Zadie Smith, editor
THE BOOK OF OTHER PEOPLE
168pp. Hamish Hamilton. £16.99.
978 0 241 14363 6
The Book of Other People, according to Zadie Smith’s introduction, is “about
character”. This is nearly correct: it is no more than the title suggests, a
book of characters. As Smith herself notes, a few sentences later, “the book
has no particular thesis or argument to convey about fictional character”;
it merely constitutes the attempts of twenty-three recognized writers to
produce a short story focusing on a different individual, which has been
stretched to include an animal, a pre-evolved man and a giant made of rock.
Happily, the beneficiary is a charity, encouraging literacy, called 826 New
York. Of course, even if Zadie Smith has not the time, unpaid, to discern
any pattern in the resultant collection (and her editing role is generally
rather restricted: a three-page introduction, a fifth of which is about
fonts; the arrangement of the stories in alphabetical order; the concern to
“retain the individuality of each piece by leaving them, by and large,
little changed”), patterns do emerge nonetheless. And there are some
well-turned tales to enjoy as well.
An initial workable definition of “character”, relevant to the modern short
story, comes from the OED: “a person regarded in the abstract as the
possessor of specified qualities”. This is suggestive of the fictional idea
that a person can be broken down into constituent parts: prose as a prism,
in which a spectrum of characteristics is revealed. The Book of Other People
contains many moments of such separation. This is from “Gideon” by ZZ
Packer:
"I saw him thinking about his parents – Sy and Rita – growing worried in
their condo’s sunny Sarasota kitchen; I saw him never finishing his thesis
and going to work for some grubby non-profit where everyone ate tempeh and
couldn’t wear leather and almost had a Ph.D.; I saw him hauling the kid
around to parks, saying it was the best thing he’d ever done."
Character can thus be catalogued, divided into a series of distinct features
that form the whole. A central thesis of this collection of short stories is
that this process is most often achieved by the act of recollection. The
majority of them convey information about a person by recounting what each
remembers. For example, Adam Thirlwell’s Nigora can make “lists of her life”
by recalling key aspects of it: “she remembered the sledge on nails above
the front door; the dovecote of slippers beside it. She remembered doing
piano practice on a Saturday morning, a metronome becoming hysterical beside
her”. This is memory as metonymy: the parts of people’s past that act as
representations of what they have become in the present. A fictional
portrait can easily be, as Heidi Julavits puts it in this book, “an anecdote
inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence”.
The reminiscences are primarily visual, another key unifying factor in The
Book of Other People. The prevailing imaginative resource for the modern
short-story writer is not literature, but film: A. L. Kennedy’s superb
“Frank” is set in a cinema; Daniel Clowes’s tiresome "Justin
M. Damiano”, a graphic story (what he has called elsewhere a “narratoglyphic
picto-assemblage”), is about a film critic; Thirlwell’s Nigora can also list
her life in terms of “all the films which she had seen with her father”; and
so on. Moments in characters’ lives are, therefore, described as if they
were framed segments from a movie: “chemical flare-ups in the brain
chemistry, arresting moving images (his analogy came from photographic
film)”, as Zadie Smith puts it in her own story. The book can be seen as a
sort of literary YouTube, a series of short, revealing clips of its
characters.
It certainly seeks to emphasize – in typical postmodern fashion – the impact
of images on individuals. When Tennyson talked about the process of
maturation, he referred to the experience of learning: “I am not what I see
and other than the things I touch”. Yet we are told here that what we see
also reflects who we are: Nigora, characterized by her films; Zadie Smith’s
Hanwell, who wants his environment to “become not just the thing I see but
the thing I am”, is echoed by his father, “for whom the world was, and could
consist only of, those people he saw or spoke to every day”. “Character”,
according to the OED, is also “a formal testimony”: what characters see, and
how they react, forms a telling testimony of who they are.
This process of perception becoming self-characterization is neatly set out by
A. L. Kennedy, who describes the reaction of grieving relatives in the
following way: “they rage for their lovers, their loves, for their dead
love, their dead selves”. The focus moves from the person loved, to the act
of love, to the self doing the loving. The outward vision becomes, then, a
graphic illustration of the inward person. The process is also an
illustration of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s maxim – in his notes for The Last
Tycoon, his novel about moviemaking – that “action is character”. Thirlwell
says something similar when Nigora notes that “events are a sure guide to
character . . . our characters – she would have argued, sadly – are nothing
but events”.
“Nigora” is actually an extract from a novel, a form that has room to have
more things happen in it. Michael Chabon has described the American short
story as “plotless, sparkling with epiphanic dew”, and there is a difficulty
that short works (as is true for the more footling efforts here) can be
reduced to merely impressionistic accounts without the narrative to
reinforce them.
The point is highlighted in the two most fantastical stories in the
collection: Toby Litt’s “Monster”, and “Theo” by Dave Eggers. Litt’s
contribution is a description of a member of an unnamed species, presumably
early man, who have only “few words and concepts available to them: monster,
creation, sun, tree, fruit, merd, good, bad, up and down”. Eggers tells the
story of three mountainous lumps in the scenery who awaken as giants, one of
whom is female (complete with “35-foot breasts, ten-foot-tall lips, legs
eighty feet high”) and is lusted after by the other two. Litt offers his
epiphanic testimony to the life of his monster, but no more, concluding:
“the monster had no story, unless being a monster is story enough”. Merely
being a monster, being any character, is not story enough; the reader
recoils from the arrogance of a conceit that does not bother to be more than
a conceit. Eggers’s giants (Soren, Magdelena and Theo) form an intriguing
love triangle, broken when the first two get together, leaving Theo bereft,
sitting “silently near the chalky cliffs of Toto-Mootn, eating bears, lost
in thought”. Yet another definition of “character” is “essential
peculiarity”: both the stories are peculiar, but the peculiarity is only
essential when it is used to tell a story.
Narrative in short stories, of course, is physically restricted by space, and
this has an impact on how much can be revealed. The Book of Other People is
necessarily a collection – giants notwithstanding – of small-scale
characterization: the narrator of “Gideon” has “a little life”; Hanwell
Senior “existed in a small way”; Nigora “was a minor character”. The best
short stories use this small scale as a tight focus, which however remains
suggestive of the wider world outside the narrative. A short tale, in Henry
James’s view, should come from the channelling of the “space-hunger” of its
characters: it should at once demand more words, and be energized by their
restriction.
The best example of this is A. L. Kennedy’s “Frank”. It turns on an
undescribed tragedy, “which had been an accident, an oversight, a
carelessness that lasted the space of a breath”, which beautifully informs
Frank’s actions throughout. We crave further information, but are denied it;
the unstated part is able, as Hemingway put it, to “strengthen the story and
make people feel something more than they understand”. In the lesser
offerings here, we also notice that overstatement can occasionally be the
product of the shortness of short stories. “Character” can yet again be
defined as “a distinctive mark; a brand, stamp”; and problems occur when a
writer seeks to brand someone too distinctively in too small a space. One
result of this is clichéd dialogue: individuals speech-marked by their
creators, given words that are stamped excessively with their character. So,
David Mitchell’s middle-aged parvenu, Judith Castle, says things like: “he
couldn’t hide how utterly enchanté he was with little old moi on a carnal
level”. Or there is Jonathan Safran Foer’s stereotypical Jewish grandma, who
parrots: “Have a cookie. It’s good for you. You know what your problem is?”.
There is also the apparent pressure on writers to stamp their own “style of
writing peculiar to any individual” (OED again, “character”), which can lead
to a different type of writerly overstatement: the inappropriate poeticism.
Examples include the unwieldy collective noun: Mitchell describes ants “like
a spilt canister of commas”; Aleksander Hemon sees “a flock of blood drops”.
Or the description over-furnished with metaphor: “the upholstery warted with
burn marks” (Julavits); or “the armchair, with its pornographic rents and
tears” (Thirlwell).
In the end, The Book of Other People still manages to offer a generally
encouraging report on the current state of short-story writing. It shows us
that the best accounts of individuals are visual and filmic, based on memory
and action, space-hungry but calmly understated, and tell a story. So
perhaps Zadie Smith was correct, and this book is indeed “about character”
after all.
Stephen Abell is a freelance writer living in London.
