Book full of rightnesses

SHORT STORIES: It's Beginning to Hurt By James LasdunJonathan Cape, 258pp. £16.99

THE TITLE STORY of James Lasdun's remarkable new collection, It's Beginning to Hurt, gives us a whole life in two pages. A businessman's mistress has died. On the day of her funeral, his wife asks him to bring home a salmon. Preoccupied, he leaves the salmon behind, in the basement filing cabinet where he left it to cool. That's it. But the story is a miracle of compression: by its final sentences, it has told you everything you need to know.

The modern short story cleaves to a Chekhovian aesthetic. It riskily courts banality and stasis, and depends for its effects on the neutrally presented observation, the carefully deployed epiphany, the life swiftly netted in a hundred words or so. James Lasdun, the author of two previous volumes of short fiction ( The Silver Age and Three Evenings) and two novels ( The Horned Manand Seven Lies), is recognisably a master of this form.

It's Beginning to Hurtcomes garlanded with praise from New Yorker critic James Wood, and it's not hard to see why: Lasdun is an exponent of what Wood calls "free indirect style", the attempt to replicate in third-person prose the inner lives of realistically-depicted characters. Lasdun, in his third collection, inhabits his characters with the seemingly effortless sympathy of the gifted realist writer. Several of the stories are masterpieces; at least one, An Anxious Man, a deserved winner of the UK National Short Story Award, will stay with you for a very long time.

It's Beginning to Hurt is the shortest story in the book. But its fellows are comparably dense, comparably rich. In each of them, Lasdun conducts a masterclass in the art of the short story. The subject matter, in precis, often seems banal: a man worries about his wife's investments in the stock market ( An Anxious Man); a married guidebook writer, under the influence of his womanising photographer, sleeps with a woman he meets at a Greek taverna ( The Natural Order); an elementary school principal worries that he might have cancer (The Incalculable Life Gesture); a lawyer meets an old college friend who has remained devoted to the Trotskyite cause (A Bourgeois Story). The strength of the stories lies in the sophistication of the prose, in the lightness of touch with which Lasdun offers a psychological insight, and in the neatly unemphatic way he has of revealing a character in his or her entirety in just a paragraph or two.

For example: the first thing we learn about a certain character's wife is that she is the kind of mother who will throw her kids out of the car and force them to walk home ( Oh, Death, one of the best stories in the book). This is impressive; but what is truly moving is the way in which Lasdun allows us gradually to modify our ideas about this woman, Faye, who has married an idealistic ne'er-do-well (a fitfully-employed logger and handyman), and whose hidden history, adumbrated in a few lines, offers us the chance to sympathise, rather than to judge.

Other characters receive similarly lavish treatment from Lasdun’s relaxed, vigilant prose. The wife of a rigidly self-righteous husband finds that “Since being with Craig she had found that it was necessary to guard, rather carefully, what remained of her affection for her own species”. A man has a fight with his sister, and finds the argument “filling him with its tedious drone every time he had a moment’s peace”.

The book is full of rightnesses: little moments of accuracy, about people, about the look and feel of things. A man justifies adultery to himself by thinking, “Life offered up so few human beings you could contemplate any intimacy with, that to turn your back on one seemed an insane and profligate waste”.

Lasdun’s eye for the human is matched by his eye for the physical world. There is an Updikean scrupulousness to his descriptive prose, though Lasdun is more restrained, less prone to painterly elaboration. Americans in Greece wear clothes and gear that has “the faint unassimilable stiffness of things bought from outdoor catalogues”. A man swimming in a Cape Cod lake finds that “Everything seemed purely an occurrence of light”. Caterpillars in a forest are “quilted, rubbery pouches”.

"Of the literary arts," Lasdun wrote recently in the Guardian, "the short story has always been the least honoured." His own collection deserves all the honours it is able to accrue: a better book of short stories will not be published this year.

Kevin Power is the author of the debut novel Bad Day in Blackrock (Lilliput)