25 May 2012 12:13:43
Simpson is the writer who most famously went where male writers were either too frightened or bored to tread: examining the "ever after" that follows the supposed happy ending. And doing so more or less unimprovably, against some highly stacked odds. She makes much of the inroads that motherhood carves into the intellect, and although not all of her characters have literary hinterlands, many of them have enough to notice the lack of fit between reading and child-rearing. In "Heavy Weather", the story I've been quoting from here (and which is, in its way, the quintessential Simpson story, the one you'd have to rescue if you were only allowed to rescue one), the father makes an unfamiliar observation about Hardy's life and the mother is able to accuse him of reading. She's right: but he only pulled over to the side of the road for five minutes, and she lets it go. (In my experience, doing this kind of thing – the crafty use of a pleat in time to pick up a book – is not usually treated so lightly. It is perhaps the only implausible or false note in any of Simpson's domestic dramas.)
So this may well be why a new collection of Simpson stories only comes out at five-year intervals, although 22 years after the first one you would have thought that she might have a bit more time on her hands by now. We're due another in three years, so until then, here is a sort of greatest hits compilation to keep us happy. In her strangely ill-tempered introduction (which is set up as an imaginary question-and-answer session with someone who accuses her of being a "baby bore" and then a "global warming bore") she responds to the suggestion that novels have more breadth than short stories by saying: "I think a good short story can be like a core sample." This is true, and a good way of putting it: and this selection, from which five stories have been taken from each of her five collections so far, could also be seen as a core sample of Simpson's career. A core sample of core samples, as it were.
I had worried, on picking the book up, whether I was on the point of wearying of Simpson's schtick, or becoming inured to it. I have, after all, made a point of regularly recommending her in this column. Would this be one recommendation too far? Well, no, because I found her stories just as hard to put down as I used to; and repeated exposure to them (although there seem to be one or two here which are unfamiliar, which is odd, because I thought I'd read every word of hers) just makes one appreciate the artistry even more. (Notice the lack of a question mark at the end of "they never get as far as this bit, do they" – the speaker is too tired even to raise her sentences to the interrogative.)
There is also a little bit of dating going on: "Besides, it was difficult to sack people these days," says a woman who discovers a talent for oversleeping in "The Bed". (This was in 1990. Oh, happy days.) Details like these show, mainly, that Simpson keeps her eyes open to what is around her, as well as to what is within her characters. It's the kind of detail that makes us wish she would hurry up so that we can read her thoughts about what's going on right now, the precise contours of our present anxieties. I suspect that she will have much to say, and be able to say it very well.
