Peopled with classic themes

DAVID Guterson appeared on the literary scene in 1989, with a collection of short stories entitled, The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind that immediately marked him out as a serious voice, one adept at mining beneath the surfaces of people and unearthing at least hints of who they really are.

Now, 25 years later, he has returned to the short story form.

The decades since his début offering have seen him well treated, largely because of his game-changing first novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, which sold 4m copies and has been translated into more than 20 languages. It also won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award and, in 1999, was adapted to considerable acclaim for the big screen. Since then, he’s written four other novels. He has also enjoyed a couple of forays into the field of non-fiction and even indulged in a recent flirtation with poetry. All received their share of favourable reviews but all, inevitably, have been overshadowed by the book that has come to define him as a writer.

Problems with People probably won’t change that, but it’s still vintage Guterson, presenting 10 stories that fixate on his familiar obsessions, the impact of men and women coming together, in ways sometimes romantic and sometimes merely platonic, and the tearing sounds they make in drawing apart. Character names are used sparingly; most of the time, the main players are simply referred to as “he” or “she”, which plays up the sense of the middle-aged middle-class Everyman/woman notion.

Loneliness, isolation, guilt, and depression are bedrock settings, though handled with a lightness of touch that pleasures in the darkest elements of humour, but what really fascinates is the way in which the author handles the natural contradictions, the constant desire/repulsion, love/hate pendulum that gives his characters their complexity and sense of depth. Tidal forces are at play throughout, and reflect a side of human nature in constant rage against the inevitable, the side that chooses to commit to helpless denial. These stories feel infused with a subtle inference that people consist of the many-stranded and widely varied pasts they’ve endured, which might be a reason why it is so difficult to ever truly know someone else. Our empathy is limited by our experiences and imaginations, and quite often simply cannot stretch far enough.

The collection opens in compelling style, with a story wishfully — and maybe ironically — enitled, ‘Paradise’. A divorced man and a widowed woman, both in their 50s, meet on a matchmaking website and set about exploring a relationship. For their fourth date, conscious of time, need, and expectation, they agree on a weekend road-trip to Mount Ranier National Park and a torrential afternoon of intimacy in a cheap hotel lodge. But when anxiety slows everything to a crawl and then a standstill, something else emerges; the woman’s tragic recollections of forbidden first love.

It is an extremely impressive story, beautifully paced, one that stands and even benefits from multiple reads. The tone is clean and hard, and attuned to the sort of minutiae that risks a border with surreality, and the heavily experiential quality of the narrative — especially outside of the confessional flashback sequence — is careful to stop short of anything like overt resolution. But reading on, it soon becomes clear that pat endings are not on this writer’s agenda, just as they almost never are in real life. Instead, we are given vividly drawn characters brought to a brink and then left gazing out over the precipice either at what might have been or what could yet be. The surface, you’ll sense, is the least of what is happening here.

This sets the tone for what’s to come. Not all of the stories on offer here are this good, but all at least have the ambition to be. And none really fail, but the best, which could apply to any of half a dozen stories, truly captivate, even when the basic premise would hardly suggest the potential for a story at all.

In ‘Tenant’, the narrator, a man of Indian extraction named Shawn Ghemawat, rents out an apartment, through an agent and sight-unseen, to a young woman. Over the weeks that follow, struggling to survive the rut that his own life has become, he indulges his curiosity about the woman, Lydia Williams. Inevitably, this curiosity veers into fantastic territory and becomes obsessional, until finally he stages a visit, using the excuse of trying to locate a missing water valve.

‘Pilanesburg’, ‘Politics’, and ‘Krassavitseh’ all choose foreign climes as their settings.

In ‘Pilanesburg’, a man visits a South African game reserve in the company of his sister, who is in the advanced stages of cancer. Lingering too long among the animals, they discover, on trying to leave, that the gates to the park have been shut.

In ‘Politics’, an American surgeon finds himself in Kathmandu, in the middle of a widespread Maoist strike, attempting to arrange for the hospital transfer of his estranged wife who has been in a car crash. With the city in shut-down mode, he is forced to walk the five miles to her hospital, a difficult task made easier with the help of an entrepreneurial shoe-shine boy. It feels like a fortunate and even spiritually uplifting encounter until the boy’s true motives are revealed.

And in ‘Krassavitseh’, a Jewish father and son tour the historic sights of Berlin in the company of a pretty young German guide. The father had escaped the city in 1938, and as the tour intensifies with a visit to a concentration camp, his remarks increase in brutality. The guide, who he mistakes for Jewish, bears it all in stoic manner.

The final story, ‘Hush’, provides the perfect closing note. An attractive 40-something dog-walker starts walking a rottweiler named Bill for a cantankerous old man. But what starts out as a purely financial arrangement quickly develops into friendship. Told mostly in dialogue, the control of the narrative is striking, not least the poignant balance between facts as the characters insist them to be and the facts as they are actually revealed. And after everything that has passed between them, and all the carrying dialogue, a final mumbled admission of something like love is met not with acquiescence or encouragement but with a single whispered response, “Hush”. Because even with the closeness that has developed between them, some chasms are unbridgeable. ‘Hush’ is not the only possible answer, but the perfect one.

Billy O’Callaghan won the Irish Book award for story of the year in 2013 with the title story from his collection The Things We Lose The Things We Leave Behind.