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Short Stories

The first book I ever properly owned – pored over, slept with, inscribed – was an elaborately illustrated hardback copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. One can imagine the producers of the attractively packaged Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children hoping it might assume similar significance for a contemporary seven-year-old boy. Conn Iggulden’s secret and quirky world of the Tollins involves old, greybearded men, intricate maps and plenty of adventures and derring-do by the book’s unlikely hero, Sparkler.

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Under Stones, a collection of short stories and one poem by first-time author Bob Franklin, reads like a study in subterfuge: a teenage outcast wreaks cyber vengeance on her local Tidy Town group; a man’s online porn addiction is turned against him by a mysterious workmate; a seasoned duck hunter finds that the target has shifted without his knowledge. Yet scratch the surface and you will find that the deception runs deeper than that; the darkly humorous scenarios hint at society’s moral decay. In ‘Soldier On’, a man’s homecoming visit to England to see his retired parents turns from farcical to forlorn, as his infuriation over their addiction to soap operas gives way to a disquieting realisation about the widespread misery of the elderly.

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Gravel by Peter Goldsworthy

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March 2010, no. 319

Peter Goldsworthy justly commands a seat at the big table of the Australian hall of literary achievement. This was underlined on Australia Day with his gonging as a Member of the Order of Australia for service as an author and poet. It is a prize that should glitter comfortably on the mantelpiece alongside the likes of his South Australian Premier’s Award, his Commonwealth Poetry Prize, his Bicentennial Literary Prize for Poetry, and his FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction.

For someone who has practised half-time as a writer and half-time as a GP for the past thirty-five years, his output is admirably prolific: eight novels, including one co-written with Brian Matthews, five collections of short stories, half a dozen poetry collections, two novels adapted as plays, two opera libretti, and a spot of essayistic Navel Gazing (1998). He has also done time on literature’s administrative front line, his committee stints including four and a half years as chairman of the Australia Council’s Literature Board. All of which mark him out as a littérateur of the first order.

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Literary definitions often have an indeterminate quality. To state the precise formal characteristics of the novel or the short story is almost impossible. There are some basic tenets, but these forms are fluid; open to interpretation and experimentation. Is there, then, any grounds for conceiving of the ‘long story’ as a distinct entity? Caught somewhere between two already amorphous forms, it seemingly occupies a negative space, defined by what it is not.

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Cate Kennedy’s début collection, Dark Roots (2006), marked a change in publishers’ thinking about the commercial potential of short stories, and helped create the atmosphere in which Nam Le was signed up for his bestselling collection, The Boat (2008).

Kennedy was well known in literary circles before her book was published; she has won several of Australia’s leading short story competitions, including the Age Short Story competition twice. Dark Roots gained her a public following and cemented her status as one of Australia’s most accomplished writers, regardless of genre. The stories in Dark Roots are master classes in style and precision: a series of lives intimately sketched by way of carefully chosen, closely observed detail and elegant metaphors. Now readers will see how Kennedy manages the tightrope transition to the long form in her first novel, The World Beneath.

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Look Who’s Morphing by Tom Cho & Why She Loves Him by Wendy James

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June 2009, no. 312

Self-evidently, the short story demands precision. The term ‘short story’ more than likely brings to mind the magazine-length sprint or the rapidly delivered epiphany. John Updike was a master of this demanding form. In his Olinger and Tarbox tales, characters are assembled quickly and sent to their fate with little delay. Never cursory, this was writing performed under haiku-like restraint. In the short stories of Wendy James and Tom Cho, we are presented with similarly brief and precise tales of two different Australian landscapes: one as small as a kitchen, the other as capacious as an arena. Why She Loves Him is James’s first story collection after two well-received novels. For the most part, the stories are quiet and domestic affairs. Her characters are frequently repressed and restrained, filled with rage that is rarely given voice. If the short fiction of some novelists feels too constrained, James’s evocation of despair is perfectly suited to these short bursts.

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Alberto Dominguez identified himself as un Australiano de habla hispana – a Spanish-speaking Australian. As such, he gave enormously to the Spanish-speaking community of Sydney. Dominguez was a radio broadcaster with SBS and community radio stations in western Sydney, and a founding member of several Latin American cultural organisations. For many Spanish-speaking Australians who came as refugees from Latin America, Dominguez’s radio-voice provided them with essential information and helped them settle in. Yet when he died as a passenger aboard American Airlines flight 11, which struck the northern tower of the World Trade Centre in September 2001, most media in Australia identified him only as an Uruguayan-born migrant, a father of four and a Qantas baggage-handler. There was little mention of his work in radio, or his prominence amongst the Spanish-speaking community. Bel Vidal, whose essay opens this anthology of stories, essays and poems, asks that Australians remember Dominguez – the first Australian to die in the World Trade Centre attacks – as more than a migrant who, decades after his arrival, still lacked fluency in English. Vidal, herself a migrant from Bolivia, argues that the civic contributions made by Dominguez in his first language deserve a place in Australian history and culture.

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The Sleepers Almanac, No. 5 edited by Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn & New Australian Stories by Aviva Tuffield

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April 2009, no. 310

What makes a good short story? Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, editors of the fifth Sleepers Almanac, say there is no objective measure of quality; that everyone likes something different; and that they simply choose what appeals. As I sit down with their funky-looking volume, I don’t want to believe it. If that is the case, there is no place for literary critics, no real justification for academic literary study, and the premise for an editor’s judgement is shaky. Why should what they like matter particularly?

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‘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.

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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.

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