quake may have broken her marriage, and a man whose very imagination may have caused the quake. What a ride.

Murakami’s controlled and structured stories feel light, like a skilled dancer who appears to float. His words are only occasionally hindered by cliché (which may be due to translation); mostly they dance and delight. But he’s about more than just le mot juste. His stories are often surreal, even daft – but they are always genuine. They are viewpoints on modern life, so subtle in their delivery that you barely notice them. A beautiful, accomplished collection.