Stories' spare prose makes room for imagination
Fascination: Stories
By William Boyd
Knopf, 277 pp., $24
"An event, a moment, is launched at your life like a projectile -- a stone, a dart, an arrow," says the narrator of one of the stories in "Fascination." "One day it will descend, following its parabolic curve, and hit you, or glance off you, or nearly miss. . . . Our individual lives are peppershot with these mysterious comings-to-earth." In his new short story collection, William Boyd -- whose eight novels and two previous collections have earned numerous honors, including the Whitbread Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize -- explores the very different forms this conception of storytelling can take.
Avant-garde art, because its proponents take themselves so seriously, can be heavy weather. But Boyd has fun stretching the limits of traditional narrative. These 14 stories offer a veritable feast of forms. "Adult Video" uses the functions found on any VCR's remote (Pause, Memory, Rewind, Fast-Forward, Repeat) as subheadings to orient the reader within a narrative that moves associatively rather than chronologically. "Notebook No. 9" comprises the random daily jottings of a compulsive journal-keeper, tucking the plot between the lines for the reader to retrieve. "Beulah Berlin, an A -- Z" begins each of its 26 sections with a different letter of the alphabet, in alphabetical order -- an obvious and not-very-interesting device, but wait! Closer inspection reveals that the first word in each section repeats or rhymes with a syllable in the last word of the preceding section; and furthermore, that the last word of the story is also its first word. The reader (you) must turn back to the opening to check this hypothesis -- indeed, must have formulated a hypothesis in the first place.
As much fun as this sort of collusion is, "Fascination" offers pleasures of a richer, more enduring kind. Boyd's prose style has the economy and power of a line drawing by Matisse. He can deliver a character, physically and psychologically, in a single phrase: a waiter "loudly straightening already straight chairs"; a 19th-century Russian landowner who, when he belches, "is careful to make a small sign of the cross in front of his gaping mouth"; a lover who shouts "Fire one!" with each orgasm. He can show the complexity of relationships between characters through unmediated dialogue and gesture:
" 'What? Yeah. I think I'm going to abandon my thesis. Concentrate on the novel.'
'That's wonderful news. Look, I must dash -- the car's waiting. Love you.'
'Bye.' I put the phone down. 'Love you.' "
Boyd brings the same synaptic spareness to the evocation of setting. "You wandered off, embarrassed by Dad, and contemplated the shingle beach, the mouse-gray sea and the pier and the tawdry stucco of the hotels and the houses." "The clouds move, and a sudden angle of afternoon sun slanting over the top of the next-door house touches the uppermost branches of the old lime tree at the end of the garden. For a moment a thick wand of sun turns its tired summer leaves into refulgent coins of lemony green, making the tree seem young again and making me think of spring." In the Chekhovian "The Pigeon," one of the most moving stories in the collection, both place and time are nailed in a few images: "Kirghiz, the bay gelding, needs the horse doctor. We have only seventy ducklings this year. Last week's rain has ruined the clover." Such spareness requires a nose (and ear, eye, hand, tongue) for precisely the right -- what the novelist Oakley Hall calls the "clincher" -- detail. "I heard the ting of her lip stud hitting the glass's rim as she brought it to her mouth"; "I could taste her lipstick in my mouth"; "the leaves of my chapter helixed gently down onto the turbid brown waters of the Clerwell."
Boyd trusts the reader. The author of 12 screenplays, he leaves room for us to enter, so that each story is a script to be played out in the little theater of our imagination. Ellipsis is tricky. Too much space, and the story never quite emerges, as in "Visions Fugitives," where several narrative modes are juxtaposed without enough cross-references to help us construct a story. Too little space, and the story we construct feels obvious and predictable, as in "Notebook No. 9." When it works, however -- and in most of the stories in "Fascination" it does -- the result can be deeply moving. "A love of the color blue and false memories of a non-existent girl called Sylvie were all that remained of Gerald Gault after his terrible injury," the narrator of "The Ghost of a Bird," a doctor treating soldiers wounded in War World II, muses, "such fragile, ephemeral foundations -- too insubstantial a thing to build a new life on? Perhaps that is all any of us requires. As I walked back to my office I saw a thrush stabbing at worms on the cloud-shadowed lawn. Patients were being urged indoors by the nurses. A door banged somewhere. The wind tugged at my tie and jacket and spots of rain began to patter on my uplifted face."
We are inside the story, firmly grounded in the words and gestures and sensory experience of the characters. Forget epiphanies! The insights arrived at in Boyd's stories are experienced rather than merely witnessed. They strike deep, and they stick.
Ann Harleman, whose website is www.annharleman.com, is the author of a story collection, "Happiness," and a novel, "Bitter Lake." She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.
