I decided to read Tessa Hadley’s collection Sunstroke and other Stories mainly because it had been nominated for the Short Story Prize. Hadley’s a Welsh writer that writes short stories of manners, usually with female protagonists, and always concerned about interpersonal interactions in domestic environments. Most of the stories in this collection share a theme of sexual misconduct, often of adultery, but also of sexual activity between people of vastly different ages. For instance, in the title story adultery is threatened with a stolen kiss; in the following story, “Mother’s Son,” a son confesses to his mother that he’s slept with someone other than his wife; in “Phosphorescence” an older married woman flirts with a thirteen-year-old boy. These activities are very deftly commented on by the other events in the story — a minor case of sunstroke seems to offer a metaphorical explanation of the momentary lack of judgment when kissing a friend’s husband, or the stench of a rotten egg symbolizes a man’s inability to stay faithful to his wife.
It’s appropriate, given this focus on the overstepping of sexual boundaries, that Hadley has many wise things to say on gender. She devotes a line, or a paragraph, to limning out the differences in how men and women think about work, or how a woman might imagine a man feeling about sex in comparison to her own feelings. This excerpt is from the end of “The Enemy,” which tries to set up the value of the protagonists quiet actions of cleaning as equal, worthwhile, and necessary in contrast to her male friend’s activities that fomented revolution (literally).
In her thirties she had resented furiously this disproportion between the time spent cooking and eating; it had seemed to her characteristic of women’s work, exploitative and invisible and without lasting results. She had even given up cooking for a while. These days she felt about it differently. The disproportion seemed part of the right rhythm of all pleasure: a long, difficult and testing preparation for the few moments’ consummation . . . In her tasks around the flat — polishing furniture, bleaching dishclothes, vacuuming, taking cutting from her geraniums, ironing towels and putting them away in the airing cupboard — she was aware that her mother and grandmother had done these same things before her, working alone in quiet rooms, or with the radio for company. In truth she had had a stormy relationship with her parents, and used to think of her mother’s domesticated life as thwarted and wasted. But she had learned to love the invisible work, the life that fell away and left no traces.
All in all, Sunstroke is an excellent read, although I would have suspected, if someone had described the book to me, that it wasn’t quite right for me — issues of domesticity in upper-class Britain just doesn’t set off the alarm bells of a “must read” in my head. Nonetheless, she manages to keep me reading through the quiet stories by offering acute psychological perceptions, and entertain me with ones like “Buckets of Blood,” which details the aftermath of a botched abortion. If you’d like to read it before the contest results are announced, you have until Feb. 27th.
I’m working on getting my hands on copies of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam and Like You’d Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard, the other two collections nominated. When I do, I’ll let you know.
Update: Here’s an essay by Hadley on reading short stories.
