This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You is a collection of short stories: 30 stories, of varying lengths (one is just one sentence; one is thirty pages) and varying styles (1st-person, 2nd-person, and 3rd person narration are all used; one story is in the form of a numbered list of “Supplementary Notes To The Testimony Of Appellants B & E”; another is a list of place names). I don’t read that many short story collections, and I don’t know why not: when they’re good, as this book is, I quite like them. I like short short stories especially, and stories that play with form, stories that are vignettes or moments: all of which there were a lot of in this book. I read about this particular short-story collection earlier year in a copy of Publishers Weekly that was in a goodie bag for a conference I attended for work, and then was reminded of it by Teresa’s post over on Shelf Love, and am glad I got around to reading it myself.
Most of these stories are set in England, or a dystopic future England; the ones that aren’t set in England are still about characters who are clearly English, and each story has a place-name after the title: Horncastle, or Upwell, or Grantham, or Gainsborough, or the very English-sounding “Irby in the Marsh.” The tone is often matter-of-fact, and the focus is often on a moment of connection (and/or disconnect) between two characters, like this, from the first story, “That Colour”:
She stood by the window and said, Those trees are turning that beautiful colour again. Is that right, I asked. I was at the back of the house, in the kitchen. I was doing the dishes. The water wasn’t hot enough. She said, I don’t know what colour you’d call it.” And: “I don’t know what they are. Some kind of maple or sycamore, perhaps. This happens every year and she always seems taken by surprise. (3)
There’s a story that alternates between prose and poetry, which actually started out as a story all in prose that later was reworked: it’s about a couple and a moment from the past that haunts their lives, and you can read the whole thing on granta.com. I like how this story, particularly, evokes the landscape—the landscape near the fens, the landscape like this, flat, with fields and water and sky: or as the story puts it, “/fields of wheat / canals & drains / tarmac roads” (7). There is humor, sometimes, in the moments of disconnection, like this bit from this story:
She had only ever called it writing: he was the one who used the word ‘poems’. But whenever he said it — ‘poems’ — it was with an affected air, as if the pretension was hers. So, for example, he might come crashing in from the barn late one afternoon, with his boots on, and say Would you just leave your bloody poems alone for one minute and help me get the seed-drill loaded up?. There were five other places he could have put the bloody in hat sentence, but he chose to put it there, next to ‘poems’. This is an example, she would tell him, if he was interested, of what placement could do. (28)
Also funny is “Looking Up Vagina,” which is about a boy who gets teased by his classmates, and which makes great use of many words beginning with V. But there is also a lot of unease in these stories: like I said above, the setting is sometimes dystopic, a world in which there are (or will be) problems with the weather, and bombs, and refugees, and landmines, and improvised explosive devices. But my favorite stories in the book aren’t those. My favorite in the book, “Close,” is one of the few not actually set in England—it’s about a pair of tourists in Japan, and it’s great for the way it conveys a chance encounter, and the weight that one of the participants can attach to it, with the specific details of that encounter’s setting: the crunching gravel of the grounds of the Imperial Palace, what the tour guide says and how she says it, the history that the characters learn. My other favorite is “Wires,” which starts like this, and has lots of really funny moments (though there are undertones of unease in it, too):
It was a sugar-beet, presumably, since that was a sugar-beet lorry in front of her and this thing turning in the air at something like sixty miles an hour had just fallen off it. (160)
I like the way these stories set a scene, or set a situation in motion, then explore it. Another good example of that is “We Wave and Call,” which you can read on the Guardian’s website.
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