Pretty Ugly – book review

On the strength of this book I am going to build a new bookshelf in the spare bedroom, just for short stories. For guests who stay a couple of nights and might otherwise run off with an unputdownable novel. Let them fill their early mornings or sleepless nights with Kirsty Gunn. That’s what short stories are for; they’re probably not designed to be consumed all at once like I did these. I couldn’t help it. These short stories are terrific.

I am in awe of the imagination behind these bursting capsules. Each is at least a full novel’s worth of character and plot, whittled and rubbed until they squeeze into a hot twenty or so pages of breathtaking entertainment. And they are entertaining – horrible sometimes, and shocking, too, but also clever, amusing, eye opening. All absolutely distinct in character, but a perfect collection in that the craft is so good, the voices so sure, every story promising a different world.

I finished the set this morning with the bombshell that is All Gone, and if you have the guts you can read it on the Newsroom link. Fuck. What was Kirsty Gunn thinking when she wrote that? She’s really screwed up my day. She breaks all the rules here even thinking about these characters, this plot, going places one shouldn’t go, imagining a mind containing thoughts which ought not be possible. We have one woman befriending another and thus becoming complicit, trying to understand her friend’s slightly compulsive order and neatness, visiting her in jail afterwards. They feel like women I might have known at the school gate (perhaps without the casual admissions of pornography). It’s all a bit ordinary, to begin with, until the unfiltered racism drifts in. Amazed it got past the editor.

Somewhat playfully, the author herself (or an author character) appears often in the stories, in meta text of writers about writers.

A biographer engages her friend in an interview with Joan Collins. “Listen,” Anne said. “You should write a story about all this…” ‘Praxis’ is a story about writing a story about writing a story. Praxis means a writing sample to examine competence in writing. “That word can be part of its title,” Anne finished. This borders on the edge of being all a little bit clever and academic, but this whole book is academic writing. Well crafted. Introspective, self-aware, and yes, unashamedly clever. I feel that every one of these stories could turn up as exemplars in a literature course. You are invited to engage in a brainy way.

‘King Country‘ is insanely good. A small town tomboy finds her niche hanging out with a rough family, the Carters. ‘Te Urewera. King Country.’ Just to say the words made you feel like a man. The boys are boisterous, the same expected of her, the dad gives his sons the whack, he’s a shouting, frightening man but she sees through all that, sees through the guns and the horsing about and the reputation of fighting and jail time. This is a young girl living a life she wants, learning about acceptance and real love. The townsfolk thing differently. And then, again, the writer comes, meta fashion, into the story, telling us what she is doing, and explaining that it is not fiction at all, but her own story : You might say the writer would come in at this point, to remark on that, on the seen and the unseen—the stick and poke of detail like the patterning of Kip’s school ink tattoos… I could spend pages bringing certain parts of the story out: Look at this here, and here and here—but what then? It’s not where any of this was ever leading. Nor what happened to me afterwards, the decisions about my own life I went on to make, when this account is finished and done with and I’d had to leave the Carters behind me, put on a dress and become a girl. I don’t know if this intervening author is Kirsty Gunn or a character, but brilliant either way.

I thought King Country was my favourite story, but hang on. Mam’s table. It’s a story of institutions, foster homes, one place and another and then one big house with six or seven kids where mam lets them all settle around the long table like flapping birds. Nourishes them with food and love and play. Calls them me old shakies like she’s a pirate and they her special crew. …Mams routines and her way of saying things…you don’t forget that stuff. The kids act tough but they love her, come in for the hugs. It feels like the best foster care can be. There’s homework and crafts and kindness. And then it turns out this mother to all of them is, in fact, a mother herself. God, it breaks your heart. It breaks everyone’s heart but it’s over and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do. There is the inevitable impact of one life upon another, the snowball effect of love and grief.

Yep. That bookshelf going in the spare room for guests and Pretty Ugly will be on it. I’ll put Pātea Boys there for balance – equally good short stories in a different way. If you come and stay in my spare room there will be entertaining reading to hand, and we can talk about what it all means and feel smarter by association.