Black Inc’s The Best Australian Stories 2007 (TBAST? TBAS2?) is pictured above in my hotel room in Dakar. (Senegal!) By all (travel guide) accounts it’s pretty difficult to find cheap accommodation that isn’t also a brothel in Dakar, so consider its green glow indicative of achievement and relief rather than envy. I was in Dakar for New Year’s Eve, so it’s been a long time between drinks. Let’s see what I remember.

TBAST has plenty of very strong examples of unique voices, an element which is key in short-form fiction. I enjoyed every story in this collection, even the non-virtuosic ones. Most of them have been published before in Australia’s various literary rags. My favourites, though, the ones I still think about, were mostly written in sophisticated, forcibly rendered first-person narrative. I do enjoy a good first-person now and then. So, to some examples.

Tom Cho’s ‘The Bodyguard’: ‘Someone is stalking Whitney Houston and I have been hired to be her bodyguard.’ A demented, playful, anxious foraging into Hollywood romance and masculinity, this is the kind of writing I’ve been thirsting to see from an Australian for a long time. ‘Quirky’, creative fiction needs an assured, strong voice, and Cho can certainly produce one of those. I kind of almost fell out of my chair for this story. He’s got a collection out now, too.

I die for Louise Swinn’s fiction. Her story Endgame is a compelling example of how vocabulary and sentence structure can give rise to a very successful voice. Endgame‘s protagonist is an immediate presence:

The class was told that I’d found my mother burning and I had never corrected them. Nobody said it to my face anyway. We filed out to morning assembly and I stood leaning against the brick wall up the back listening to the principal call out winners of last week’s basketball. I watched the cloud through the window as it darkened and exploded into massive drops of loud rain. Our teacher flicked the hall lights on. I expected her to tell me to stop leaning against the back wall but she didn’t.

There are also a couple of violently impressionistic stories that use such commanding imagery that my retina, impossibly, retains memories of them. Patrick Lenton’s ‘Uncle Jeremy Has Turned into a Tree’ needs little explanation from me. In Lee Kofman’s ‘Floating above the Village’, a cross-cultural mother-daughter relationship and desultory wanderings through Melbourne are anchored by the fey spectre of Chagall’s Au Dessus de la Ville.

Then, of course, there’s Nam Le’s ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’, which needs a category all of its own. No other piece of writing has been on my mind as much in 2009 as this story. It is complex and fictively autobiographical. The fictive Le is ‘dreaming about a poem’ in Iowa, and when he awakes, his father is standing in front of him,

smiling ambiguously. He wore black trousers and a wet, wrinkled parachute jacket that looked like it had just been pulled out of a washing machine.

What a punch in the guts. How simple his writing can be, and how powerful. Le’s story unbalanced me when I first read it (in The Boat, last year): Did I like it? Did the angsty, awkward confessions (‘The truth was…’; ‘That’s all I’ve ever done…’) interrupt the superb tension between the writer and his father; were the writerly clichés of Johnny Walker and blonde girlfriend too thoughtlessly exploited? But…wasn’t the brevity of the dialogue potent, and the son’s appropriating the pathos of the father’s Vietnam War experience ever-so-tentatively callous? At the apex of what good literature can do, Le is sitting on a solemn throne, pumping conflicted blood through his readers’ hearts as well as his.

These are just a few of the friends you can make in this book. So the news is good, all very good. Can’t wait to read TBAST. I mean, The Best Australian Stories 2008.

I like short stories, and I like that short stories are garnering (in my humble, based-on-anecdote opinion) a wider audience; I talk about Nam Le and Miranda July lately as much as I talk about Haruki Murakami and Ernest Hemingway. New Australian Stories is on Scribe’s ‘latest bestsellers’ list, so that’s heartening. The short story’s a great narrative form, and I’m not going to insultingly qualify that statement by saying ‘for our time’ or ‘for my postmodern, YouTube-inhaling generation’, because I’m not sure that those kinds of things are relevant except for as PR pap.

My love for short stories explained: I like the way short stories seem like biopsies, sampling as if for your edification and entertainment lumpy segments of life. My love for short story collections explained: I really like eating at restaurants partly because I love menus — if you read about everything on offer it’s like sampling each one, if only in your head. In the case of short story collections, reading/sampling is consuming. For me, a person who finds picking and choosing hard, that’s great. A local focus is good too; I like seeing what lots of Australian writers are up to, from the ones I’m familiar with from collections, literary magazines, newspapers and small press, through to the ones I’ve never heard of (no fault of theirs, I’m sure, as the authors all have extensive biographies). It’s also great for the writers, because it puts them in touch with a wider audience. So I guess what I’m saying is that I love the idea of an Australian short story anthology, especially considering that short stories (for whatever reason) are still considered black holes for the publishing dollar.

Scribe’s New Australian Stories, most of whose constituent stories are previously unpublished, gives us stories from the likes of Cate Kennedy, Louise Swinn and Paddy O’Reilly as well as lots of writers I’ve never read (my fault, not theirs — most of the authors have extensive biographies). Stories spanning the spectrum of experience, from the beginning of life to the guilt, agony and mystery of death, can be found in this diverse collection. Re: birth, see Max Barry’s anti-couvade experience in How I Met My Daughter: ‘They dragged this bloody, howling thing from my wife’s abdomen, its limbs twitching and clawing, its face like an angry pumpkin, and asked me, “Do you want to take a photo?”‘ Re: death, see Ryan O’Neill’s ‘Last Words’: ‘Most last words, he had discovered, were banal.’

If short stories are biopsies, then the writers of New Australian Stories are skilled surgeons. The best short stories can conjure a past and a future out of a segment of present. Lots of the stories in this collection do this well. Highlights for me included Abigail Ulman’s Chagall’s Wife, whose tale of a high-school student angling for the attentions of a teacher easily evokes the nonchalance and unexamined alertness of burgeoning sexuality. It also stands out for its lean, direct prose; most of the other stories have a tendency towards fleshier prose which can sometimes be less effective. Another stand-out was Vivienne Kelly’s The Third Child. In this story, Frances writes yearly letters about her unchanging life to an aunt who lives abroad. Kelly’s restraint is admirable and pays off in an unexpected way; it’s a breathtaking story.

In relation to the talk of eliminating the territorial copyright provisions, there has been some fear that if it were to go ahead, uniquely Australian voices and stories would be lost. I get the feeling that the production of this kind of book will be negatively affected by major changes to the Australian parallel importation laws; I’d guess that the risk to independent Australian presses of putting out works by new (to books) Australian authors put is offset by their domestic sales of big-ticket overseas titles and books by established local heroes. The way the Productivity Commission is going (i.e. arbitrarily hedging their bets), if you love short stories, you should buy books like these and make them bestsellers in their own right.

You may have noticed that what’s pictured here is The Essential James Joyce, not a Dubliners edition. The collection contains Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and excerpts from the ‘difficult’ Joyce books. I’ve only read Dubliners so far; it’s one of the books I read while I was away over the summer. Two months have passed since I returned, so my memory of it has faded spectacularly. But what I do remember about reading it is that I was strongly reminded of the Oscar Wilde story ‘The Happy Prince’, which I loved when I was a child. (Full text here.) That story begins:

High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword-hilt.

A swallow nests at the base of the statue but is soon disturbed by the Prince’s tears. The Prince is unhappy because ‘they have set me up here so high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead, yet I cannot choose but weep.’ Feeling sorry for the Prince, the swallow agrees to stay three winter nights taking the jewels and gold from the Prince’s statue to the poorest people in the city: the seamstress with a sick child, the playwright with no fire in his garret, a match-girl freezing in the square.

It wasn’t the sentimentality of Wilde’s story that Dubliners brought to mind, but the immediacy and interrelatedness of its vignettes, and the fossicking for drama in lots of everyday lives. Joyce’s stories alight severally on scenes from early-20th-century Dublin and feature places, characters and situations based on assiduous observations and sometimes his personal experiences. If we consider Dubliners a realist survey of its titular city, locating from amongst its thousands of minute happenings a sample of representative scenes, we can infer the significance (at least to Joyce) of the decay of political idealism (‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’), the negotiation of class through marriage (‘The Boarding House’), Protestant-Catholic push-and-pulling (‘Grace’) and dilettanteism in the Gaelic language movement (‘A Mother’). But a more domestic horizon is also figured; Joyce’s characters include an intellectual bachelor whose one love affair returns to affect him (‘A Painful Case’) and a young woman on the brink of leaving Ireland to live with her fiancé in Buenos Aires (‘Eveline’).

It’s interesting, though, to remember how controversial this book was when it was finished in 1905. Obviously, there’s nothing here to shock a modern audience. In fact, I found Dubliners curiously unlively. The detail of the stories is evocative: street and family names reoccur with verisimilitudinous frequency. But the detachment and disillusionment evident in the telling of these stories is alienating. They resolve the intricacies of Dublin into but a cold picture; carousing and conviviality are portrayed without warmth, just as relationships are made and abandoned without hope or affection. Dubliners is no surprising product of an expatriate son of Ireland, and it’s certainly not a cheerful companion. Unlike the Happy Prince, who was discarded by the mayor and his henchmen because of the shabbiness he acquires after giving his treasures to the city’s downtrodden, Joyce writes with a flat disenchantment, bestowing little gleam upon his Dubliners.

It pains me to be hasty in writing about a book I enjoyed so much, but my immune system’s inability to deal with certain allergens yesterday means that I feel like I’m about to collapse. So just a quick one today.

So, it took what seems to be a long time for me to read any Carver. I love tensile writing, and I love minimalist writing even more. So Carver was always going to be a shoo-in for me. I was already familiar with the Gordon Lish controversy, and the lauded minimalist qualities of the prose resulting from Carver’s relationship with Lish, his one-time editor. Literary drama is always fun, and there are lots of arguments to be made on both sides of that fence. But the results of the Lish/Carver collaboration(?) are powerful and timeless, despite whatever might be said about its ethics.

Some of the stories are very short. ‘The Father’, weighing in at two pages, describes something like a pastoral tableau in which a newborn baby is coddled by its family. When trying to work out who the baby looks like, little Carol decides that it is ‘Daddy’. Yet, when the other girls hear this, they express their confusion: ‘But who does Daddy look like?’ Carver allows the father only one appearance at the end of the story, but his lack of expression and paleness in response to these innocent questions speak volumes.

This is really the genius of Carver: to be able to imply desolation without so much as typing a ‘d’. He’s the biggest shower-not-teller I’ve ever read. Carver’s simple sentences seem to play tricks. Straightforward (‘I had a feeling tonight.’); vernacular (‘I’m getting jealous, Rudy says to Joanne.’); and barely touching a 4 on the affect scale, there’s nothing flashy to the discrete parts of language that make up the stories. Neither are there any ‘big bang’ moments; as far as we can tell, these are either in the past or future. Carver places his characters on a cliff which is crumbling from underneath. Woven together, the words, sentences and paragraphs create portraits that would seem mild but for the ellipses and cathexes Carver is able to evoke. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please depicts, over and over again, the inanition of small town American life.

Extra points: Geoffrey Wolff’s review in the New York Times from 1976.

I ordered the Mini Shots box set (issues #1-10) from Vignette Press a little while back. Mini Shots are cute single short stories you can pop into your pocket or bag and they’re all by emerging Australian authors. I’ve read three so far — they are very good public transport companions. If you’re scared of short stories, these booklets could be a good introduction as the stories are very accessible, though a bit unpolished at times. These little books are a great and inexpensive way to support local authors. Also, the ‘mini’ format is a fantastic way to let the character of a short story shine, unobscured by collection-mates.

Each of the stories is quite different. ‘Coda’ by Simon Groth is about the relationship which develops between Astrid, a fledgling nurse, and Martin Finn, a patient with ‘locked-in syndrome’, which leaves him unable to communicate except for a complicated system of eye movements. Martin’s frustration at being unable to communicate extensively finds a receptive balm in Astrid’s willingness to assist him. Groth does a nice job of splitting the narrative between Astrid and Martin, making them both sympathetic and real.

Emmett Stinson’s ‘Something So Helpless’ takes a look at life and death in Washington. David and Steve find it difficult to confront the issues posed by a mewling kitten left by its mother out the front of their house. Stinson uses this scenario to portray a city, rent by violence and overtaken by consumerism, whose inhabitants maintain a practised (or feigned) nonchalance towards the cruelty of urban life. This story probably worked the least well for me, partly because the characters weren’t immediately differentiable, which is crucial if you’re only going to do 1500 words. I liked it more on a second flick-through, though.

Mini Shot #3 is Sarah Jansen’s ‘Dragon Dust’, an elegantly written fantasy story. Velvet is a busy, lively, loving mother with four children, a husband and a crotchety mother-in-law. Her everyday life in a country town is so beautifully and gently described by Jansen that the foreshadowing of the town’s problems with an old enemy is really able to build up to an affecting end. The title may put off non-fantasy readers, you know, two types of people in the world: likes reading about dragons/doesn’t. I’m unabashedly in the ‘likes’ camp, so take your advice advisedly.

Looking forward to getting to the others; it feels really nice getting one of these out of my bag at the beginning of a train trip and putting it away, finished, by the time I get home.

It’s been so unforgivably long since I read this that I’m going to try and read it again next year, or at least some of the stories, or at least skim through and re-awaken some kind of memory or feeling. It’s not you, Lorrie, it’s me and my utter lack of accountability. Sorry! I do remember it was good, though. I love American short story collections.