'I called, and John was very sweet, asking how I was feeling, how the memorial service had gone, how my father was. And I told him all that and then I knew I couldn't tell him the rest and that I couldn't marry a man I couldn't tell this story too.' ( Amy Bloom, Love is not a Pie)

I remember reading this story and going 'tingly' at the liberating insightfulness of this revelation. The narrator has just attended her mother's funeral and is responding to the 'supportive' telephone inquiry of her fiance. And in verbalising her response, the narrator recognises the limits of her relationship with this very conventional man and ends the relationship over the phone:  there and then!

For the narrator feels the distance between her world and his;  between her words and his..and this haitus exposes the emotional abyss that exists beneath the shiny acceptability of their relationship. Bloom manages to encapsulate this emotional distance between the characters through  this looming awareness of story telling as a means  of literally 'passing on' who we are, and where we would hope to go.  Anecdotes are far more than 'just' stories, they are actaully a means of shaping and rehsaping who and what we are.  

My clumsy paraphrasing just serves to highlight how briliantly incisive Amy Bloom is at recognising those make or break moments of reciprocity in the middle of our suddenly awkward lives. . Indeed the  ability to reciprocate  ( or not) is probably Bloom's central concern in her short stories. Her two collections of stories are nothing short of miraculous and is probably only writer I have ever taught who stuns her readers into silence.

' the bed's made up.I'll be up before you in the morning.

'How do you know? '

'I don't.' She came down three steps. I'm pretending I know.'  ( Night Vison)

Mother and son have been estranged for years. The mother's act of improvised knowing about  the son's daily habits is almost too painfully honest to read. It carries all the weight of 11 years of yearning in just  one phrase. How much Bloom must listen to know this? This a lonely monologue striving to reach out and grow again  into dialogue.

Amy Bloom is a truly adult writer. She dares to know and say things society and individuals prefer to bury deep. And what she knows, she knows with a tenderness that few can reach and I think we all yearn for in secret.

Probably the best short story writer on the planet!

Imagine a shop exclusive enough to have a secret password...a shop daring enough to deny Madonna access..This  story explores the nearly orgasmic pleasure of  dressing up ...and down ...

'Try this,' said the girl to Isobel, holding against her a dress in a green the violent colour of a cricket pitch before a thunderstorm.

'Yes,' said Isabel slowly, nodding.

The girl dropped an acid-yellow mantilla over her left shoulder and we let out of collective breath with a hiss.She smiled in triumph. '

We are in a fallen Eden. We are Lamia-serpents pleasured by the sight of our prey. Temptation talks and walks as colour! Every shade has its own metaphor and seduces the both eye and body.

Brings a wildness to the idea of the changing room and pin number!

The door was glossy with its second white coat, immaculate. It had two silver bolts, which he demonstrated would slide easily  and slickly into the plates he'd fitted in the frame...

'Better not shut it for another couple of hours,' he suggested. 'With luck the rain'll hold off that long; I think it will, but if you shut it before then the piant won't have hardened enough, it'll stick to the frame when you open it again. So leave it to harden for as long as you can before you shut the door. '

I can recognise good advice when I hear it. This was what I neeeded to know.

'Thank you,' I said.' Thank you.'

Helen Simpson is one of the best short story writers around. A natural successor to Mansfield, Simpson manages to explore the secret isolation of our daily lives, and the ways in which the ordinary can become a life saving epiphany. Here, the organisation of a new back door after a break in becomes an unexpected means of healing after the death of a married lover. The  neutral, practical advice of the door fitter takes on a progressively meaningful aspect as the story moves on; and as the security door takes shape, so does the protagonist's feeling of hope and unexpected normality. The revelation of hope through a vocabulary of 'beading' and 'brass screws' is brilliantly done and allows the protagonist the dignity of her 'secret self' whilst also communicating her metamorphosis to the reader. We are as reassured by the fitter as the narrator!

So hard to do and Simpson makes it look SO easy...

An umissable writer.

AWAY FROM HOME

It has been so long since she last used a metaphor!

This has become a homage to Lydia Davis day! And why not - she has a dead pan delivery and sharp eye worthy of Beckett.  And how tenacious too!

This tale embraces Milan Kundera's astute premise that relationships fail due to our inability to understand another's metaphors. If I don't 'get' your range of reference and you don't get mine, then there is little room for growth or care?

Davis captures the very real sense that 'home' is where we are appreciated linguistically. You don't have to look too far in books to find how true this is. Linton's marriage to feisty Cathy in Wuthering Heights founders upon his register of complacency and restrictive 'decency'. Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day explores the tragedy of cowardice, expressed through the stilted vocabulary of a man who does not dare to interpret the words of his companions metaphorically 'otherwise' and so consigns himself to terminal loneliness; a death-in-life.  

SAMUEL JOHNSON

 IS INDIGNANT:

that Scotland has so few trees.

How perfectly delivered is this? Each time I read it it makes me laugh out loud! How audaciously brief! We have read a short story in a minute.But what does it mean? Why should the great Samuel Johnson allow his emotions such rein for such an absurd  reason?

  And then, when you examine the tale its parts are far more tricksy than may first appear. great fun for the copyists amongst us and conserves ink and energy!

FABULOUS!!!

'A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years. it was not enough for her to brush his coats, wipe his inkwell, finger his ivory comb: she had to build her house over his grave and sit with him night after night in the damp cellar. '

I  have had a lot of fun with this story this week!

Is it a short homage to Edgar Allan Poe with its Gothic infrastructure of  morbidity and melancholy? Or is it a gloomy elegy on lost love unconsummated and unrequited ?

My feeling is that Lydia Davis is sardonically exposing the futility of many relationships. Afterall there are many ways to be dead before we take our last breath? Why do we often ignore the emotional signficance of those who declare their emotional aridity and still see them as redeemable and a challenge?  

The brevity of the tale renders the subject matter stunning. Nothing is wasted, everything is suggestive. The connotations of the highly selective vocabulary are wildly resonant; who would want to sit in that damp cellar I wonder? We can almost smell the sexually fetid air. But what is the woman doing down there?Our mind wanders and wonders ! 

This is orchestrated behaviour for an audience both within and without the tale. The speaker is watching herself being 'watched'( even with a dead gaze) and may take pleasure in such a gaze. And we as readers are repeating the same scenario. The sensory habits and rituals enjoyed by the unnamed woman make her strangely real to us. Her desire for daily activity is insatiable, and hardly unique. But where should the line be drawn?

In the cellar of our imagination perhaps?!

Drama is everywhere!

"For me the research that underlies the writing is the best part of the scribbling game. . . . On Jumbly shelves in my house I can find directions for replacing a broken pipe stem, a history of corn cribs, a booklet of Spam recipes, a 1925 copy of Animal Heroes of the Great War (mostly dogs but some camels); dictionaries of slang, dialect and regional English. . . . This digging involves more than books. I need to know which mushrooms smell like maraschino cherries and which like dead rats, to note that a magpie in flight briefly resembles a wooden spoon, to recognize vertically trapped suppressed lee-wave clouds; so much of this research is concerned with four dimensional observation and notation." ~ Annie Proulx

AS GREGOR SAMSA awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.

What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small, lay quiet between the four familiar walls. Above the table on which a collection of cloth samples was unpacked and spread out—Samsa was a commercial traveler—hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!

'It is evening. Supper is over.We have left the small, cold dining room, we have come back to the sitting room where there is a fire. All is usual. I am sitting at my writing table which is placed across a corner so that I am behind it, as it were, and facing the room. The lamp with the shade is alight; I have before me two large books of reference, both open, a pile of papers...All the paraphernalia, in fact, of an extremely occupied man. My wife, with her little boy on her lap, is on a low chair before the fire.'

The pulse of this opening is slow, careful and fastidious. The narrator is disassociated from his wife and child. Yet there is also a strange lyricism here; we recognise the universality of claustrophobia and sense the suffocation endured on all sides? Is the speaker 'browsing; through his escape options? Or inhabiting a private world where the conventionaliuty of the present ceases to affect/infect him? Like DHLawrence, KM sees socially sanctioned relationships as deathly?

'Took me about a year to figure out it was that I shouldn't a let you out a my sights.Too later then by a long, long while'

Perhaps all love stories emanate  from a pivotal moment of recognition. Yet the supreme pathos and  fragility of Proulx's profoundly moving tale seems dependent upon the inarticulacy and unknowingness of the protagonists. The tenderness  of Ennis's discovery of his own shirt  enclosed within his murdered lover's own bloody shirt  in the latter's closet. is heartbreaking.

'Hidden here inside Jack's own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.'

One of the most perfectly delivered bombshells in Contemporary Fiction.