Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor review – a chilling meditation on loss and time
The rural village, the missing girl, the search for a body … then life goes on, as an archetypal story is rekindled with explosive results
Tessa Hadley Saturday 14 April 2017
W
hy is it always a girl who’s missing? What is it in that archetype that tugs at us in some deep place – readers and viewers, male and female alike – when yet again the quest begins with news of someone’s daughter who hasn’t come home, or a glimpse of a girl in some place that’s much too lonely, glancing back nervously over her shoulder? We can’t imagine being hooked so easily if the paperback thriller or crime drama began with a missing boy, and the idea of his disappearance wouldn’t transform with the same inevitability into the idea of the boy’s death, the image of it.
FICTION: A mesmerizing novel about a rural English community and the disappearance of a teenage girl.
By MALCOLM FORBES
Special to the Star Tribune NOVEMBER 3, 2017 — 10:45AM
The famous Arlington Row in Bibury, The Cotswolds, dusted with January snow
Jon McGregor’s first novel, the Man Booker Prize longlisted “If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things,” was a shrewdly composed, beautifully orchestrated urban hymn. “The city, it sings,” ran its opening refrain, and from there McGregor zoomed into a British street and amplified its residents’ individual voices.
He mixes the mundane and the ecstatic, and refuses to settle into conventional form.
James Wood November 20, 2017
One of my favorite short stories is Luigi Pirandello’s beautiful, brief “A Breath of Air.” An old man, paralyzed by a stroke, sits in his bedroom, while the life of the household stirs around him. The old man seethes with anger and resentment, and on this particular day he is unusually perturbed. Everyone seems to be acting strangely. His little granddaughter enters the room, and is annoying and unruly—she runs toward his balcony, whose glass doors she wants to open. His daughter-in-law, who comes in to remove the child, seems not quite herself. Even the old man’s son seems different: he uses a tone of voice that the patriarch has never heard before. What has happened? Are they all in league against him? When he asks the servant why she is sighing, she laughs, and he angrily dismisses her. Later, he confronts his son, who assures him that nothing is going on, nothing has changed. But in the early evening, as a perfumed breeze gently pushes open the balcony door, he understands: spring has come. “The others could not see it. They could not even feel it in themselves because they were still part of life. But he who was almost dead, he had seen and felt it there among them. . . . That was why they had all behaved differently, without even knowing it.”
This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor – review
An audacious collection of short stories in which events come out of left field
Maggie O'Farrell Fri 3 Feb 2012 22.55 GMT
I
was at a literary festival recently when an audience member asked the panel if they thought the short story would make a comeback in this country. I was surprised at the time because, as far as I'm aware, the short story has never gone away. The genre in Britain may not perhaps share the robust health it enjoys in North America, especially after the BBC revealed plans to reduce its short story programming. But all is far from lost. We haveHelen Simpson,Dan Rhodes,Ali Smith: skilled short-story writers, all. We can now add Jon McGregor's name to this roll-call, with his generously titled collection,This Isn't The Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You.
THIS ISN'T THE SORT OF THING THAT HAPPENS TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU
STORIES
BY JON MCGREGOR ‧
RELEASE DATE: MARCH 27, 2012
Absorbing, quirky stories by Booker-nominated McGregor.
The best stories here are very good indeed. McGregor approaches his narratives elliptically and doesn’t shy away from experimentation. “In Winter the Sky,” for example, focuses on the fortunes of George, a young man who has been visiting his girlfriend. Driving home in a preoccupied state, he accidentally runs over a man, killing him instantly. Because he knows this would have a less-than-salutary effect on his future, George calmly buries the man and gets on with his relationship with the girl, eventually marrying her and taking care of his debilitated father. Years later the body is discovered, but there are no moral ramifications for George, only a little inconvenience. While McGregor conveys this narrative on the left-hand pages of the story, on the right-hand pages he gives us fragments of poetry written by George’s girlfriend/wife, poetry that gives us an alternative view of the events recounted. Another brilliant story, “Which Reminded Her, Later,” introduces us to Michael, a vicar, and Catherine, his wife. In deft strokes McGregor gives us glimpses of their earlier relationship, but by the time this story begins, they’re a long-suffering married couple. In his role as vicar (and Good Samaritan), Michael has invited a mysterious American woman into their house, a woman who spends much of her time dealing with a mysterious ailment. Catherine has little tolerance for this act of charity, and she and her husband become equally intransigent about how to deal with the situation. McGregor gives us 30 stories here, ranging from a single sentence to dense (and intense) re-creations of relationships.
The best short stories should haunt you for days and weeks. The stories in McGregor’s collection have stayed with me for months on end. They are linked by a unity of place – the fenlands of Norfolk and Cambridge – and by precise, elegant prose that elevates everyday occurrences into small, perfectly rendered pieces of art. As Maggie O’Farrell put it in her Guardian review: “The stories wrap themselves around the wholly disconcerting premise that catastrophes can rear up in anyone’s life without warning.”
Possibly the most economical short story writer in this list, Carver, with his precise, punchy prose, conveys in a few words what many novelists take several pages to elucidate. In stories such as “Fat” and “Are You a Doctor?” he writes with flat understatement about suburban disenchantment in mid-century America. The collection – shortlisted for the National Book prize – was written during what Carver called his “first life”, when he almost died of alcoholism. His “second life” started in 1977, when he gave up drinking with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Winner of last year’s inaugural Folio prize for fiction, Saunders is, according to Entertainment Weekly, “the master of joy bombs: little explosions of grin-stimulating genius that he buries throughout his deeply thoughtful, endlessly entertaining flights of imagination”. Stories such as “Victory Lap” demonstrate his deftness of touch in mixing humour and humanity, as well as showcasing his technical brilliance, incorporating several different points of view in a contained space. And “Sticks”, little over a page in length, is one of the most moving stories I’ve ever read
The Thing Around Your Neck
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009)
Adichie had written two novels set in her native Nigeria before this collection. It shifts her gaze to the US in 12 stories that explore the experiences of husbands and wives, parents and children, immigrants and permanent residents. The title story delves into the loneliness suffered by a Nigerian girl who moves to an America far removed from her imaginings. A wise and emotive writer, in this collection Adichie touches on her familiar themes of exile, cultural miscommunications and the human desire to reconcile internal and external worlds.
The Canadian writer won the Nobel prize for literature in 2013 for her extraordinary work as “master of the contemporary short story”. She also won the 2009 Man Booker International prize for her lifetime body of work and has been called a modern-day Chekhov. Runaway is among her best collections and displays all of Munro’s mastery: the effortless shifts in time, sometimes across decades; the ability to convey an entire life in a few pages; the exploration of complex truths in uncomplicated language.
This collection was first published in 1922, a year before Mansfield’s death at the age of 34 from tuberculosis. A pioneering modernist writer, Mansfield was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand before moving to Britain, where she became friends with DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. The title story, one of her best-known works, is written in the modernist style, with the deceptively simple setting of a family preparing for a garden party. Against this backdrop Mansfield brilliantly interweaves meditations on class, life and death, illusion and reality.
Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex Features
Pulse
Julian Barnes (2011)
Barnes is best known as a novelist and won the Man Booker prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. As a result, his short stories are rather overlooked and shouldn’t be. Pulse is Barnes’s 17th book and is a masterclass in the shorter form. He is brilliant at evoking social nuance and has an unfailing eye for the tiniest detail that will shine light on the whole. Two particularly wonderful examples from this collection are “Complicity”, about the delicate beginnings of a love affair, and “East Wind”, about a relationship between an estate agent and a foreign waitress.
This deliciously fat collection gives the reader the chance to dip in and out of one of the best observers of human behaviour. Moore is notable for her arch tone and her sharp humour. But what makes her special is the way she can shift so smoothly to gut-wrenching poignancy. She writes about terminal illness, family dynamics and infidelity with equal fluency. A particular favourite from this volume is “How to Be an Other Woman” from her first published collection, Self-Help (1985), which was composed almost entirely of stories from her master’s thesis.
This debut collection of nine stories won the Pulitzer prize shortly after it was published in 1999 and was named the New Yorker’s debut of the year. The stories, written with what Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described as “uncommon elegance and poise”, deal with the diversity of Indian-American immigrant experience and the curious alchemy of love and relationships. My particular favourite in this collection is “A Temporary Matter”, a beautiful mediation on grief, love and loss as a couple try to come to terms with the stillbirth of their child.
That Glimpse of Truth
David Miller (ed) (out 23 October 2014)
Some of the best short stories contain unexpected moments of felicity on which the plot pivots. And so it was that, just as I was compiling this list, I received a giant package containing this doorstep of a book. It might be the most comprehensive collection of short stories… ever, featuring an all-star cast including Angela Carter, Charles Dickens, Roald Dahl and more, selected by David Miller, a literary agent and author.
Surrealist artists, dogged detectives, modern lovers and spies behaving badly ... leading authors pick their best books to enjoy these holidays
Saturday 7 July 2018
Jon McGregor
People always say not to judge a book by its cover, but people are wrong. Ashleigh Young’s collection of smart, funny, insightful and unexpected essays, Can You Tolerate This? (Bloomsbury), has a bright yellow cover, making it perfect summer reading. I love it. I’ve been telling people about Lucy Wood’s short stories ever since her debut collection came out a few years ago; she’s back with another collection, The Sing of the Shore (4th Estate), and she’s better than ever. Finally, Melissa Harrison’s forthcoming All Among the Barley (Bloomsbury) is an astonishingly good evocation of rural England in the 1930s, complete with creeping fascism and the subjugation of women. It’s subtle and mesmerising and brilliantly detailed, and I’m going to lie down in a meadow and read it all over again.
Pankaj Mishra
Fiction in English from Pakistan has redeemed its promise with dazzling consistency. Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds (Bloomsbury) is a fresh marvel, describing with cool wit and steely yet tender intelligence the interlinked fates of antagonists in a forgotten war-scape – and the complicity of our own sheltered lives in remote conflicts. Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton) is a poetic and remarkably fertile exploration of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment, and what can still be done to stem its rapid deterioration.
The term neoliberalism provokes much choleric denial. But Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard) decisively establishes it as a coherent project, tracing it back to the political and intellectual synergies of the 1920s. Michelle Dean’s Sharp(Fleet), a portrait of 10 female writers and thinkers, is a bracing tribute to the life of the iconoclastic mind: a reminder, in our age of flashy hot takes, of the matchless power of sustained and elegant argument.
Blake Morrison
Kept from the world by a crazed fundamentalist father, cowed herbalist mother and violent misogynist brother, it’s a miracle Tara Westover escaped her childhood in rural Idaho. Her memoir Educated(Hutchinson) brilliantly recounts her journey towards knowledge and enlightenment; bravely, too – her family are still alive. With Rachel Cusk as with Karl Ove Knausgaard, you wonder what makes you keep turning the pages. But while he’s confessional, her narrator Faye lets other characters do the talking, giving little of herself away; Kudos completes a remarkable trilogy. The crepuscular, dreamlike, post-1945 London that Michael Ondaatje invents in his novel Warlight (Cape) continues to haunt you long after the plot itself.
Andrew Motion
Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan is the best first collection I’ve read for a long time: moving, technically adroit, clever in all the right ways, and full of brilliant small-scale effects as well as large achievements. Angela Leighton’s Hearing Things (Harvard) is as good as her previous book on poetic form – which is to say it’s terrific – and illuminates a great deal about the sound effects of poetry that cannot be disentangled from its page-sense. Rachel Cusk’s Kudos brings her enthralling trilogy to a well-judged conclusion, at once rounded and open.
Sarah Perry
Now that Terry Pratchett is gone, Stephen King is one of the only authors I buy in hardback on publication day. His latest, The Outsider(Hodder), is both a detective and a horror novel, and it gripped me to the point of checking under the bed before I went to sleep. It reminded me of what it was like to lie reading by torchlight late at night, when camping in the summer.
I’ve never been much of a reader of contemporary poetry, but I have been seduced by some of the brilliant young poets writing now, of whom Amy Key is perhaps my favourite. Her new collection, Isn’t Forever(Bloodaxe), is playful, surreal and enchanting but also rooted in brutal emotional honesty. She is writer of a rare and strange magic.
I am lucky enough to have an advance proof of Mrs Gaskell and Me, the new book from the brilliantly gifted Nell Stevens: she describes it as a love letter to “her own very special, dear friend”, Mrs Gaskell, and I have it patiently waiting on my desk.
Michael Pollan
On my bedside at the moment: Go, Went, Gone(Granta, translated by Susan Bernofsky), a novel about the refugee crisis in Germany by Jenny Erpenbeck that is not only timely but masterful; Matt Walker’s illuminating review of the science of sleep and how we’re all doing it wrong: Why We Sleep(Allen Lane); The Overstory (Heinemann), Richard Powers’ weird and wonderful novel about the intricate relationships among trees and humans; and Carlo Rovelli’s mindbending The Order of Time.
Ian Rankin
Liz Nugent’s Skin Deep (Penguin) is the perfect holiday read for those who like their escapism on the darker side. If Patricia Highsmith were Irish she might well have come up with this tale of a scarred woman who taints all she touches while remaining as charismatic as she is enigmatic.
In The Smiling Man (Doubleday) Joseph Knox pulls off the “difficult second novel” with ease and considerable style. Labyrinthine Mancunian noir with the obligatory battered but dogged detective.
Ambrose Parry, The Way of All Flesh isn’t published until late-August, but it’s a rip-roaring tale of murder amid the medical experiments of 19th-century Edinburgh. The book brings both city and period to colourful life and is a joy to read. It’s a collaboration between seasoned novelist Chris Brookmyre and his wife, consultant anaesthetist Marisa Haetzman.
Irish lawyer Steve Cavanagh writes excellent courtroom thrillers set in the US. His latest, Thirteen(Orion), sees him at the top of his game. It features a serial killer who’s sitting on a jury. Terrific premise, and the resulting story doesn’t disappoint.
Sally Rooney
I recently read Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar(Faber, translated by Srinath Perur), a perfectly formed short novel about a family in India undergoing a rapid change in fortune. Published in translation last year, it’s an admirably slim book – you could read it in one sitting – and for me it conjured up a whole world.
I’d also recommend Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (Portobello, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori), an exhilaratingly weird and funny Japanese novel about a long-term convenience store employee. Unsettling and totally unpredictable – my copy is now heavily underlined.
Finally, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the day I spent reading Olivia Laing’s Crudo (Picador). I couldn’t put it down, and then it overwhelmed me so much I had to put it down, and then I had to pick it back up again. A beautiful, strange, intelligent novel.
Katherine Rundell
My favourite book for adults this year, by some margin, has been Fifteen Dogs(Serpent’s Tail) by André Alexis. It opens with two gods having a quiet drink at The Wheat Sheaf in Toronto and debating whether, if animals had human intelligence, they would be only as unhappy, or more unhappy, than humans. It’s unhinged, wise, sharp, witty and daring. I’ve also fallen in love with Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy; her work is staggering.
In the world of children’s books, I can’t wait to read Hilary McKay’s The Skylarks’ War (Macmillan), set in the approaching shadow of the first world war. McKay couples warmth and grace with wry humour like nobody else out there.
Salman Rushdie
My recent (re-)reading includes Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Speak, Memory, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, all books that don’t need me to recommend them. I have, however, immensely enjoyed David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar (Cape) for its pitch-perfect black comedy and Jeet Thayil’s The Book of Chocolate Saints (Faber), easily the most original and formally inventive novel to come out of India in years.