Jon McGregor's latest book is a collection of short stories, and while he's content to be slipshod in some areas, when it comes to his writing, only perfection will do, writes SINEAD GLEESON
A WRITER KNOWN for his lengthy book titles, Jon McGregor has not only outdone himself with his latest work, but contradicted himself, too. This Isn't The Sort of Thing That Happens To Someone Like Youis his most verbose title yet, but that it's a short-story collection suggests a commitment to paring back.
There are 30 stories, some as pithy as two pages long, another is just one line. They are eye-blinkingly short; the kind of stories that require a literary double-take from the reader, because they’re over – often devastatingly – just as we’ve settled into them.
McGregor, slight and bespectacled, sips tea and explains why, four books in, it has taken him so long to produce a book of short stories. “If it had been up to me, my first book would have been short stories. I’m glad the stories I wrote then weren’t published, because they weren’t very good, but I’ve always been interested in the form. Even my first novel is an assembly of short fragments.”
That first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was published 10 years, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2006, So Many Ways to Beginalso made the prize's long-list. McGregor says he never set out to be a writer and ended up doing so, almost as a process of artistic elimination. "I started writing at university, but only after I tried being a musician and a film-maker, so I narrowed it down. Very quickly I realised that unlike making films or music, I didn't need equipment, or to rely on other people. And I didn't need money."
Writing the stories that make up this new book was "challenging in a creative sense" and it's not hard to see why, given the range of themes and exploration of form. What binds them is not just a foreboding sense of chronology – of the stories all leading towards a unifying coda – but a geographical thread. The framework is not as blatant as Dubliners, or as specific as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, but McGregor included block-print maps on the pages, to reinforce the specific nature of the setting.
Born in Bermuda in 1976, he grew up in southern Norfolk. Rural landscapes dominate the stories, and images recur of ditches and lonely country lanes. “I spent some time in Lincolnshire and was struck by the land around it. The further I got into this book, there was a sense of a unifying landscape, as a portrait of this place, but there were also things I wanted to include that are a central part of the rural experience.”
There is an assumption that the city – with its enormity and corruption – dwarves small-town life in danger terms, but in This Isn't The Sort of Thing. . . there is a definite conflict between these polarised places, with the countryside offering its own form of darkness. "In some ways that conflict is about my own experience of moving from Norfolk to Bradford [where he went to university] and I had to learn these new codes."
Nowhere in the book is this more apparent than the brilliantly unnerving story Wires. In it, a young woman, Emily, is driving on a motorway when a sugar beet hits her windscreen. Shaken, she pulls over to the roadside, where two men offer to help her. Beyond the metal barrier lies endless fields, and it becomes clear, first to the reader, and later to Emily, that she has escaped a car crash only to find a different horror awaits her.
The experience of travelling on motorways only to look into the black countryside beyond the lights has happened to us all, and McGregor says this image has always stayed with him.
“At university I did a lot of hitchhiking, and it’s very eerie. You get dropped off at a place you’re often not supposed to be, so you’re trapped in this non-place and that’s when the dilemma happens: Do you stay and get a lift, or hike across the fields?”
The story’s title comes from a Philip Larkin poem about young cattle unwittingly wandering into an electric fence, with its “muscle-shredding violence”.
Like the poem, the story moves towards a stark, shocking finale. McGregor likens it to that “coming-of-age moment when you realise that there are bad people and things in the world and you need to develop your antennae”. Emily, like many of the characters in these pages, is young – a triptych of naivety, hope and cocky immortality. McGregor is adept at capturing the carefree idealism of youth. He offers his characters a glimpse of having all the time in the world, only to cruelly present a game-changing scenario, out of nowhere.
Several of the stories are just a few hundred words, and the brevity suits the exploration of seemingly insignificant, almost mundane events. One story, which concerns a brief encounter in a lost-property office, is a subtle and economic exploration of the possibility of love. It’s hard to do, but McGregor convinces.
“It’s partly a challenge to myself to make those very short stories work just as well as the more obviously dramatic stories. I’ve always thought that Hemingway’s famous six-word story [‘For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn’] was a terrible piece of writing. If you mention a dead baby, or a fire, or a struggle with cancer, you’ve automatically got some sort of pathos. There’s enough of that in real life. It’s more difficult to focus on those small encounters where significant moments of change can occur.”
In Wires,Emily composes a series of Facebook status updates about what is happening to her. McGregor is a keen user of Twitter, and I wonder if he feels that, despite the time-sponge elements of social networking, social media forces us to think up micro-stories.
“I think we’ve all found ourselves thinking up updates, and I think that’s a form of storytelling, of engagement and communication with others. The danger with it is the distraction. Not being able to choose where your attention lies is problematic.”
He never discusses work-in-progress online and chooses specific internet days, working nine-to-five on writing days. “When a piece of writing goes really well, even if it’s 500 words, there is nothing more exhilarating than that. It happens once or twice per book, that instant moment.
“I walk home on top of the world after a day like that. Writing is the one thing in life that I feel completely perfectionist about. If I’m cooking a meal or putting up a shelf, ‘nearly good enough’ is fine, but with writing it has to be perfect.”
This Isn’t The Sort of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You
by Jon McGregor is published by Bloomsbury
