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“Helen Simpson’s short stories read like cautionary tales about the ravages of parenthood, harrowing dispatches from the front lines of middle-class family life. Her previous collection, “Getting a Life,” dissected modern British domesticity, the tenderness included, with a mordant wit. In her new collection, “In the Driver’s Seat,” child-rearing is still a marathon of compromise and exhaustion — and now illness, as her characters get older. If they remain wry and indomitable, it might be that death is no match for someone who’s faced the daily car pool.
Artemis_98 wrote this review Wednesday, June 6 2007. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
In the first story, “Up at a Villa,” four skinny-dipping teenagers spy on a squabbling couple with a baby. The young trespassers are not really distinct individuals yet, and the perspective of the story is suspended effortlessly among their minds. As the new mother breastfeeds by the pool, bemoaning her husband’s lack of interest, the teens watch with giddy horror from their hiding place:
“ ‘She’s hideous,’ whispered Tina. ‘Look at that gross stomach, it’s all in folds.’ She glanced down superstitiously at her own body, the high breasts like halved apples, the handspan waist.
“ ‘He’s quite fat, too,’ said Charlotte. ‘Love handles, anyway.’
“ ‘I’m never going to have children,’ breathed Tina. ‘Not in a million years.’ ”
Their certainty that they will never be brought so low gets them as far as the last half of the story’s last line.
“The Year’s Midnight” is set in a very different pool, indoors in winter at the end of the day. A lap swimmer, putting off thoughts of a mildly depressing Christmas, calms a stranger’s wailing toddler with the promise that the holiday will be wonderful, and the child’s impoverished, miserable relatives will be nice to one another. The little girl, “puny and fair and hopelessly smudged and blotted and puffy round the eyes,” almost believes it. The swimmer herself almost believes it. The child’s mother, “a crouching Fury of a young woman ... baleful as Dürer’s engraving of Melancholia,” doesn’t believe it for a second, but the screaming has stopped and so she keeps her mouth shut. In stories like this, Simpson seems to do childhood grief and adult desperation like no one else.
The last story, “Constitutional,” is a meditation on time and memory by a schoolteacher who is single and pregnant at 43. She is starting to forget things, which might be normal and might be alarming: her grandfather lost his entire history, regressing through childhood to the state of a newborn. But she is calm and reflective, her thoughts laid out in beautiful sentences, and it’s a pleasure to be in her mind. Of a conversation with a 93-year-old friend whose memory was clear until the end, she says: “She paused and we both waited to see what she would come up with. Talking to her was like mackerel fishing, the short wait and then the flash of silver.”
In other stories, the touch is less light. In “The Door,” a woman who didn’t attend her married lover’s funeral has a door replaced after a break-in. Early in the story, she reflects, “Grief kept indoors grows noxious ... like a room that can’t be aired.” In the final lines, the kind handyman tells her she has to leave the new door ajar for the paint to dry, or it will “rip away and leave raw wood when you open it again.” She understands that the advice is about her life, and thanks him, but the moral is too portentous and obvious to have the power of Simpson’s best stories. “If I’m Spared” and “The Phlebotomist’s Love Life” both take sides too stringently, put a thumb on the scale of our opinion about the characters — this is a bad man who cheats, this is a good woman who despairs of the war in Iraq — and it makes them simpler and less interesting than they could have been.
“The Green Room” is the most confusing inclusion. In it, an unhappy woman named Pamela is visited before Christmas by a festive life coach, Holly, who magically appears, sent by the Internet.
Holly offers some advice about procrastination and pessimism, and also about Pamela’s need to care for her inner child, who is revealed to live in a safe, happy cupboard under the stairs with the grandfatherly Old Year, the baby New Year and a cozy, crackling fire. Then the life coach disappears before Pamela can thank her, “back to the wide world web where she was needed. So she thanked the thin air instead and, smiling, joined the little family group waiting for her in front of the fire.” “A Christmas Carol” is in the story’s lineage, but not to flattering effect. It’s odd to find the story along with “The Year’s Midnight,” which is so bracing and unsentimental about holidays, and contains a real, if small, hope that an unhappy woman might change her life.
“In the Driver’s Seat” contains some wonderful stories, and if it seems rushed and uneven, I still sided with Simpson’s practical-minded characters — like the one who gets a furtive kiss from her 9-year-old son in full view of his school — for whom the good moments, sometimes achingly perfect, make up for the rest.
NYTimes May 20, 2007
Domestic Disturbances
By MAILE MELOY
Maile Meloy’s latest novel, “A Family Daughter,” was recently published in paperback.
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