Constitutional
Helen Simpson Jonathan Cape, 133pp, £14.99
ISBN 0224077945
Helen Simpson has never written a novel but was nevertheless voted one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. This may seem an anomaly, but her short stories remind us why Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, V S Pritchett and Grace Paley are all major writers despite the small scale of their fiction. In a year in which a number of overlong, under-edited novels by famous authors were published, it seems extraordinary to find the short-story collection so undervalued by publishers and booksellers as to have become virtually extinct. Constitutional is Simpson's fourth. Like her previous collections - Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Dear George and Hey Yeah Right Get a Life - it seems to follow the trajectory of an individual's private experiences, and to render these universal. It is impossible, I believe, to read a short story by Simpson and not feel that it is describing the inner strains of your own life.
"The Door" seems to be about fixing a back door after a break-in. The narrator shops for a new one and is charmed by the "rare and warming" good temper she encounters at the hardware shop, because "since the 17th of August I had grown . . . selfishly incurious and downright hostile". The replacement of the door is described meticulously, but the cause of the narrator's feelings is revealed as bereavement. The new door, with its sticky coat of paint, becomes symbolic of what the narrator must do in order to heal: instead of shutting herself away, she must risk leaving it open so that the paint can harden.
It is a simple metaphor but a good one, and later on Simpson presents us with another door - this time to "The Green Room", a magical Christmas retreat. A Christmas gift prompts Pamela, a woman who associates festive greenery with graveyards, to download an internet "life coach" called Holly - a brilliantly funny modern version of the ghosts in Dickens's A Christmas Carol. "People with low self-esteem exert a detrimental effect on the world about them," Holly says briskly, upon hearing about Pamela's Christmas blues. Something restorative awaits her in the cupboard under the stairs, once she promises to take up yoga and leave off self-pity. Simpson often interleaves the meticulous realism of her domestic tales with symbolism and supernatural visitations. Her stories pull between unflinching veracity and the determination to celebrate what is good about life, and out of this tension spring works of art whose miniature scale should not delude anyone as to their originality or depth.
Simpson's female characters, who started out 15 years ago as libidinous girlfriends and newly wed brides, now tend to be wives and mothers feeling the pressure of "a mountain of stuff waiting to be done", unnoticed, unremarkable and unloved. Only one in this collection, a phlebotomist who silently joins in the condemnation of the Iraq war while telling patients to stay calm, is overtly political. These women are, if you like, the Mrs David Davises of fiction rather than the Cherie Blairs; nothing much happens on the dulled domestic surface of their lives, but they are still seething, if not as angry (you feel) as they should be.
Two stories - "Every Third Thought" and "If I'm Spared" - address the fear of cancer. The first is about how, at a certain age, cancer seems to spread like "a horrible, sticky contagion"; the second about an adulterous foreign correspondent who rediscovers his despised wife's "timeless womanly qualities of fidelity and selflessness and compassion" for as long as he thinks he has lung cancer. Like "The Tree", in which the narrator's scatty old mother drives her daughter mad, it leaves a sour taste. Only "Early One Morning", about a mother's struggle to get her nine-year-old son to school, and her brief reward of "a hurried - but (thought Zoe) unsurpassable - kiss", strikes the old positive note of a life unexpectedly redeemed by love.
These are winter's tales - stories of illness, infidelity, ageing - and it's a relief to end with the title story, about a middle-aged science teacher who has accidentally become pregnant by her married lover. Walking on Hampstead Heath, she ponders grief, memory, nostalgia and the passage of time before feeling "enormous deep delight" at the beauty of a landscape that does not require one to do anything but exist. With its intelligently punning title, this collection is an unfailingly sympathetic meditation on how we confront the fixed laws of nature. As such, it is both bracing and essential.
Amanda Craig's most recent novel is Love in Idleness (Abacus)
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