LITTLE BLACK BOOK OF STORIES
By A.S. Byatt
Knopf. 240 pp. $21
Well, how much would you like to have to sit down and write a review of a book written by the Booker Prize-winning author of "Possession," one of the finest, wildest books in the English language? Especially when the short stories here might be the slightest bit uneven (and even though at least two of them have been published in the New Yorker and an earlier English critic has said they're "worth crossing a desert to read")? I'm just going to fall back on my college education and remind the reader that not too long ago, in literary time, Wordsworth and Coleridge made a pact to see if one of them could "make strange things familiar," the other one make "familiar things strange." Byatt, with brilliance that borders upon the headstrong and maybe even the self-indulgent, has settled upon the latter course. Our world, filled as it is with pilled cardigan sweaters that creep up in the back, with jam tarts that have been in the bakery way too long, with journalistic platitudes and creative writing classes taken with uncreative morons who can't begin to write, etc., etc., is actually a fabulous mystical inexplicable matrix of wonders -- if only we could open our dull and rheumy eyes wide enough to see them. Thus, these five stories.
"The Thing in the Forest" opens in England's dark days of World War II, when two perfectly ordinary little girls -- except that they carry the fairy tale names of Penny and Primrose -- are part of an evacuation of children from the standard horrors of the London Blitz. They are billeted at a great country house and promptly sent out to play. But Penny and Primrose don't stay on the country-estate lawn; they sneak out into the great green English forest that has been such a staple of literary myth. Something bad happens. First they smell "putrefaction, the smell of maggoty things at the bottom of untended dustbins, the smell of blocked drains, and unwashed trousers, mixed with the smell of bad eggs." Then they see something with "blind, opaque white eyes, fringed with fleshy lashes and brows like the feelers of sea-anemones. Its face was close to the ground, and moved towards the children between its forearms which were squat, thick, powerful and akimbo, like a cross between a monstrous washerwoman and a primeval dragon." Its description goes on for another page, but you get the idea. One human life is lost, but Penny and Primrose go on to live bravely ordinary lives even after seeing this monstrous apparition, which, the author stresses, is all too real.
In "Body Art," a conventional physician in an ordinary British hospital, in the company of a charming woman whom he would ordinarily end up with, is charged with the task of cataloguing a collection of medical curiosities including "shelves of artificial nipples, lead and silver, rubber and bakelite. . . . Shelves of foetuses, monkeys, armadillos, rats, sows, boys, girls and an elephant. Monsters also, humans and creatures born with no head or two heads." The charming woman hires an assistant, who starts up an affair with the doctor, camps out with the monstrosities, steals many of them, and then fashions an art object for a gallery, a depiction of the goddess Kali: "Her earrings were preserved foetuses, decked with beads . . . her crochet hooks were the tools of the nineteenth century obstetricians, midwives and abortionists" -- again, all loot from the hospital collection. The doctor freaks, but this wacky woman is already pregnant with his child. Thus, the grotesque and the stolid commingle.
I know this collection is good and good for me, a sampler, if you will, of what fine writing should be. But -- how dare I say this? -- a little fine writing can go a long way. "A Stone Woman" at first appears to examine how grief can turn us emotionally to stone. Ines, loving daughter, loses her beloved mother. Ines puts away her mother's finery, "creamy silks and floating lawns, velvet and muslin, lavender crêpe de Chine, beads of pearl and garnet," but soon finds that she -- after more suffering -- is turning into a very different kind of art object on her own. No pearls or garnets -- she's turning to stone and minerals, like "labradorite and fantomqvartz." She meets a stonecutter who takes her for the summer to Iceland where "the daylight was sempiternal, there was no nightfall, only endless shifts in the colour of the sky, trout-dappled, mackerel-shot, turquoise, sapphire, peridot," and you want to say, okay, I get it! We don't make enough use of the language! Our minds are largely dead! Thank you for sharing! You've made your point.
"Raw Material" makes mean-spirited fun of untalented writers while pulling the same linguistic stunts on topics like stove blacking and doing laundry in the old days, complete with an abstruse mention of Reckitt's Blue, which I had previously thought was, to paraphrase Eliot, "a madly American word."
You can't really complain about this book. Buy it for your mother, father, lover. They won't be able to complain about it, either. They won't have the nerve.
