Short Stories:According to her profile on MySpace, Clare Wigfall got her first break in writing when an editor from Faber visited her university and came across her work. Within a week, the 21-year-old had been given carte blanche to write what she liked and to take as long as she liked - an offer that might yet prove both milestone and millstone in terms of her literary career, writes Freya McClements.
Ten years on from that auspicious beginning, and equipped with a prestigious MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, she has at last ventured fully onto the literary scene with The Loudest Sound and Nothing, her first collection of short stories.
The result is an eclectic mix of unusual and often highly imaginative stories spanning continents and centuries and reflecting the author's varied experiences of life in London, California, Prague, Morocco and Spain. In The Ocularist's Wife, an acutely observed study of self-absorption set during the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870, a middle-class Parisienne frets over inconsequential domestic arrangements as an entire society experiences the cataclysmic shock of defeat. In Safe, an unsettling study of paranoia and insanity set in modern-day England, an apparent epidemic of baby-snatching terrifies a mother struggling to come to terms with the loss of her own young child. And in The Parrot Jungle an enigmatic European traveller, scarred by the tragic loss of his family, embarks on a road trip across the US with a suburban divorcee and her teenage son.
Most of Wigfall's protagonists are damaged individuals, unable to fit into the world around them. Like Joyce's gnomon, they are defined by the piece that is missing - whether lost loved ones, as in Hero I Have Lost or The Parrot Jungle, or a lack of companionship, as in Numbers, or a desire to turn back the clock, as in My Brain. At her best, Wigfall can create haunting and memorable stories - most notably Folks Like Us, a Springsteen-esque tale of an ex-con who falls for a waitress and persuades her to leave town with him in the hope of a better life on the road together. These lovers turn out to be Bonnie and Clyde, and what follows is a poignant romance between displaced, dysfunctional killers. Ironically, Clyde's realisation that "I know that's all life is, just a long road stretching up afore you, and you knowing as sure as hell there's gonna be a dead end coming up sooner or later" is the nearest any character comes to an acceptance of life's limitations in a collection in which most characters either rail against - or fail to acknowledge - the realities with which they are confronted.
Ultimately this is an ambitious work - and its breadth of vision and diversity of subject matter result, almost inevitably, in it falling short of the high standards it has set. On too many occasions stories end with their central characters musing against a backdrop of seeming normality - "kiddies playing, down in the courtyard" - or resorting to gestures that have become overly-familiar - "she descended quietly, retrieving her hat, coat and umbrella from the stand before letting herself out the front door". Indeed, such is the diversity of settings and vernaculars employed that it is with varying degrees of success that the author moves from Scottish isle to Andalusian village to downtown New York.
In the titular story, we learn that The Loudest Sound and Nothing is that made by a body drifting under the sea, and while Wigfall is neither drifting nor silent, she is perhaps still searching for her distinctive literary voice.
Freya McClements is a writer and journalist
The Loudest Sound and Nothing, By Clare Wigfall, Faber & Faber, 227pp. £12.99