The Devil's Bathtub
Various
Biscuit Publishing 2005
Brian Lister’s foreword to the 2005 anthology of the shortlisted entries to the Biscuit Publishing Short Story Competition has a hopeful message for those who might think that this most challenging of literary forms is dying out: ‘The short story is alive and well. Rumours of its demise are greatly exaggerated.’
This sense of optimism, however, is only partially fulfilled by the entries chosen to fill this pocket-sized volume of (often very) short stories. Ten authors offer tales concerned with death, the afterlife, melancholy, escape and change, almost exclusively set in domestic and urban surroundings. Parks, Laundromats, city streets and hotels are the locations for these brief framings of people’s lives.
There is certainly a unity to the collection, but it is perhaps not one to celebrate. In most, there is very little pervading sense of time or place; these stories focus on the people they describe and their individual experiences, almost to the point of disregarding the proposed setting. The writing suffers from a desire, less to tell, than to ‘end’ – to secure a conclusion, to have things sewn up – that the classic short story eagerly dispenses with. Instead of providing us with a fleeting glimpse that somehow tells us too much, a fragment that opens up a world momentarily before ineluctably closing it, in Biscuit’s final ten, B follows A, and C is definitely on the way. But because of this undisguised, solid progress, the resultant narratives are largely unconvincing.
There is a naïve, almost fairytale-like quality to the majority of the prose, which could leave you with a minor toothache: a girl, living by the sea and mysteriously abandoned by her mother, is born wearing a coral necklace and her life moves into, what becomes a rather predictable new phase; an abusive father is handily run over by a car to be replaced by a new, loving ‘Daddy’ who happens to be a dwarf; an attempted murder is witnessed by a small park bird who, bizarrely, manages to save the day.
There is not enough skill here to sustain these narratives or allow them to escape their unwieldy concern with neat form. Attempted murder, suicide, accidental death, unhappiness and soul-searching make up the subject matter, but it all seems to slip by without ever touching the raw, painful emotions of such events.
The most successful story, by far, is the last in the collection, Jay Boyer’s ‘Sad Little Stories to Tell’. It is a slight piece set in the turgid, by now familiar and almost imperceptibly peculiar world of the American suburbs. Boyer captures this mild strangeness, particularly through a subtle use of speech patterns, which suggest continual and apparently trivial miscommunications.
A girl, Lisa, returns home from school, changes out of her uniform and immediately trips down to the laundry, just down the block, with two carefully separated bags of clothes. As her dirty things whoosh round in their cycle she calmly goes to the little phone booth and makes a crank call – something, it becomes clear, she has done before.
As she tries to leave the house on her way there, a conversation with her mother and a guest who has just dropped in captures in its heavy, awkward syntax, just how boring and pointless the adult world can seem to a young person:
Lisa said to her mother, ‘I’m going to the laundry.’
Lisa’s mother answered, ‘Again? That’s twice in one week.’ She turned to Ned […] ‘Twice this week, Ned. I’m serious.’
Ned said, ‘She must want something.’
Lisa’s mother answered, ‘I guess.’[…]
When Ned seemed to have run out of things to say about the laundry situation, Lisa’s mother added, ‘The laundry is my department.’
Ned said to Lisa, ‘ I suppose I could drop you?
Escaping from the mind-numbing chat and Ned’s unwelcome offer of a lift, Lisa goes to the Laundromat to make something happen. She is trying to communicate, and it just so happens she has chosen to communicate with the two old people who simultaneously pick up the phone at the end of the line. She is randomly stabbing out at the world, trying to make someone listen and succeeding, at least partially, with shock tactics.
Boyer leaves us uncertain and not really caring at all about the truth of the matter, or the whys and wherefores, but that, strangely, is the subtle grip of the tale.
Despite Boyer’s sophisticated effort, anyone who has ever tried to write a short story may find the rest oddly familiar. The awkward turns of phrase and hard-won descriptive passages excite a certain sympathy in their attempts to crack this notoriously difficult medium.
Aiming criticism at others’ work often, deservedly, gets the response: ‘So you think you could do better?’ If you think you can, the deadline for this year’s competition is 31st May 2006.
For more information, see www.biscuitpublishing.com
