Alison MacLeod is the author of two novels, The
Changeling and The Wave Theory of Angels. Her short stories have been published
by Prospect, London Magazine, Pulp.Net and Virago, and her first collection,
Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction, was published by Penguin last month. She
lives in Brighton and teaches creative writing at the University of Chichester.
Writing a short story is a high-wire act, sentence by
sentence, foot by foot. Very few story writers work with the safety net of a
plot conceived in advance. They trust in the humming tension of a single
opening line or in an image that rises in their mind, or in a fragment of a
character's voice. They might have a sense of where they want their characters
to go; they rarely know how they'll get them there. At times it's unnerving
work. Lose your concentration or the line of tension in the story and both you
and it fall. The best short stories have a breathless, in-motion quality to
them, a quality that makes them ideal for adaptation into film, as directors
are increasingly realising. A great story ending resonates far beyond its final
word. It's a hit to the brain. I read stories and love them for that hit. As
the writer Elizabeth Taylor commented, the short story gives the reader the
feeling of "being lifted into another world, instead of sinking into it,
as one does with longer fiction". The best stories leave you exhilarated.
1. The
Nose by Nikolai Gogol
On March 25 the barber Ivan wakes to find a nose in
his morning bread roll. He is alarmed and confounded. He tries to abandon it in
a gutter, then tries to throw it from a bridge but his plans are scuppered.
Meanwhile, Kovalev has woken without his nose. Is it a terrible dream? No. The
absence grows into an outrage. Then "a door of the carriage opened, and
there leapt thence, huddling himself up, a uniformed gentleman... And oh,
Kovalev's horror and astonishment to perceive that the gentleman before him was
none other than - his own nose!" This story is delicious. It always makes
me smile even though I now know well the exploits of said Nose, the eponymous
hero. Gogol's story says the imagination, like the Nose, can go absolutely
anywhere. He shows us that dream-realities have their own kind of logic. I love
Hanif Kureishi's homage, Rhe Penis. Lord knows it was crying out to be done.
After all, isn't the Nose sometimes referred to by Gogol as the member? I also
love the fact that a statue erected in St Petersburg to honour Gogol and the
story of The Nose disappeared from the face of the city in 2002 - another
fitting tribute.
As fate thankfully had it, Joyce added this story to the
Dubliners manuscript as a sudden afterthought while his publishers
prevaricated. The most powerful in the collection, The Dead is not about death.
It's about life force. Gabriel and Gretta have enjoyed a jolly New Year's do at
the home of his aunts in Dublin. Later in their hotel room, Gabriel is filled
with tenderness and desire for his wife. But a song from the evening has filled
her with memories of a boy long dead, Michael Furey, who once stood outside her
window, ill and shivering in the rain just for a glimpse of her. Gabriel is
firstly jealous, then disquieted by "how poor a part he, her husband, had
played in her life", then moved finally by a sudden insight into the
strength of the life that Michael Furey gave up for love. The last three
paragraphs are among the most beautiful ever written.
3. The
Rocking-Horse Winner by DH Lawrence
This story is inexplicable, uncanny - a testimony to
Lawrence's interest in alternative states of mind, whether accessed by love,
sex, dream or artistic creation. A mother needs money. Her young son loves her
and worries. (Another intense mother-son relationship for Lawrence.) Astride
his rocking horse high up in the nursery, Paul rocks himself into a trance
through which he becomes strangely prescient. The dialogue is a bit wooden, the
plot a tad tortuous, yet the ending is compelling and completely unforgettable.
VS Pritchett once said that a good short story captures a character "at
bursting point". Lawrence doesn't let you down.
4.
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath
"Every day from nine to five I sit at my desk
facing the door of the office and typing up other people's dreams." So
begins the story of the Out Patients typist whose "real calling" is
to collect the dreams of the frightened, lost and despairing, and to dedicate
herself privately to the service of "Johnny Panic", her own low god
of fear. The story is hilarious (she has to share her office space with the
Foot Clinic), giddy and breathtakingly stark. It's alive with the bravura of
Plath's dark and shining mind.
Story writers are naturally drawn to life's undersides
- to the bits we perhaps shouldn't see. They're often private worlds, stolen
glimpses, and we, the readers, are licensed voyeurs. Here, two couples, Mel, a
cardiologist, his second wife Terri, and young Nick and Laura in their first
flush of love, sit around a kitchen table sharing a drink. They talk, the sun
goes down, the gin bottle drains. That's it. Or it would be, except inhibitions
slip. An argument starts, emotions burst like blisters; they're covered over
and burst again. As Nick and Laura struggle to hold onto their clichés of
romantic love, Terri claims that the ex-husband who used to drag her around the
living room by her ankles really did love her. Carver had to have been
influenced by Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Things get that
ugly. But it's also profoundly moving as Mel struggles through the blur of the
gin and the shadows of the setting sun to believe in the strength of the human
heart.
6.
Meneseteung by Alice Munro
While novels are arguably about life's big moments,
stories, Munro says, are about "the moments within moments". This is
the story of Almeda Roth, a little known Victorian poetess-spinster who lives
in a small Canadian town. She resides on the respectable Dufferin Street but
her back gate opens onto the edge of a boghole, an area known locally as the
Pearl Street Swamp. "Bushy and luxuriant weeds grow there, makeshift shacks
have been out up ... " and a woman cries out: 'Kill me! Kill me!' ...Yet
there is something taunting and triumphant about her cry." It makes Almeda
uncomfortably aware of the narrowness of her own life, one in which she waits
to see if Jarvis Poulter will finally deem her to be suitable wife material.
The woman of the Pearl Street Swamp is to Almeda what Bertha is to Jane Eyre:
her alter ego, her nemesis, but also the agent for Almeda's new, painful
insight. The detail of Almeda's home and her inner world are tenderly and
sharply observed. Munro's prose is, as usual, translucent - so breathtakingly
clear there is nothing between you and the world she creates.
7. Love
is not a Pie by Amy Bloom
This is one of the most poignant coming-of-age stories
I know. Ellen's mother's funeral brings back fond memories of idyllic summers
spent long ago at a cabin in Maine. It was in these days she first began to
understand how vital, lovely and flawed a person her mother was. Ellen's family
shares the cabin with their old friends, Mr. DeCuervo and his daughter.
Everything is close, warm and comfortable for Ellen until the night she pushes
open the creaky door and sees her mother "spooned up" against her
father - and Mr DeCuervo "spooned up against her, his arm over the covers,
his other hand resting on the top of her head". Three middle-aged bodies
in a bed. Stories aren't plots so much as the unfolding of characters. Bloom
knows this. Ellen's mother, father, Mr Decuervo and their shared lives are
drawn by Bloom with sharp realism as well as great tenderness. She yokes the
two together without contradiction - because she's that good.
8.
Lilac by Helen Dunmore
In story after story, Dunmore's prose is lucid, sensual
and beautifully understated. It just doesn't get much better. Here, Christie
spends a spring holiday in Sweden with her cousins Agnes and Tommy, and Tommy's
best friend Henrik. Christie tell us a story that, in the context of the world
she has known so far, is shocking, even taboo - in the final pages, she sees
something. I'll keep her secret so I don't spoil the story, which is also
unbelievably lovely. Exquisite even. I admire the last few paragraphs so much,
I want to eat them.
9.
Vanilla Bright like Eminem by Michel Faber
The opening line is quirky, involving. It offers the
reader an enticing prospect: "Don, son of people no longer living, husband
of Alice, father of Drew and Aleesha is very, very close to experiencing the
happiest moment of his life." How can you not read on? This story breaks
all the rules. Nothing happens for a long time. An American family are on
holiday, en route to Inverness by train. That's it. Then suddenly the story
abandons the usual unity of time and space, zooming forward through many years
and vast changes in the characters' lives. Usually such a narrative spree would
leave anyone bored. But not here. It makes us, along with Don, return to that
train journey when life was simple and whole. On the train Don observes the mundane
details of his wife and children with a credibly odd mixture of honesty and
deep affection. It's moving, if a bit of a narrative cheat. As one
writer-friend said to me, "Would we find it so moving if a mother were
observing her children so lovingly?" Probably not. We take it for granted
that mothers do. But we feel moved when fathers take note. That is admittedly
part of what makes this story the success it is. But that said, an unexpected
epiphany - a moment of radiant insight worthy even of Joyce - is what makes and
sustains this story. It is an apparently ordinary vision: Don's daughter combs
her sleeping brother's hair. Don watches. But he watches mesmerised, filled
with a sense of a present moment that is bigger than him, bigger than any of them.
As in the best of stories, the moment can't be paraphrased. It can only be
experienced. You'll have to read it yourself.
10.
Weddings and Beheadings' by Hanif Kureishi
This story is dark, deadpan and knocks you sideways. A
quiet bomb, to use a phrase coined by writer Joseph O'Connor. A film-maker in a
present-day "war-broken city" is forced at gunpoint to film the
beheadings of kidnapped prisoners. But he is also paid for the work. It becomes
his living. "You don't know me personally," he says. "My
existence has never crossed your mind." But Kureishi makes us look. The
story is less than five pages long, told as the narrator awaits the knock at
his door. Less is more. The details are matter-of-fact - what isn't said
boomerangs back at you and hits you between the eyes. I admire Kureishi's
daring and his willingness to explore the turbulence of the here and now. I
suspect this story won't leave me, and that's a good, awful thing.
