Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ann Rand

The title of this blog post comes from one of the stories I have just finished reading. It's The Best American Short Stories 2011. One of my favourite reading events for the year – time-out with a 20 page short story that almost always leaves you transported in time and place and most importantly, wanting more. It’s like a perfect little entrée. I try to use it as a guide to new authors – to read more widely in the coming year. In this case I’d happily read any of the people featured in this anthology though I don’t think it was quite as startlingly good as the 2010 collection. And a quibble – last year’s edition featured a story from Jennifer Egan’s book A Visit from the Goon Squad which is arguably a novel. I felt a bit cheated encountering another piece from the same book, even though this is a classy bit of writing. It either falls into publication in 2010 or 2011, not both. My favourite stories were ‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan (you can read it as first published in the New Yorker, A Bridge Under Water by Tom Bissell, The Sleep by Caitlin Horrocks, Housewifely Arts by Megan Mayhew Bergman and another story by the fabulous Rebecca Makkai who has been anthologised in this series four times.

Series Editor Heidi Pitlor makes some general comments about the kind of short stories that American writers are producing. She says that each of the 2011 stories sustains its own momentum through “premise or language, character or even perfectly placed silence.” Geraldine Brooks, who was the guest editor of the 2011 collection, is forthright about what she encountered(or did not encounter) in whittling down 20 stories from 100.

"Enuf adultery!" "Foreign countries exist." "Consider the following: Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul, Handel's Messiah, Martin Luther King. Why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?" and on said humor: "There's so little. Why, writers, so haggard and so woebegone?"

I can’t really do each story justice here but there is a blogger who can. She is working her way through each story with a detailed review – very interesting and entertaining reading. Go to Claire Guyton’s Sideways Reviews. If this is too much info, there is a shorter but detailed review which discusses each story in some detail.

Tony, Susan, Arnold, Edward and Jill

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I think this is a three and a half starred book. Interesting, but it falls away in the last third. What I did like about it is that this is a book about the porous boundaries of reading. Susan receives an unpublished book in the mail from her first husband, Edward - whom she hasn't seen in 20 years (his second wife sends her an Xmas card each year). Susan had an affair with the man who became her second husband. Things ended badly between Susan and Edward. Things aren't so great with her new husband Arnold, who is away at a conference.

As the reader, we experience Susan reading Edward's narrative - which is a thriller, along with her thoughts about their relationship, her thoughts about her current marriage, and the impending arrival of Edward in her home town. So there's layers on layers here - which is what makes the book interesting. I was reading, being consious of my own life, my readerly reactions, Susan's life, and then the very lively plot within a plot. As the Guardian reviewer says: "Wright, like David Lynch, has the knack of beginning in wrongness then piling on the tension from there." He also said "if Tony & Susan can be said to be about anything other than its exploration of form, it is about the failure to be an agent in your own life."

This review also provides a description of the author, now deceased "He was a professor at the University of Cincinnati for 23 years and was obsessed by the interconnection of real and invented worlds and believing that at least in some sense the reader writes the book. His daughter Katharine told the Daily Telegraph recently that his last words to her were: "You. Are. Invented." "

The book went out of print but was resuscitated by a publisher who thought it had been neglected. It has been billed as "the most astounding lost masterpiece of American fiction since Revolutionary Road" but it's not in the same league as Revolutionary Road in my view. You might be interested in this less than complimentary view of Tony & Susan - in which the reviewer reveals the worst sentence in the book - a funny sentence about Arnold's penis and the trouble it causes.

I liked the layered stories and the sense of anxiety the writer creates as we wait for Susan's current husband to return home, for resolution of the internal story which has a kidnap and revenge as its focus and whether Edward will step beyond his writing into Susan's story. Is his narrative a form of revenge?



View all my reviews

June reading

11 July

I've decided to try to distil what I am reading into haiku. Yes, it could be seen as a sign of being a wanker but I think its a good way of trying to work out what the writer was really on about.

I re-read Marry Me by John Updike after reading Couples again. I last read these books in the 70's/80's when I was at uni and before I'd had affairs with men. I think I just thought about it then. I needed Esther Parel (Mating in Captivity) in my life but she only wrote it last year. I liked Couples - it was sexy, redolent of the 60's but still real. Marry Me was disappointing.

Flip-Flopping Jerry
Loves Ruth. Or Sally. Or Ruth.
Or? How will it end?

If I had more room, I'd write "And who cares?" I didn't like Jerry or Sally much. I liked Ruth and Richard. I wondered whether I liked any of them when I read it in 1980. I wish I'd written in the margins. This blog is a way of writing in the margins...

I also read The Road by Mr Cormac McCarthy who writes about men. This book is less obviously a book about men and more a book about the relationship between the anonymous father and the anonymous son in the face of a post-apocalypse world. It was absolutely gripping; both the unfolding of the story and the depiction of the tragic doomed relationship they shared. I loved the way that he avoided telling us what had caused the apocalyspe and that, contrary to the way the genre usually unfolds, the story is set several years after disaster has struck.

A world full of ashes.
Doomed father and young son lurch
onwards. World without hope.

The love story (if you can describe it thus) is what enables you to read this grim story. It's beautiful sparse prose. A wonderful book.