Stories from The Stinging Fly, Dublin Review, White Review, etc.
Some of the strengths of the stories are blunted by reading the stories together - once the shock of the new wears off it's clear that whether the pieces are first or third person, the distance between narrative and character is much the same, and repeated themes abound - Women with older lovers; Young women from Ireland; Women moving from small town to big city; Mad mothers; Mothers and daughters keeping in touch by phone; Someone wanting to be normal with someone wanting to become less so; Depersonalisation; Women doing/thinking strange things; The obvious becoming puzzling or making people cry; feelings of detachment from the world leading to attempts to find things to identify with. There's a list of kranky thoughts that could have been in any of the stories, as if the author kept a list and sprinkled them around.
I liked "Show them a good time" (perhaps because it was the first I read) and much of "Abortion A love story". I least liked "Parrot". Each story had something to like, even if it was only a quip or two.
- Show them a good time - She's about 28, working in a filling station as sort of therapy. On Fridays the employees have a group therapy session. She's living back with her parents after 2 years away. Kevin, 19, starts working with her. They get on well. She says that she went away to the city to discover her self and found nothing. He can't tell whether he's real or in a film. We learn (and the others know already) that she was in porn films. Customers seem to know as well. Her city boyfriend used to hit her. One day she decided enough was enough. When Kevin's sacked, she goes strange - she watches her old films and the 2 of them on CCTV garage footage. She works hard at breaking and replacing a light-bulb, then collapses?
I liked this, partly because of the shock of the style. The garage is the woman's world of experience. I like the use of the light-bulb and the plant. - Sweet talk - She's 14. Her parents hire workers for a farm, housing them in caravans. Sex is beginning to enter her world. She chats about it with friends. The headlines are about missing women. A 30 year-old Australian man appears, who she fancies. When he gets a 24 year-old live-in girlfriend (24), he asks the protagonist if he should marry his girlfriend. Her mother asks the protagonist if the girlfriend is pregnant. The girlfriend leaves. The protagonist goes into the Australian's caravan, looks at the cosmetics that the girlfriend has left, then strips off and waits. There are dead flies in her mouth.
- Hump - her father died at 70. At the wake she has some kind of breakthrough about communicating. She moves into her father's house. She has a boring job - "We shed our city selves but, lacking imagination, we had nothing to replace them with. Between the forty of us, I think we could have made a complete person". She hates her boss who she's going out with and having one-sided sex with. She thinks she's developing a hump-back. She tries to slap it down. She has massage. Her boss says she's acting strange. They split. She has time off work - grief? At night she meets new people and introduces them to old college friends for no apparent reason. She wants men to tell her their failures. She stripteases for them without them asking. She makes "little adjustments" to her life. She asks her boss for a date. He says he got sacked and has a lump on his neck. She can see it's nothing but tells him it's cancer, good to catch early.
- Abortion, a Love Story - 86 pages. Student Natasha has to see Prof Carr about her lack of progress. She's at a famous university - "She remembered reading through the college brochures and picking the place with the oldest, leafiest trees, the highest buildings. This was where she would get the most value for money, she decided". She blamed The Computer House - a glass building she looked into but never entered. Carr gives her private lessons, touches her. Patrick was her first, clingy boyfriend. She was strange, trying to be normal. He wanted to be less conventional. She avoided fun. She became pregnant. She had an abortion, stopped going to lectures. She stayed with Patrick's parents at the weekend while he went clubbing. They loved her like an orphan.
She was replaced by Lucy, a student writer. She stands on a restaurant table to give a speech about Natasha. "Lucy had no idea where she came from ... She didn't know where her money was funnelled from""She was studying theatre and that involved rolling around a wooden floor in a leotard. She was a cat, a bridge, a cartoon of milk. She was the most nalleable student and the instructors ran their hands up her spine. She memorised and recited passages with vigour. Cocteau. Artaud. Sartre. She recited these quotes as if they were filled with utmost meaning, as if they were designed specifically for her. Her mind had little compartments and her education slid in easily. Her past was disappearing, although she still had dreams."
She returns, becomes friends with Natasha. She auditions badly. In Lucy's flat she notices Carr's presents. They rewrite Lucy's script as a comedy. They put the show on for one night. It's a summary of their 2 lives. At the end Lucy says "I'm not sure. I don't know if I get it"
I was trying to work out how much Natasha and Lucy were one person. I liked the final play, and much of the story as a whole, though it could have been shorter. - Track - She's Irish. Her parents are divorced. In her 20s she tried suicide - "I remembered the boy I was seeing when it happened, carting me around as if I was on loan, glamorous but refundable". then flew to New York. Her boyfriend's a famous comedian. There's an age difference. She loves him. "What he wanted more than anything else was to be told he was normal". She's a cosmetician, visiting people. She moved in a week after they met. On the first night she watched a man who lived opposite throw good shirts from his window. She has no friends or relatives in the town. She sometimes thinks that even those who know he would rather not. "Every day, there were two versions of me."; "I practised my accents so the neighbours would think there was a flurry of people who lived next door". He encouraged her to audition for acting parts. She lacked presence. A psychic tells her that her life will be empty. She likes staying in with him. Things go wrong when they start going out together. She takes painkillers to cope with society events. Her boyfriend plays her his talisman - a cassette tape of laughter given him by his mad mother. He used it when practising routines. The forum about him says he's past it. She befriends some of the forum people. She leaves posts there under his mother's name saying he's not funny. In his show his character is knowing - "When he pointed to the sky and said 'Sure looks like snow!' snow fell immediately." She discovers she has many STDs. He sleeps with other women. She gets a part on his TV show but when asked to put a maid's uniform on, she walks out. The ending is "And I thought I would like weather - thunder, lightning, snow. I thought I would like weather and snow came from the sky."
- Parrot - A 30-ish ex-art student, stepmother of a 9 year old boy who behaves badly at school, has moved with her older husband to start again in Paris. She doesn't know French. She went there with her mother once. She still regularly phones her mother. One afternoon she is "searching for her soul at a frantic pace that suggested she was rummaging through a demolition site for the remains of her belongings rather than spending a pleasant few hours in a museum". His first wife had never got over post-natal depression and had killed herself a year or so before the story starts. Not for the first time she has to go to the school to talk them out of expelling the boy. She's invited to watch from a distance his behaviour amongst other kids. The story ends as he's about to strike out again.
The weakest piece so far - You're going to forget me before I forget you - The first-person PoV's sister called because she can no longer do small talk. She's pregnant at 40. In her early teens she miscarried. She had been preparing for aliens to land Her neurosis is like the narrator's - she can no longer the purpose of forks. The narrator's on an anniversary book tour. She's tried to write sequels to the children's book but they seemed written by "a woman who resembled me." "My main trouble, my sister declared, was that I always liked my life like I was immediately planning on leaving it". Her mother died before she was 9. She has no furniture in her house. She has an ex who she sometimes phones. At her hotel "I wanted to use the phone but when I saw the barman, suited, assured, giving no indication that he was dying, or that anyone in his family was dying, or forgetting their lives, or losing something day by day, I was so angry that I was speechless. I thought of all the people who cared about him and how they would continue to care about him. So what I said instead was, "I think this hotel is trash"". Her sister gives birth early. The narrator visits her in hospital (the same one they'd been taken to when the sister miscarried). Her sister looks at her as if she doesn't know who she is.
- Not the end yet - Angela's the third-person narrator. She's 41. She goes on a date with a salesman, 45. She looks forward to dates like dental appointmens - a man is going to examine her and discover that something is horribly wrong. He thinks her cold. He has gambling debts. He warns her that if they go back to his place she risks being attacked. She invited him to her car then goes back to his place, he "banging her like he was partaking in a burglary - ransacking the house for something he would never find." Next she dates an artist (47) at the same restaurant after doing to a play. He says "if you didn't enjoy and appreciate that play, you're not going to understand me, fundamentally, as a human being". She then dates a supermarket greengrocer (50) at the same restaurant. Again, they sit in her car. She goes to a car dealership. The dealer "had the look of someone who might have debated wearing a cowboy hat to hawk his goods, but was persuaded out of it by a sensible person aware of cowboy hats and what they could do to a man's reputation". She thinks of buying a sports car.
Other reviews
- Anthony Cummins (Flattery’s themes are work, womanhood and early-to-midlife indirection ... casually disturbing revelations heightened by her fondness for cutting any obvious connective tissue between sentences)
- Chris Power (Flattery’s dominant interest is in people who are deeply estranged not just from their surroundings – they are isolated even in crowded rooms, and the ones in relationships are the most isolated of all – but from themselves, too ... the excellent "Track" ... As is the case with many of the settings in these stories, the hotel is at the same time a physical space and an external projection of inner turmoil ... "Abortion, a love story" [] continues beyond what seems its natural endpoint. There must be a reason why Flattery devotes more than 20 pages to an exhausting scene-by-scene description of the [] play [] but I’m not sure what it is. “I don’t know if I get it,” Lucy says at the play’s close, and in that moment it’s hard to tell if Flattery is being aggressive or apologetic towards her readers. ... they deal largely with disordered thought, disappointment, the failure to connect and pain)
- Goodreads
- "Reading these stories, you’re never quite sure what to expect, what bargain characters have struck with reality. At times, the tales progress according to realist conventions; at other times, according to a dream logic in which characters’ reactions seem displaced or condensed, wildly disproportionate or slightly off-key ... This surrealism permeates down to the sentence level, making each story delightfully surprising and unsettling to read ... In these ways, Flattery’s tales are reminiscent of Donald Barthelme’s short fiction or the stories of Leonora Carrington, in which meaning and desire attach to unexpected things.... If the collection has a weakness, it’s that the stories all operate in a similar emotional register" - Emily Mitchell
- "Some of Flattery’s conceits seem odd for the sake of it. The longest story here grinds wearyingly on and its protagonists outstay their welcome." - Malcolm Forbes
- "Nicole Flattery’s narrative voice is monotonous, with almost no variation in tone, no cadences, no impetus. It is persistent without being insistent. It does not shock, nor engage the reader with its rhetoric. ... The second serious issue is the lack of originality. This is not a new voice in Irish fiction but a familiar echo of world literature ... The intention seems not to describe emotions or to offer any unique insight so much as to impress with cleverness." - Richard Pine
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