Short Stories

‘I like sad girls,’ confesses the creepy narrator of ‘His Blue Period’, the story by Deborah Robertson that opens the latest anthology of short fiction from Black Inc. It is never entirely clear what form this liking took. The narrator’s intentions were undoubtedly sexual, but not just that. What he seemed to desire most of all was the story of each girl’s sadness – the telling of her particular tale of woe, ‘the full, heavy, sad, sweet works’ which blossomed (at least in his mind) like a magnolia. And how did he elicit such revelation? Simply by asking each of his melancholy companions about her childhood; it is there, he supposes, that true sorrow first takes root. Robertson’s story is sinisterly opaque, not least because the tables are eventually turned on the predatory narrator (the past tense of his opening confession is surely significant in that respect). Things start to fall apart after his brief encounter (a late-night quickie) with a woman who boldly describes her childhood as ‘lots of laughs’. This entanglement precipitates such a crisis of confidence in him that he suddenly has the urge to redecorate his yuppie apartment: ‘I wanted to go downstairs and take the car from the garage and drive out of the city to the suburbs, and in the unfamiliar streets I wanted to find a Bunnings.’ There is a deft comic touch here, but the dominant note is indeed a blue one, suggesting a vast metropolis of inexplicable sorrow.

Barry Oakley, in his brief introduction to Families: Modern Australian Short Stories, tells us that the quality he was seeking in the fiction was ‘vitality’. This seems a rather broad filter: surely all good writing must possess vitality if it is going to hold the reader’s attention? Notwithstanding, many of the stories here are good, even excellent.

Serge Liberman’s new book contains a series of short stories and one novella, all narrated by Dr Raphael Bloom, a Melbourne physician who variously plays the roles of healer, confidant, confessor and counsellor to patients and their families. In doing so he explores existential and theological problems which often revolve around the Jewish memory of the Holocaust and the post-memory of second-generation migrants. For members of this traumatised community, brushes with illness and mortality raise the spectre of that terrible event and show how the past is not easily laid to rest.

In Robert Drewe’s latest collection of stories, people often find themselves caught in rip tides of ill fortune. Snake bites, car accidents, marauding dingoes, unexpected adulteries – these are all part of the rough seas of circumstance that crash without warning over the lives of Drewe’s characters. The dominant note of the collection is this quality of suddenness: out of the blue, bad things happen to good people. Most of The Rip’s characters are benign and likeable enough (even the shonky businessman awaiting trial on fraud charges is a long way from outright villainy), but each of them discovers the world turned upside down by what the title story calls ‘the abruptness of savage chance’.

Kathryn Lomer’s collection of short stories is ‘show, don’t tell’ storytelling with an emphasis on atmosphere instead of rapid plot movement. The best stories don’t have twists but end with a shift in perspective, a small victory or a solemn realisation. The book’s title is fitting: like the pinhole camera used by artists to isolate a single scene, Lomer’s stories are narrow in both scope and perspective. The stories are imagistic, even cinematic. Descriptions of light feature constantly: sunlight is triangled, louvred; fairy lights hide in vines, candles among food. Answering machines blink red in the dark.

If we keep hearing about our famous expatriates, the Greers and Jameses and Hugheses and the like, it is because they have made it their business to ensure we do. Gone but not forgotten. Others such as Randolph Stow or Alan Seymour were less busy at self-promotion. But Ray Mathew was a mere rumour. You saw his books here and there in the antiquarian bookshops, especially the short stories, A Bohemian Affair (1961), and the joint collection with Mena Abdullah, Time of the Peacock (1965). Some of his plays were eventually gathered into representative collections. Mathew himself seemed to disappear into thin air. Tom Shapcott’s project is to retrieve a writer he believes we should have paid more heed to.

David Malouf’s The Complete Stories brings together the three and a bit books, spanning twenty-five years, that constitute his forays into shorter fiction: Antipodes (1985), Dream Stuff (2000), and Every Move You Make (2006), along with two stories that accompanied his novella Child’s Play (1982). Given that this is a collection rather than a selection – no stories are cut from the earlier books – the quality ebbs and flows, both from story to story and from book to book. Despite its slight imperfections, The Complete Stories confirms that Malouf is, at his best, a masterful exponent of short fiction.

What can we make of the fact that, of the forty-seven stories selected by Robert Drewe for this year’s The Best Australian Stories collection, thirty-three are written in the first person? The influence of Creative Writing classes has to figure in any stab at an answer. It would be interesting to do the rounds of the universities to discover whether the teachers of such courses actively encourage the use of ‘I’, or if it happens obliquely, resulting from the way that writing exercises are structured. One wonders, too, if that old saw, ‘write what you know’, is discussed in the first week of these courses, and if such a practice contributes to the writer’s feeling more comfortable and secure when deploying the first person.

It is a treat to see ten of Laurie Clancy’s short stories collected in this volume, his third. Given their quality, it is not surprising that seven of them have already been published in magazines and anthologies. But to read them together is to see their interdependence, their thematic patterns. All deal with male experience, beginning with that of the fourteen-year-old Leo, on the brink of sexual knowledge; and moving on to stories of middle-aged men contemplating the emptiness of their lives. The collection concludes with two stories about death, one from cancer, one from AIDS.

In 2005, Lisa Gorton, writing in ABR, named Paddy O’Reilly’s The Factory one of the best books of the year. It was O’Reilly’s first novel, but she was already well established as a prize-winning writer of short stories. The End of the World is a collection of those stories, and should secure her reputation as one of our most interesting, if not best-known, literary talents.