- "Like this" - A mother takes her toddler to the toilet while leaving her baby outside with a woman. When she comes out, the woman and baby have gone. They're never found. She blames herself. Her marriage falls apart. Ah, but that's a page-long flight of fantasy. Actually the woman and baby are there. On the way home she feels like "A wanderer who visits another world and spends a lifetime there, only to return to their own and not a minute passed" (see "The Inner Light" - StarTrek).
- "Mayday" - A student in Ireland is about to take morning-after pills that she bought online. Her grandmother is back in hospital. She recalls when as a schoolgirl she went to a Catholic service, and when she had a school debate on abortion. She removes all trace of her searches and purchase from her laptop. She's relieved, sad, so relieved when the pills work. She recalls going to her mum when she had her first period.
- "People tell you everything" - The female narrator, 27, is having drinks with a work colleague, Rachel. She doesn't want Rachel to know it's her birthday. She hopes a man will txt her. She starts crying. Rachel's theory of life is that people tell you everything when you first meet them. The narrator tries to recall the man's first words. Rachel asks her if she recalls her first words to her. They were about a new start, which Rachel had interpreted as a come-on. Actually the narrator had meant that she'd given up waiting for the married man to leave his wife. More street scenes - "the bicycle repair yard opposite turned into a bar by night, all fairy lights and bunting, the Airstream trailers in the vacant car park now street-food vans. Deckchairs outside bars on scrappy squares of AstroTurf".
- "Words for things" - About how women's views about each other are affected by men. About communication problems more generally. The narrator and an old friend, both recently mothers, think of some women that they had made fun of when they were younger (Monica Lewinski, etc). The narrator realises that these women might have been misrepresented. The 2 women often communicate using only emojis. Her mother responds with gifs. Her father reads txts weekly. She thinks back to her headmistress, who on reflection might have been an early feminist. She thinks how notions of time/love have changed now she's on maternity leave. She plays with her little son for ages; her mother tells her that "You'll never be loved so much again". She recalls how at university a male lecturer used extracts from the Lewinski case to demonstrate literary close-reading. He was an entertainer - the students laughed at the right places and applauded at the end. She starts txting her friend at 2am, the "phone jumping to anticipate each word". A good story.
- "Jars of clay" - The 3rd-person female protagonist is in a little group of religious people flying (from the USA?) to Ireland to help with anti-abortion campaigning. They've practised their arguments but on the street a women makes a case to the already wavering protagonist that the proganist fails to cope with. No.
- "Night waking" - A mother of 2 little children awakes in the night thinking that an intruder might be in the flat. Her husband's away. She's too scared to check, then she does. Finally "Something is happening, somewhere, you tell yourself, but not here, not here, not now.". No.
- "The children" - The narrator (young mother of 2) has found a lump in her breast. While waiting to have tests and get the results -
- She reads about Caroline Norton (b.1808 - author and social reformer who got the child custody laws changed). Her children were taken away from her by her violent husband
- Her little boy is scared of being snatched
- In the news, it says that child asylum seekers in the USA are being taken from their parents. She wants to join a protest march.
p.s. At the start, going down Trumpington Street, Cambridge she sees "The Fitzwilliam, the Pitt Building, Peterhouse", which are in the wrong order. - "Lady moon" - The female narrator lives with a guy in a London flat with a roof terrace of sorts. They track planes. She has an unplanned pregnancy. They're both happy about it but it will mean big changes. But she might be miscarriaging. After a medical examination and more long waits she's none the wiser. Online she finds consolation - "even if a soul barely flickers on this astral plane, a week, a few days, it's still you it's chosen as its mother". No.
- "All the people were mean and bad" - Much the best story, some reviewers wrote. 2nd-person, present tense. A mother and 21 month-old Tilly are starting a transatlantic night flight back from a funeral of the mother's female cousin, who she was briefly close friends with. Her husband is a busy film producer. She's unsure about the marriage. She feels she's lost control over her destiny. She tries to interest Tilly in a book about Noah. Tilly loves the page that shows all the naughty things Noah's people did (hence the story's title). The 54 y.o divorced father beside her is understanding. She recalls how happy a uni friend of hers was when she married an older man. The man asks the mother if she believes the book - he thinks people are basically good. They talk through the night - about distances, how people change. He says "I think people change, for sure, but only ever become, essentially, more themselves". She replies "Then where's the hope, if we can never truly begin again, or become, I don't know, something else or better?". At immigration control they're mistaken for a family. He offers her a lift. She thinks of the books that she read with her cousin, "the ones with multiple pathways through, and dozens of endings. Her cousin chose the most reckless routes. She turns him down, lists the things she has to do. She goes home and does them. She feels sorry for Noah's people who like her were trying to do their best.
- "Devotions" - A mother muses about life during a long car journey home with 2 little kids and her husband. They arrive in London at midnight, unload, settle in again. It's nice to be home, to be a family. "Home, you think; a Zeno's paradox. Motion is impossible and change an illusion ... Motion is not impossible: in fact the opposite. Life rushes by, streams through the attempt to snatch at it, then suddenly parts to show you glimpses of the next world, and the next, the ceaseless change to come
- "Intimacies" - A mother of a young child imparts 7 snippets of wisdom (with supporting anecdotes) to her next child (not the aborted foetus that's hinted at), addressing it as "you". E.g. "We think the tests will come on the days we're ready for them, braced and prepared, but they don't: they come to us unheralded, unexpected, in disguise, the ordinariest of moments". The "you" was born in a drought when ground-markings of old sites reappeared. Scars/wounds reappear if you're low on vitamin C. In an estuary, 750,000 year-old footprints of a woman plus children are discovered - "they briefly appeared and, in the act of appearing, vanished. This is the second thing". Later, "That's the sixth thing. Art as merely a surfeit of desire, these words the currency of unspent love" and "now the seventh, final thing, the most banal and profound of all. Tell the people you love that you love them ... Say it now". "Thought for the day"? I wasn't convinced by most of the sections.
The pieces (bar perhaps the last) are all very readable - at times erring on the side of readability.
Planes appear often, as does the strain of having 2 young kids and the dream of a new start; the possibility of change. Love is all. Several pieces are based on standard themes - "Where's my baby?"; "Shall I have an abortion?"; "Will he leave his wife for me?"; "Is an intruder in the house?"; "Is the lump cancer?"; "Am I miscarriaging?" - the execution not always compensating for the predictability. The issues aren't always "explored". A situation arises that forces a decision. Memories either help the decision-making or retrospectively help explain why the decision was made.
The strands that comprise the better stories sometimes seem rather contrived (e.g. the Noah book vs the multiple-choice book in "All the people were mean and bad").
That said, I think "Words for things" and ""All the people were mean and bad" are good. Many of the others aren't my type of thing. My problem, I guess.
Other reviews
- Carrie O'Grady (10 of the 11 stories are about mothers and babies or children ... She has an amazing ability to zoom from small-scale to large in an instant, one moment mired in stifling domestic immediacy, the next contemplating the vast shadow of tragedy across the generations.)
- Niamh Campbell (high stakes – the life and death of the body, disaster, violence, illness, loss – play out in domestic life, where they are handled with a delicacy that illuminates, rather than mutes, their profundity. )
- Lydia Bunt (It is this idea, of a moment between mother and child that is already gone before it even happens, that is crucial for Caldwell. Is that bond enough to make it all worth it? Intimacies are fleeting, barely there, barely satisfying. ... These stories are often characterised by a sense of how things could have turned out differently. ... This is the appeal of Caldwell’s stories with multiple outcomes, clever twists and empty spaces: they are necessarily incomplete, but also require us to keep on imagining new histories for women.)
- JacquiWine (there is an intensity to the emotions that Caldwell captures in her stories, a depth of feeling that seems utterly authentic and true. Some of the most memorable stories rest on ‘what if’ or ‘what might have been’ moments, opening up the possibility of multiple outcomes)
- Mika Ross-Southall (Embedded in these stories are exquisite, often moving descriptions where everyday moments mix with the monumental. ... The collection is at its strongest when Caldwell explores the sinister and suffocating impact of society on women. ... Plots are clunky and unconvincing at times, and Caldwell’s decision not to include characters who are undecided about having children or know they never want them feels oddly outdated. Nonetheless, there’s an intriguing, resonating quality to these stories. )
- Storgy
- Jonathan Gibbs
- Laura Besley
