It’s Beginning to Hurt (new stories)
It’s Beginning to Hurt, a collection of short stories, is James Lasdun’s latest book, published by Jonathan Cape (UK) in April 2009 and Farrar Straus Giroux (USA) in August 2009.
It was chosen as one of The Atlantic Monthly’s Best Five Books of the Year and was also a Book of The Year selection in the LA Times, the Library Journal and The Guardian (UK)
From the British reviews:
“Reading Lasdun is like reading a sly collaboration between Kafka and Updike: elegant, acutely observed and utterly unflinching . . . this is a collection that examines the most inward mechanisms of rage, fear and desire with astonishing skill and strangely lyric power.”—John Burnside, The Times (UK)
“Lasdun has a Nabokovian eye. Few exponents of the short form offer such tempting, disturbing pleasures. It’s Beginning to Hurt is . . . a superlative collection, exhibiting all of Lasdun’s familiar talents and a few new ones into the bargain.” —Richard T. Kelly, Financial Times
James Lasdun’s stories often begin simply with a name and a place, but they are anything but parochial. Within a dozen pages, they create a world of objects and feelings that are rich, recognisable and yet elusive. People lie in bed worrying about death with a “cold pulsating wakefulness” held “in precarious abeyance” by pills, or contemplate the lost reality of what they might have done while regretting “the withheld trophies of the outer world”. They find in music a second self “of fiery passionate vitality” or discover that sex isn’t an answer but merely another, more confusing question.
There are bankers, furniture dealers, a self-employed forester, a former-hippie divorcée with a talent for sanctimonious martyrdom, an astronomer coping with academic redundancy, an assistant in a jewellery store and a womanising Scottish photographer full of preening selfesteem. A surgeon who bullies his younger son is one of several coercive husbands with disdainfully elegant wives. These characters have briefly sketched pasts and family ties, memories of exile in Tomsk or long-gone friendships. They appear in upstate New York and Manhattan, the Sussex countryside and suburban north London, among mountains in Albania and France.
Lasdun is a good poet; his prose here is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness. When he describes seaside light “ringing all around… like shaken bells”, or the “brimming sufficiency” of a marriage, or a man’s unwelcome pettiness “filling him with its tedious drone”, or advertisements “caught up in their own logic of escalating tawdriness”, or a flirtatious look that’s like “somewhere with dry, sweet-smelling blue-domed air”, he is using language that is formal but not pedantic. The words are moral and precise - moral because they’re precise. Allusions to Leibniz and Lawrence, Bruckner and Beckett, respect the reader’s intelligence.
Several stories seem to crystallise around a central image. A man dirties his suit en route to his father’s second wedding and stains his stepmother’s wedding dress with “great oval blotches”; a widower approaching his second marriage sees a fountain sending up “thick petal-shaped curves of water”; a middle-aged barrister takes a tatty revolutionary magazine from an old friend and then looks at the “inexhaustibly profligate” blossom on the trees in his garden. These symbols are neither explicit nor indistinct, but carry an intense ambiguous charge that carries forward and backward into the events that surround them.
There is drama throughout - not spectacular action but the accumulation and adjustment of details that suggest how we try to propitiate the future and make silent bargains with our fears, hopes, strengths and inadequacies. A man watches a woman behave arrogantly in a fishmonger’s and then unexpectedly finds himself her guest, helping grill the live lobsters she has dishonestly obtained. By allowing her conviction that she’s desirable to trump his earlier negative judgment, he becomes obscurely aware of himself as “a flawed and fallen human being”. The phrase is magisterial but justified by the author’s scrupulous presentation of the truth of human behaviour.
Lasdun uses his dramatic skill to show the most subtle and delicate movements between poles of feeling. A woman who had many affairs during an abandoned marriage allows a teenage boy to pay awkward court to her - his “enigmatic aura” makes him seem “like a state of mind from long ago”. Another woman deals with the effects of her partner’s furious self-righteousness and of the poisonous caterpillars that have spoilt their walk; the two things exist together, creating an undefined but powerful tension.