The funny thing about Helen Simpson's In the Driver's Seat is that I couldn't accept the collection as short stories. As "short stories," I thought these things were flawed -- simple "plots," characters, and conceits that were clever but seemed to've sucked the chance for the width of exploration dry. Cliches popped up, too, which worried me.
However, I can almost accept them as "short shorts," which makes me wonder about the standards of the short short form itself, and whether or not switching the labels is enough to justify a swing of judgement. I don't think I can accept this, though, as short shorts aim for a compressed intensity which these lack: these stories are simple and laconic.
Here are the "plots," and here's what happens: children sneak onto a vacation house on the Mediterranean, then run away; a woman suffering from PTSD has a door replaced, then feels better about the door and herself once it's replaced; a woman comforts the upset child of a young mother at a swimming pool; a woman's worried about dying, loses a limb in an accident, then feels better; a woman drives some kids to school, feels lousy no one says goodbye to her, then feels better when someone does; a woman's mother is worried about a tree, and makes a mistake; a man makes his girlfriend feel uncomfortable, but for reasons the narrator doesn't understand, sticks with him; a foreign correspondant thinks he has cancer, and is probably the best story in the book; a woman can't stop thinking about the war; a life coach coaches while her coachee can't make sense of the world with an ineffective "Christmas Carol" analogy; and a sixty year old has a baby. Mostly, the stories don't extend beyond their plots.
The climax of one scene of "Every Third Thought":
"That's enough," said Harry, putting the paper down at last. "Didn't you hear your mother?"
How one character describes their workload:
I had so much work on that it wasn't funny.
Or this:
He had been flipping between channels for a while now, the flares and flashes and explosions changing place with roaring and balls and goals. Men are for Mars, she thought; is that it?
"Can't you stay with one channel?" she asked.
"I just wanted to see how Arsenal were doing."
Reality can be done better than that; reality can be livelier than that. "If I'm Spared" comes close to what I imagine the stories are trying to be, and captures all sorts of varieties, evolutions, regressions, and emotionality. In fact, I liked "If I'm Spared" quite a lot.
I'd like to make special mention of the story "Early One Morning" (he wrote.) There's an absolutely infuriating tic in here (he wrote), making me think (he thought) that there must have been a better way presented to the author during the course of writing these things about how to communicate interiority more effectively (he wrote), or, at least, a clearer way to tell the reader what a pronoun was (he wrote.)
The problem here is, they end well. I like the endings (save "The Phlebotomist's Love Life, he wrote.) I just wish there was another way to get there.
Things I Didn't Know
* That "like a house on fire" was a euphemism more than one person knew.
* What a Barclaycard was.
Things That Made Me Laugh
1.
I think he married me on the Picasso principle -- however old and ugly I get, with any luck I'll still be less old and ulgy than him.
2.
"Do you like beards on men?" she replied.
"No, I said. "I think they hide double chins."
There was a pause anda cold old blue-eyed stare.
"You know it all, don't you?" she said, and smiled in some version of triumph.
Then she started feeding peanuts into her tea again.
"What's the matter?" she said when she saw me staring. "Haven't you seen this done before?"
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