Not so short but very sweet

SHORT STORIES: EILIS NI DHUIBHNEreviews Where the God of Love Hangs OutBy Amy Bloom
Granta, 201pp, £10.99

“You must miss Pop,” he says. “Of course, honey. I miss him all the time.” This is not entirely true. Julia misses Lionel Senior when she hears an alto sax playing anything, even one weak note, and she misses him when she takes out the garbage; she misses him when she takes out the garbage and she misses him every time she looks at Buster. Buster puts his arm around her waist. “You must miss Peaches, too.”

JULIA IS the main protagonist in a sequence of four inter-linked stories in this collection of 12. We first meet her at the funeral of her famous saxophonist husband; the second and third stories are set 20 or 30 years later, and illuminate the lives of her offspring. In the final story of the suite, Julia is an old, wild-haired woman, dressed always in black jeans and T-shirt, who has “entered Official Grandmahood. Sweet or sour, spry or arthritic, she is now a stock character, as essential and unknown as the maid in a drawing-room comedy”

A warm, charismatic, modern matriarch, Julia is universally liked and trusted, and, in the matter of love, thrives on diversity: she has sexual relationships with young and old, male and female, black and white. She can even love someone who is French – who, it is implied in the stories, unintentionally I imagine, are the final frontier. The message of the book, as the title suggests, is that love hangs out in the most unlikely of places and you should take it where you find it – even if that is a foreign country where people are too thin and don’t speak English.

That’s an unfair comment, perhaps (Julia can, and does, speak quite good French) And the collection is essentially outstanding – “at once achingly funny and heartbreaking”, as one of the blurbs puts it (is there a competition for the most outlandish blurbs?). Bloom’s depiction of the modern extended family, a merrily inclusive jumble of step-relations and in-laws and exes, various kinds of gender and religion, and even some non-Americans, is masterly. Her characters are very believable, of the moment, and also original and surprising. Above all, her writing is lovely: the words sparkle along , in the speedy river of wit which is almost a hallmark of the contemporary American short story. It’s a highly entertaining style, and the juxtaposition of that wisecracking Woody Allen-ish voice with profound insights into the human heart is highly effective.

These are short stories in the sense that they are narratives that can be read at one sitting, to cite the old Edgar Allen Poe benchmark, or stories of less than 10,000 words, to use Joyce Carol Oates’s more foolproof measure. Other than that, as Joyce Carol Oates also says of the short story in general, it is not easy to pin them down. They’re not atmospheric and suggestive, like Chekhov’s. They’re not Joycean – epiphanies are sometimes absent, and symbol and metaphor not very apparent. They’re certainly not Carveresque – there’s nothing minimalist about them, either in shape or subject matter.

The four interlinked stories in the Julia and Lionel suite span a lifetime. Far from dealing with microcosmic events and extracting deep universal meaning from them, the majority of the stories have big, passionate themes – unconventional sex of all kinds, including adultery, incest and rape, serious illness. Accidental death. Murder.

The collection prompts one to consider where the contemporary short story is going, and the answer might be that it is becoming the novel. Just as her characters cross conventional borders in the quest and bequest of love, so does Amy Bloom jump generic fences in her fiction. There are a mere four "stand alone" short stories in this collection – two, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, and By and By, are outstanding examples of the more conventional form. The two quartets of interlinked stories are more like novels; in them we encounter the same casts of characters again and again, and follow them through their lives, meeting them at specific junctures, rather as one meets one's cousins at weddings and funerals. I found I became so engaged with the families of Julia and Lionel, in particular, that I was reluctant to revert to the single short stories, brilliant as they are.

Possibly Amy Bloom’s genre crossing does her a slight disservice, for the best of reasons. On the other hand, her blending of traditional genres can be interpreted as evidence of an innovative, exciting, experimental vision. Whatever it is, this is a great piece of fiction, thought provoking, and highly entertaining.

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist and short story writer. She teaches on the MA in Creative Writing course in UCD