"Sweet home" by Wendy Erskine (Picador, 2019)

Stories from The Stinging Fly, etc

• To all their dues - 3 sections entitled "Mo", "Kyle" and "Grace". Mo has opened a beauty parlour - she used to work on phones where people wanted their Fortunes told. Her window's smashed. She's asked for protection money by Kyle. Then we see Kyle by his brother's graveside, at a hypnotist/therapist (a humourous mismatch), then with his wife Grace at a new restaurant. His style of speaking is great fun. In the final section we learn of Grace's religious childhood and how an early encounter with a rough girl made her lose religion. She's unable to have children. She loves Kyle and decides she should be more high maintainance. She regularly goes to the new beauty parlour. She asks about the broken window.
• Inakeen - Malcolm's dutifully visiting his widowed mother Jean. With time on her hands she's been trying out clubs/classes. She's been observing the 3 new inhabitants of the house opposite who she's nicknamed W7, Black Sail, and Inakeen. He has a new girlfriend to replace the Canadian Mariel, the mother of his 3 year-old, Anton. Jean misses Mariel and Anton (who's now in Canada speaking French) more than her husband. "Her husband was someone she once overheard being described as a fellow who would put a bob on himself both ways". At the end I think she dresses Islamic intending to befriend the people she now knows are Somalian.
• Observation - School-age Cath's friend Lauren has a mum called Kim Cassells who has boyfriends. Her new one, Stuart is 26. She holidays without Lauren. Lauren says that she (Lauren) has had sex with Stuart. Cath wants to see him. She wonders about which kinds of men attract which kinds of women. She's curious about whether Kim Cassells has a fake tan. She breakfasts with the family after a stay-over.
• Locksmiths - The female narrator's mother is jailed for murder. The narrator lives with her nan. The narrator visits her mother twice a year. When nan dies, the narrator's mother is let out for the funeral. She misbehaves. The narrator doesn't visit her again. She collects her on her release. They don't get on. They go to the local together. The mother meets an old friend. The daughter leaves. Next morning she plans to chuck her mother out (I think). The weakest piece so far.
• Sweet home - Gavin (from Belfast - his senile mother's still there) and architect wife Susan (Scotland) decide to move from London to Belfast where she's designed a big people's centre. He's an ideas man in advertising - jobless really. They hire a gardener Bucky, and his girlfriend Emma becomes their cleaner. Both get hugely overpaid. Emma brings her child Carl to work. Gavin sometimes reads him stories. Emma wonders if he's a paedo. Gavin and Susan had a daughter who died when 6. Bucky dumps Carl on Gavin for a day. Carl escapes into the road and nearly dies. Emma and Bucky split. Because of work, Susan's hardly in Belfast.
• Last supper - Andy manages a church's coffee bar that provides work for vulnerable people. It's losing money. At the end of the day 2 customers complain that a couple - workers - were having sex in the toilets. Andy apologises without agreeing that the workers "aren't right in the head" and asks the customers to keep it secret. Next day, the female worker doesn't come in. Andy had forgotten that it was her 6-month review. A man (his pomposity well-rendered) from the charity comes in, asks a few questions, then asks "So do you want to reflect on the process?" At the end of the story they find that the toilet episode in the "freakzone" is spreading through social media.
• Arab States: Mind and narrative - When Paula returns from a break early, Jimmy's not there, but his phone is. She worries, but he's only at a festival. She sees that Ryan Hughes, who asked her out at college, is sometimes on TV, talking about politics. He has a book out - "Arab States: Mind and narrative". He's going to be at a book festival in Newcastle. She books a flight from Belfast, and in her confused obsession arrives at a swimming pool instead of the venue.
• Lady and dog - Olga's been a primary school teacher for 40 years. Bit of a Miss Brodie. Doesn't get on with computers. When she was 17 and having an affair she found her lover with his head blown off. Belfast. She has a dog so that she can wander less suspiciously. A guy called Cormac comes to teach Gaelic football. He teases her. When he suddenly stops coming she's suspicious. I don't get the ending.
• 77 pop facts you didn't know about Gil Courtney - It's what the title says - a list of facts, anecdotes, and quotes from interviews and biographies. OK, though for a change we're distanced from the main character.
• The soul has no skin - The main character Barry works in a place like Argos. He uses skin lotion. He had an affair with Annie, his ex-boss who had a well-known drinking problem and an invalid husband. She had low self-esteem - "Look at me, she said. I want you to look. You see the, well, I hardly need to point any of it out to you, I would rather not give chapter and verse here, but what you are looking at is not really babe material.". He recalls when he was under 18 helping a bullied little girl in a playground. He was interviewed by the police that evening because she went missing. Now his boss accuses him of doing something wrong, but he was innocent. After the police incident he moved from his parents because people were throwing things at the house. He no longer sees his parents much. It's a dead-end job and most people move on. He hasn't.

I like the humour. I like the depiction of the males in particular.

No quote-marks. Not always a new paragraph per speaker - e.g.

Mariel and Anton might move back at some point, Jean said. Oh aye right, like anybody believes that. You need to go over again maybe next summer. I'm sure it would be better than last time. Yeah how dead on of Mariel, generously giving me an opportunity to see my own son. Jean was silent. Well, anyway, like I said, flying visit.

and

She was on the road the other day, Kim Cassell's, Cath's dad said. You didn't mention it, her mum said. Why would I mention it? Why would I mention to you everyone I see? Am I going to tell you about everything? Don't come in, her mum said, there's bleach going on this floor.

Even when stories don't quite work, you can feel sorry for the characters and there's observation and/or witty conversation. In "Last Supper" for example, dead-end but hard-working Andy knows the place will close down. He pops to Shop Kwik where "There's the polyphonic sound of a row of animatronic fish, flexing as they sing. Somebody's gone down the ailse pressing all of the buttons".

More than once, a character becomes rather obsessive, the intensity out of proportion to the unexpressed motivation. Paula seems to have more general issues.

Other reviews

• Will Heath (Each of these stories is written with a somewhat assuredly flippant disregard for the established tropes of short story writing. We are thrown into the deep end of these characters’ lives ... we follow them for a little while and then part ways without a resolution ... my favourite story, ....Locksmiths. ... We live at a time of unrest and impassioned hatred, and here are capsuled examples of the real people who live through that, all the while balancing the stresses and responsibilities of the inescapable everyday.)
• Sarah Gilmartin (The downtrodden in the community is a focus for Erskine, as is the importance of work for people who are struggling or rebuilding their lives after trauma. ... The penultimate story shows stylistic ambitions beyond the rest ... Erksine is at her best when she gives the narrative over to the authoritative, pulsating voices of her characters.)
• Lara Pawson (An exceptional ear for dialogue, an impeccable semantic rhythm and an uncanny ability to tease laughter out of the darkest moments mean Erskine is perfectly poised to stare, unflinching, into our neoliberal abyss. The result is a gripping, wonderfully understated book that oozes humanity, emotion and humour. ... Erskine’s subjects do their best to cope. They are trying to keep up; they are trying to reach out. They are doing their best to free themselves from the undertow of their lives.)
• Good reads

"Sweet Home" by Carys Bray (Windmill books, 2016)

This was first published by Salt in 2012. It contains stories from MsLexia etc. Most are about 10 pages long, though some are much shorter. There are many troubled parent-offspring relationships, several ill/trauma'd kids and people who like order in their lives. It's common for parents to flashback to their childhood, to compare themselves with their parents. In "Bodies", Dad speaks. "'The world is full of tragedy,' he said, shaking his head sadly, as if the world was nothing to do with us.", p.147. That tone could apply to many of the pieces. Sometimes the main character who's under strain doesn't reveal the extent of their problems. An alternative viewpoint (their memories, or the viewpoint of someone else) makes the situation more stark. In "Cover all" for example, we learn that the main character is rather obsessed in covering things up, but we learn more from the 2 girls watching her from a window as they negotiate their friendship - "And Louisa smiles as she hides under the covers". In general I like how children's PoVs are handled.

In "Love: terms and conditions" a visit to grandparents is described. On the journey back, we're told (I'm unsure why) that the children "have grown up in a family where love doesn't track a base rate of obedience. There are no Terms and Conditions to our affections, which has left them utterly unprepared for the measured, auditing love of their grandparents" (p.127). At home, the mother makes a snowman in the night (she wasn't allowed to as a kid) but the rest of the family aren't interested, even next day. The mother realises, in sequence, that she loves each of her 3 children best. Sometimes on the strength of one story, you buy a collection. This one has almost the opposite effect on me.

The title story looks rather like another predictable re-telling of a fairy tale. In "On the way home" there's a succession of points-of-view, a relay. I like "The ice baby". I like "Wooden Mum" (she has an Asperger's son). I like the more obviously constructed stories -

• "Scaling never" - Jacob's young sister, Issy, dies of meningitis. His father takes the funeral service. Jacob's confused about miracles. He unearths a bird that he and her sister buried. At the end "He wishes that Sister Anderson would bring magic beans to Primary instead of mustard seeds. He wishes he could plant the magic beans at the bottom of the garden behind the hedge, and watch an enormous stalk twist and stretch skyward. And even though Dad says that heaven is not actually in the sky, he wishes he could climb the stalk right up into the clouds and find Issy. That would be ace.". Bodies" is another child-PoV story where a child with religious parents struggles with the concept of death.
• "Bed rest" - "The curtains go shush as they horseshoe around, hiding us in a thick pocket. I stare at the curtains, rather than the incubator. They are criss-crossed with local landmarks in green and beige. They must have been made specially. It costs so much to watch television in hospital nowadays. In Exeter you can watch the curtains instead.". The baby's about to die. The mother thinks back to when her mother was having a difficult pregnancy. Her father had slapped her, then feeling guilty, bought her a doll which soon fell over the side of a ferry that's depicted on the curtains. Her brother, the outcome of her mother's difficult pregnancy, hasn't turned up.

There are some (often extended) metaphors that make me wince, but that's personal taste -

• "Another laugh wings her throat and she clips it to stop the tears that are fluttering close behind", p.5
• "'I'm not on holiday,' I replied, rummaging through the pockets of my head, trying to find her name", p.15
• "in the grotto of his heart, he knows that he is engaged in a much harder operation. // In the beginning he thought the rescue would be easy. Equipped with a Say-No-to-Drugs book and audiocassette, he set out to winch his son to safety", p.36
• "she knows he visits the son as well. She observes the changes in his vital signs: the wretchedness before the visits; the flatlining afterwards, and she is ready with defibrillating cups of tea on his return", p.38
• "She sucked up emotion like a vacuum cleaner. At times she was puffed with it", p.100. "She has soaked up all the grief around us like a piece of blotting paper", p.103.

There are some phrases that don't work for me -

• "He creates miserable montages of her mothering misdemeanours", p.59
• "He was happy. His love for Asta zigzagged through his chest like an icicle", p.141

Other reviews

• Simon Savidge
• Jane Housham (Here babies are like dolls and dolls like babies)
• Valerie O’Riordan (a couple are very much in the line of fairy-tales; and, in the same vein as Helen Simpson (whose Hey Yeah Right Get A Life is the stand-out influence here), Bray eschews the sentimentalisation of children and childhood, so that there’s a dark, melancholic edge to several of the stories that very much rings true to life. ... The two that impressed me most were ‘Under Covers’ and ‘Love: Terms and Conditions’.)
• Stuart Kelly ( have to confess I read many of these stories with a catch in my throat. It is not simply that much of the subject matter – a premature child, a bereavement, a parent's dementia, a son's spiral into addiction – is inherently affecting. Rather it is Bray's supreme control over the prose, which has a quality both lapidary and tremulous)
• Richard T. Watson (Every story is lovingly-crafted and a genuine pleasure to read ... Unusually for a short story collection, there are no stories that stand out as weaker than any of the others. ... Bray’s stylistic signature is probably her trick of giving the reader a little detail and letting that half-sentence stand in for a wealth of lived experience. )