Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“VINCENT O’SULLIVAN: SELECTED STORIES” Selected by Stephen Stratford (Victoria University Press, $NZ 40)

A wise person recently remarked to me that short stories “should never be read in bulk without medical advice.” I endorse this view. For many evenings over the last four weeks, I have worked my way through the 35 short stories, in about 600 pages, that make up Vincent O’Sullivan: Selected Stories. They have been selected by Stephen Stratford from the seven collections of short stories that O’Sullivan has so far produced, beginning with The Boy, The Bridge, The River in 1978 and ending with The Families [reviewed on this blog] in 2014. So this is a selection based on the best part of forty years’ work.

But why should “medical advice” be required in reading such a book?

Because reading too many short stories in a short space of time can often cause one story to blur into another. Like a good poem, a good short story will be dense with detail, and will have its own unique and individual impact. Read one after another, that impact will lessen. As a reader, you end up thinking of the stories as one thing, and reducing them to generalisations about the author’s aims and methods.

I’ll try to compensate for this effect in what follows, but at the same time I will avoid the dire mistake I made earlier this year, when I synopsised slavishly every single story in analysing D.H.Lawrence’s collections The Prussian Officer and England, My England. In considering a collection of short stories, at least some generalisations are inevitable.

            Born in 1937, so now aged 82, Vincent O’Sullivan was already in his early 40s when The Boy, The Bridge, The River was published. It’s obvious, therefore, that all his published stories are the work of a mature man who has had wide experience of life. And the same is true of most of his protagonists. The great majority of the Selected Stories deal with people who are either middle-aged or old – such as the old people in a home in “Closing the File”; the sad story “Recital” about a pianist who didn’t go anywhere; the physical embarrassments of ageing in “Fainting and the Fat Man”; or adult children contesting memories of their father in both “Daddy Drops a Line” and “Getting It Right”. There are some stories about younger people here, like the teenage daughter and pre-pubescent son in “Family Unit”, or the protagonist in this selection’s very last story “Luce”. But they are the minority. In the Selected Stories we are in the world of older, and mainly middle-class, people, most of them articulate but many of them stuck in a rut.

            For a few of these older people, there is a Catholic upbringing somewhere in their past and references to it, but this does not loom large in Selected Stories. What does loom large are marriage and sexual matters, often presented in terms of deception, regret, or dissatisfaction. Mature women remember a libidinous artist in “The Last of Freddie”. There is double adultery in “Survivors”. A man, worried about his wife, talks it out to a counsellor in “On a Clear Day”. A marriage cracks up spectacularly in “Pieces”.

            Perhaps the majority of stories are set in New Zealand, but there are a few stories set in the U.S.A. (sordid vignettes of New York in “The Corner” and “That’s the Big Apple for You”) and a few set in Oz (such as “Coasting”). More important, there are a number of stories set in New Zealand in which memories of, or imaginings about, Europe come into play. “The Boy, The Bridge, The River” itself, for example; and the imagined Europe in “Photos, to Begin With”, where the illusions about Europe have to be measured against the reality. This is very much like what I diagnosed as “the Pakeha condition” when I reviewed O’Sullivan’s novel All This by Chance on this blog. We know that we are fully New Zealanders, but we also know that our roots, our deepest mythology and much of our cultural formation still comes from Europe.

            In the main, O’Sullivan’s stories offer little in the way of overt experimentalism. “Billy Joel Her Bird” is written in youthful patois and “the snow in spain” is written without capital letters. But there are none of those tiresome postmodernist literary games, found in the works of at least one other New Zealand story-teller, in which we are supposed to congratulate ourselves for understanding that a story is a literary construct. Also O’Sullivan tells stories - he does not spin anecdotes. So there is none of the antiquated O’Henry sting-in-the-tail stuff. The only stories I found with something like a final, unexpected twist were “The Club” and “Photos, to Begin With”, but in both cases the “twist” has to do with character development.

            The Selected Stories are mainly slow-burn stories – revelations of character, not anecdotes. Engagements with real (or realistic) people, not technical literary exercises. But the mode of narration is important. At a rough count, there are as many stories written in the first person as there are stories giving multiple perspectives in the third person. As a male writer, O’Sullivan doesn’t hesitate to have women as his narrators in  “Picture Window”,“Photos, to Begin With” ,“Pictures of Goya”, “Waiting for Rongo” and some other tales. Nowadays, discussions of narrative voice seem to lead inevitably to comments on the “unreliable narrator”, with the assumption that we are not meant to take at face value what any narrator says. But in a story like “Palms and Minarets”, it is hard to see the narration as anything other than honest testimony in a study in alienation, the apparent unreality of things and the power of childhood memories.

            Yet there are at least some genuinely unreliable first-person narrators. The smug advertising man who narrates “Dandy Edison for Lunch”; the rage-filled narrator of “Terminus”; and the particularly obnoxious narrator of “Waiting for Rongo”, a nosy-parker, curtain-twitching woman who spies on her neighbours, makes denigratory comments about them and only slowly learns a hard lesson about what other people think of her [or does she?]. There is a suprising pathos in the way the story ends.

            Have I given the impression that Vincent O’Sullivan’s world view is a melancholy one? I hope not. A better term would be mellow. The author, in his maturity, does chart the faults and shortcomings of many of his characters, but he does not look down on them. Reading Selected Stories is not like reading all those Frank Sargeson stories in which, implicitly, we middle-class readers were invited to feel condescending towards those unaware drongos who make up so many of Sargeson’s narrators. In O’Sullivan’s universe, people are flawed, but they are not irredeebably flawed and – even if sometmies self-deluded - they are not any stupider than we are. When I reviewed The Families five years ago, I concluded that the best word for O’Sullivan’s fiction was “compassionate,” meaning feeling alongside people without sentimentalising them.

            Against the idea that these stories are overwhelmingly melancholy, I would also note a strain of robust wit and satire. One of the most likeable stories, “Putting Bob Down”, is both sad and funny as two mistresses of the same man get know and like each other. “Hims Ancient and Modern” is a lighter, almost whimsical account of tourists in Italy. As for satire, there is “Coasting”, in which small-town Oz commemorates the arrival of James Cook, with their efforts set ironically against fragments of Cook’s diaries and what two rather pompous academics have to say about it. And there is “Still Life” – partly satire on art criticism and partly concerning the delusions people have about artists.

            If I have not fallen into the trap of synopsising every story in this large selection, I have perhaps fallen into the trap of name-checking most of them. Sorry. I hope I have conveyed that this is essential New Zealand reading.

            I’ll conclude clumsily by noting some stories that had a powerful effect oin me:

            * “The Witness Man” I recall first reading when I was in my twenties and it came out in the March 1980 issue of Landfall. I read most of it on a ‘bus journey when I was being bounced along to work in an inner-city Auckland school, which I didn’t like. This third-person-limited story stuck in my mind for the ingenious way it was told, getting into the mind of an older man who has to give witness about something nasty that has happened between younger people. Even if I could not remember all the details of the story, the old man’s hesitation, sense of intimidation, and irrational guilt, all stayed with me. It did not disappoint when I rediscovered it in the Selected Stories.

            * “One Ordinary Thursday” concerns adultery and a deadness of feeling. Some people aestheticise the world and nature and appear to be very “reasonable” about human relationships. But the sort of reason they embrace may in fact mean that they have ceased to be fully human, underplaying what could, among more demonstrative people, be raw tragedy. This may be one of O’Sullivan’s melancholy stories, but if so, it is only because of its ordinariness and credibility.

            * “Family Unit” is not written in the first-person, but conveys a holiday as experienced in the minds of grumpy Dad; Mum wanting to have some space to herself; teenaged daughter very needy for connections [be they with Jesus or with a local Goth]; and the younger son who is just on the cusp of randy puberty. Again, fully credible and nobody is caricatured.

            Then of course, there is “The Families” itself, a longer short-story with some of the complexity of a novel. But as I have already sung its praises elsewhere, I will not repeat myself.