Honeydew
by Edith Pearlman, John Murray, 2015
The
short story is a form more enjoyed, I suspect, in North America than in the UK.
We are too serious and too steeped in Shakespeare for our own good. I have not
read a better collection of short stories than this since perhaps Annie Proulx
in her prime fifteen or twenty years ago.
The
charm of these short stories rest in the speed with which you become engaged
with the characters. There is less investment needed and you are soon in the
middle of the story. Because of economy, many of the short stories here hang at
the end, in a rather disjointed but charming way. Do you want to know what
happened next? Time to pick up a novel instead.
Edith
Pearlman resists the shorthand of other short story writers, who give false
depth through strangeness and bizarre choice of names. The stories in
‘Honeydew’ happen in Godolphin, a fictional Boston suburb, which is comfortable
and familiar. Several stories cross-reference each other, which keep you on
your toes as a reader, checking back to confirm that a character who was
mentioned briefly was detailed in all her richness in another branch of the
same tree.
The
dust jacket claims that Edith Pearlman is ‘the equal of Updike or Munro’. Can a
writer be the equal of well-regarded literary heavyweights and yet be so very
different? Part of the appeal of Edith Pearlman’s latest collection is that
they cannot be compared with the work of anyone else. There are surprising
turns and startling sudden deaths, but they are plotted out with such a
matter-of-factness that she stands apart from more esteemed American writers.
Perhaps the calm acceptance of death in all its sanitised forms in a fair
reflection of Pearlman’s own time of life: an internet search reveals that she
is a grandmother.
Brevity
is a skill. There are twenty stories in this collection, some barely clocking
in at twelve pages. I have great admiration for the writer who has the
confidence to set up and break down in such a short space of time. Her stories
might as well be occasional glances through shop doors and around curtains in
hospital wards, with a few captured phrases from each character. It is a sort
of literary equivalent of a long, shared bus ride. There is so much richness in
the stories that curiosity is satiated. That is a real mastery of this style of
writing.
