Reproduced from a blog post by Professor Charles E. May
Carys Bray, whose first collection
of stories, Sweet Home, was published in November 2012 by Salt
Publishing, received her M.A. in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University,
where she is now a Ph.D. student and associate tutor. Although Salt is a
growing Independent publisher in England, its promotional budget is probably
relatively small, especially for debut collections of short stories;
consequently, Ms. Bray’s book has not been reviewed in the British press,
although she has received several glowing notices from bloggers, to whom she or
Salt has probably sent copies.
Since I have been retired, I only
check my campus mailbox once a year. Recently, when I made my annual
visit to my old workplace, I found a packaged copy ofSweet Home, inside
of which there was a hand-written greeting from Ms. Bray. I hope it had
not been languishing in that cobwebby mail cubby for a long time. I read
the book with pleasure and suggest that you may also enjoy it—that is, if you
like the particular kind of story that Ms. Bray writes. I offer the
following comments on that kind of story for your possible interest.
When Carys Bray was asked in an
online interview who was most important to her in developing her writing life,
she replied that when she was working on her BA, one of her tutors introduced
her to the short stories of Canadian writer Carol Shields, and that within a
couple of weeks she had read all the stories in Shield’s three collections,
adding: “I found her writing funny, dark and intriguing. Shields deliberately
included items like, ‘wallpaper… cereal bowls, cupboards, cousins, buses, local
elections, head colds, cramps, newspapers,’ in her fiction and as I read her
work, I knew that I wanted my stories to be similarly bursting with real
life.” Bray also said in the interview that after discovering how versatile
the short story was, she allowed herself to experiment. “I had tremendous fun
as I stocked the shelves of a surreal supermarket, invented fictional parenting
books and imagined an alternative to IVF that was steeped in Nordic mythology.”
There may seem to be something of
a contradiction between Bray’s wish to make her stories “bursting with life”
and the “tremendous fun” she had experimenting with surreal supermarkets and
Nordic mythology. Not really. There has long been a tradition in the short
story of combining the stuff of everyday life with the artifice of surreal
fable. Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Raymond Carver did it
brilliantly. So does Alice Munro, David Means, and William Trevor. The
short story, by its generic nature and literary tradition, is a form that is as
much artifice as it is reality (whatever that is). The question that Carys
Bray’s stories raises for me is how “reality” gets embodied in the artifice of
her stories and how the kind of story she writes is similar to the writer who
she says has influenced her the most: Carol Shields.
Shields is better known and more respected as a
novelist than she is as a short-story writer, having established her reputation
with her 1995 Pulitzer Prize winning novel,The Stone Diaries. “Light
and breezy” is a phrase often used to describe her short stories. Whereas
Shields seems most interested in the realistic exploration of character in her
novels, she seems primarily intent on examining ideas in most of her stories,
which are frequently little “what if” concept pieces or considerations of
common objects and phenomena. To call Shields’ stories “experimental,” as
many reviewers have done, may be to dignify them with more weight than she
intended them to have. After all, the word “experimental” perhaps should not be
confused with having fun with little narrative essays on the metaphoric
significance of such things as keys, or windows, or the weather.
Typical of Shields’ kind of story is the title
piece of her first collection Various Miracles, for it signals both
her delight in coincidences as well as her interest in the connection between
fiction and reality. After listing several anecdotal coincidences, such
as the fact that on a certain date three strangers on the same bus were reading
the same novel, she narrates the longer anecdote of a writer taking her
manuscript to a publisher who had earlier expressed some reservations that the
novel depended too heavily on coincidences. A gust of wind blows it out
of her hands and she has to retrieve the separate sheets all over the street,
only to discover that one page is missing. Later a woman in a red coat
finds the missing page while buying zucchini in a grocery store. The first
lines of the page describe a woman in a red coat buying zucchini in a grocery
store.
Some of Shields’ stories are about little events of
everyday reality that achieve some sort of transcendent meaning. For
example “Taking the Train” is about one woman’s experience of separate moments
of un-sharable significance, such as listening to a special song or finding a
rare manuscript in a museum, while “The Journal” is about a woman who keeps a
notebook of the travels she and her husband make, finally describing a rare
moment of intimacy that she knows occurs only two or three times in one’s life.
Shields has said that she has always been compelled
by the idea of transcendental moments in which we are occasionally able to
glimpse a kind of pattern in the universe. She also has said that she
used the Emily Dickinson quote “Tell the truth but tell it slant” as an
epigraph to her first collection of short stories because she likes to use
various angles of perspective. What she says she likes best is to set up
a story conventionally and then turn it upside down. There is always a
technical problem in writing, says Shields, and often the problem gives her
something to hang the fiction on. Sometimes a word or a phrase, a problem or a
puzzle starts a story off, something odd or surreal--something that does not
quite fit in. She then begins with some point that interests her and
starts to piece the story together, writing it over and over until it gets
longer and thicker.
The title story of Dressing Up for the
Carnival (2000), Shields’ final collection, is a little parable about
people in a town putting on costumes each day, all to illustrate that we cannot
live without our illusions. “Weather” is a satirical parable about the weather
ceasing to exist when the weathermen go on strike. “Ilk” is an academic
satire of postmodern jargonistic literary theory. Shields is more
effective when her little “what if” stories examine individual characters
rather than abstract ideas. For example, there is a certain poignancy and
truth in “Mirrors,” about an aging couple that do not permit any mirrors or
other reflective surfaces in their vacation home, thus enforcing a sort of
vacation from focusing on the self.
Shields’ playful experiments sometime become mere
tours de force of cleverness and ingenuity. For example in “Absence,” a
writer discovers that a certain vowel, the very letter that signifies the
“hungry self,” no longer works on her typewriter. The dilemma she faces
is how to write her story without a first person pronoun, a problem she tackles
as being similar to the limitations of the sonnet form. As we follow the
struggles of the fictional writer, we only gradually become aware that Carol
Shields has written her entire three-and-a half-page story without a single
“I”--a feat that may make one smile with admiration, but which, after all, is
merely a highly-skilled jeu d’esprit.
As I said at the beginning of this little
discussion, I enjoyed Carys Bray’s stories, but I must also say that the
enjoyment was relatively “light and breezy,” as critics often designated the
stories of Carol Shields. Bray, a mother of four, obviously follows the
common creative writing advice to “write about what you know,” for many of her
stories focus on being a wife and mother. However, her approach to these
domestic topics is often, like the stories of Carol Shields, that of the jeu
d’esprit.
The first story in the collection, entitled
“Everything a Parents Needs to Know,” begins with the line, “Helen’s daughter
hates her,” a realistic assertion that Bray explores by juxtaposing Helen’s
parental trials and tribulations with quotations from self-help books (which
Bray says she invented) with titles such as Parenting forIdiots by
JoAnn Humble, and A Happy Childhood, a Happy Life!, by Brenda
Jolly. It’s an entertaining concoction with which parents can identify,
containing a dash of whimsy and a pinch of sentiment.
Beginning sentences and closing epiphanies have
always been important for the short story form, and Bray has learned her lesson
well. “Just in Case” opens with: “I’ve been looking for a baby to borrow
for a number of weeks.” It’s a chilling story about a woman’s sorrow at
the loss of a child and involves, ultimately and ominously, a Samsonite
suitcase. I don’t want to summarize the plots of Bray’s stories, for that
might spoil the potential reader’s fun. However, my reluctance to say too
much is also an indication how much many of Bray’s stories depend on the twist
of plot.
The title story is a modern fairy tale based on the
story of Hansel and Gretel, but it is somewhat less scary than the treatment of
fairy tale motifs by Bray’s British predecessors, A.S. Byatt and Angela Carter.
“The Ice Baby,” also a fairytale treatment, is a more universally human
evocation of one of Bray’s signature themes—the poignant relationship between a
mother and a child.
“The Baby Aisle” is a futuristic fable about
shopping for babies in the supermarket—the kind of story that George Saunders
does so well, but which once again is much lighter than the biting satire of
that suddenly very famous short story writer (More about Saunders in a week or
so).
“The
Countdown” is a clever treatment of the fears of a soon-to-be-first-father that
pushes the terror of dropping the kid on his or her head to the ultimate
fantasy extremes. “Under Covers,” which also opens with one of Bray’s
clever first sentences (“Carol’s bra is spread-eagled in the hedge like a
monstrous, albino bat”) is a delicately restrained treatment of the universal
female fear of breast cancer.
I
thank Ms. Bray for sending me a copy of her collection of short stories.
She explores serious human issues with narrative control and whimsical
style. I wish her well.
No comments:
Post a Comment