Melissa Bank’s two books look like collections of “linked short stories”, but the links are deeper and the stories or episodes more tightly integrated into an artistic wholeness than that might imply.

Keith Ridgway and the publishers of A Shock (2021) are very clear that the book is a novel, not a collection of “linked short stories”. In an Irish Times interview with John Self, Ridgway said:

I’m going to get people insisting that this is a short story collection, and it’s absolutely not, it’s a novel. It’s a polyptych, one of those altar pieces made of panels. You can take one of the panels away but they only really work together.

I’ll admit I was sceptical. The book seemed too episodic, too lacking in unity, its disparate parts too loosely connected, to conform to my preconceptions as to what a novel should be. Perhaps it’s true that the panels “only really work together”, but is working together enough to make them constitute a novel? Might they not instead be a hybrid form, perhaps “a collection of exceptionally closely linked short stories”?

My scepticism was shaken a bit when I read Nicole Flattery’s review in The Stinging Fly:

The atomised, isolated way we live now, the blank void where community used to be, has been explored in a lot of contemporary fiction. Ridgway’s characters don’t have time to explore it; they’re already numb to it. They wander alone. And the effect it has on their wellbeing — the lack of structure, the lack of safety — infects their confidence, their relationships, their conversations. It robs them of self-worth, drive, happiness. Most crucially, it robs them of language … They have no interest in truth, characters disappear without a trace, everything is transient.

This is an excellent account of much  —  by no means all — that is going on in A Shock but, again, I have doubts that the “void where community used to be” is a theme for a novel rather than a collection of stories, linked or otherwise.

The foregoing paragraphs are just my notes of my first impressions of Ridgway’s A Shock. I’m not yet ready to write in any depth about it. I’ve read the book just once, in an ebook edition borrowed from the library, and I don’t feel able to write about any work before I’ve read it at least twice. But the room for disagreement as to whether it’s a novel or something else put me in mind of the work of a rather different author.

Last week was the second anniversary of the early death of Melissa Bank. She had published just two books, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999) and The Wonder Spot (2005), works that have similarly occasioned confusion as to whether or not they’re novels. Whatever their form is, it’s the same form: they both follow the same pattern: each is a series of linked stories, arranged for the most part in chronological order, and featuring the same central characters or the people adjacent to them. Yet, I’ve found one person referring to one as a collection and the other as a novel! On the back of the Penguin paperback there’s a quote from the Mail on Sunday describing The Girls’ Guide as “this exceptional first novel”.

Where these books differ from Ridgway’s is in the nature of the connections. Bank’s books are (with the exception of a couple of episodes, which I’ll discuss) the first-person narratives of a young woman, telling a more-or-less continuous story from her teenage years up to the age of about 40. In Ridgway’s book, the continuity is not that provided by a small group of characters, but by something more closely resembling a community — even if it is the kind of community that, in Nicole Flattery’s terms, is coming to seem more like a void. The events of A Shock occur in a distinct part of South London (“Cannibal and Feckham”), and several of them centre on a pub, The Arms. The unity is of theme, place and circumstances, rather than on the centrality of any particular character.

Ironically, then, Bank’s books feel more like novels than Ridgway’s, though it seems that Bank herself was happy with the “stories” label. When asked on a podcast how to write a novel, she replied that she didn’t know. She knew how to write stories. “Stories became chapters and chapters become a book, she said.”

The copyright pages of both books acknowledge previous publication of some of the “chapters” in story form. “My Old Man” won a short fiction award under an earlier title, “Mr. Wilson and Dennis the Menace” some years before its appearance in The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Interestingly, though, while five of the seven chapters in that first book had previously been published as stories, only the title story from The Wonder Spot had made an earlier appearance. That suggests that, notwithstanding the formal similarities between them, the second book had from the start been conceived more as a unit than the first.

It’s certainly the case that the eight chapter-stories in The Wonder Spot are all the first-person narratives of the same character, Sophie Applebaum, over a period of slightly less than three decades, while two of the stories in the first book depart from that pattern. “The Best Possible Light” has a first-person narrator, but that narrator is not Jane, the cental character of most of the stories in the book. “The Best Possible Light” is told from the point of view of Nina, a woman who lives in the apartment downstairs from that of Jane’s great-aunt, Rita.

Nina’s son, Barney, has just announced that he is going to marry his girlfriend, who is pregnant — and that his ex-wife is also expecting a baby and that he’s the father. He and his new wife are going to help to look after the ex-wife’s child. Nina and her two daughters react to this news rather differently.

I see him and I think, I am the one who taught him to regard himself as a blessing (p. 122)

Jane, following the death of her great-aunt at the age of almost 90, is living part of the time in Rita’s apartment (but most of the time at her lover’s) and witnesses part of an argument on the terrace between Barney and his older sister. His younger sister, “a civil-rights lawyer” (p. 112) is more inclined to make allowances for him.

The other story that doesn’t consist of Jane’s first-person narrative is “You Could Be Anyone” and is narrated in the second person singular by a young woman who has breast cancer. She also has a lover who is attentive and apparently devoted but who doesn’t seem to see her as a distinct individual.

You don’t see him again. Sometimes you worry that he loved you better than any man ever has or will — even if it had nothing to do with you. (p. 221)

This unnamed young woman might well be Jane but there isn’t (at least not that I’ve noticed) any indication in any of the other stories that they’re about the same person.

The remaining five stories in the book tell a sequential but noticeably episodic tale, one whose continuity is unusually broken up. The longest story, about 75 pages, is “The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine”. The terrible thing that Jane has to deal with is the death of her father, a doctor, who has had leukaemia for nine years but hasn’t told anyone apart from his wife, Jane’s mother. While he is ill, Jane resumes her relationship with Archie Knox, a famous and prominent book editor.

Not only is Archie 28 years older than Jane, but he has diabetes and is an alcholic (who exaggerates the extent to which he is “recovering”). The course of this relationship is told in the earlier story, “My Old Man”. Jane works as an editorial assistant, not for Archie’s publisher but a different company. Archie’s help and encouragement enable her to delay the realization that this is not a position that suits her very well. Inevitably, Archie’s diabetes and heavy drinking have a deleterious effect on their sex life.

“My Old Man” comes across as a story with a definite end. After Jane has left him, and now drinking openly, Archie writes a novel about their relationship, but he makes the end more upbeat:

Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end. (p. 104)

His novel is well received. Jane sees people reading it on the beach. The next story is Nina’s account of her son, Barney. Following that, in “The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine”, Jane’s father tells her and her brother about his leukaemia. Soon afterwards she runs into Archie at a book reading/signing and they start to see each other again. Jane is not legally entitled to occupy Rita’s old apartment and in any case finds it gloomy and oppressive. She effectively moves in with Archie.

When her father goes into hospital, Jane goes home to visit him. In her absence, Archie neglects his health, collapses with ketoacidosis and has to be taken into hospital. Jane rushes back to New York, where Archie’s doctor gives her a talking to:

“Okay,” he said, “now listen to me.” I couldn’t tell whether he was furious or just in a rush. Did I know how serious this was? He told me that Archie could’ve lapsed into a coma and died. The doctor seemed to hold me responsible: I needed to regulate his diet and exercise; I needed to be vigilant about monitoring his blood sugar.

I said, “You better talk to him.”

He said, “I’m talking to you.” Then he walked away. (p. 183)

Jane gets back to the hospital in Philadelphia before her father dies, but finds him on a respirator and heavily sedated. A nurse assures her that he knows she’s there. Archie recovers but the relationship doesn’t last much longer.

I’ve now read The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing three times. On this most recent reading, it has seemed to me more obviously a single narrative unit, something that holds together, despite the fact that each story or chapter is discrete, and that some important characters (often Jane’s boyfriends or lovers) are not carried through from one to another. I’m thinking of it more as a novel now than I did on first reading.

Much the same is true of The Wonder Spot. I hadn’t read it at all up to ten days ago. I’d been looking out for a secondhand copy for some time and finally ordered one via Alibris. I got an email to say that the copy I’d bought was posted on 2 July. There’s still no sign of it. (Post/mail from Britain to Ireland is so unreliable that it’s effectively useless. I knew this already from recent experience but I had decided to take the risk. Never again.) I had ordered the book from Alibris because the seller had a mass market paperback. I could have ordered a trade paperback from this Irish site but I prefer to avoid trade paperbacks when I can, mainly because they can be unwieldy.

Two weeks ago, recognizing that the copy that had been posted on 2 July, more than three weeks earlier, wasn’t going to get here on time, I gave in and ordered the trade paperback from the Irish site. So, I’ve now bought and paid for the book twice and ended up with the edition I hadn’t wanted.

As I suggested above, the stories in The Wonder Spot more obviously constitute a through-narrative in chronological order than do those in the first book. They’re all narrated by Sophie who, like Jane in The Girls’ Guide, leaves a low-status job in publishing and winds up working in advertising. The death of her father, a judge, leaves her without a figure on whose mildly admonitory wisdom she had been able to rely, but her bereavement doesn’t occupy as much space in the story as Jane’s does in the earlier book.

Once again, parents and siblings, work colleagues and life in New York are constant elements from one story to the next, while the discontinuity is found in the changing roster of male lovers. That element is even more pronounced in this book, where there is no character corresponding to Archie Knox, who features in two chapters of The Girls’ Guide, including the longest. This is particularly noticeable in the second-last story in The Wonder Spot, “The One after You”. Sophie and Adam, her friend and ally from when she was in publishing, are in Central Park, scattering the ashes of Chris, to whom Sophie had once been engaged for three weeks:

There was a metal can of his ashes and Adam and I each took some and scattered them on the mound. As a joke, I said, as I had a thousand times, “Tell me the truth: you don’t think Chris and I will ever get back together, do you?” (p. 276)

She now says that she had always thought she’d wind up with Chris. I had to check back through the earlier stories to make sure that he hadn’t been mentioned earlier, and that I hadn’t just forgotten this character.

The striking thing that one discovers in reading through The Wonder Spot is that it’s not just boyfriends and male lovers who disappear from one chapter to another: Sophie also leaves behind — one might say discards — a surprising number of female friends.

Preteen Sophie decides that she doesn’t want to have a bat mitzvah but is persuaded by her father to give Hebrew school a try. She dodges out of class and spends much of the time smoking in the powder room with Margie, who gives her cigarettes. When Margie is expelled for stealing, another student asks Sophie “How’s Margie doing?” (p. 46). Sophie doesn’t know: it apparently hasn’t occurred to her to keep in touch.

In college, she rooms with Venice Lambourne, who is beautiful, bohemian and well travelled. For a while they’re very close but they drift apart when Venice first meets Hugh and then becomes involved with wealthy, arrogant Anthony. Venice eventually admits to Sophie that Anthony is married. The friendship between the two women fizzles out.

I couldn’t really believe that she’d decided to be with Anthony, whom I would never choose over Hugh, or choose over anyone, or choose over no one. That made it hard for me to believe that Venice and I were the same person underneath everything, which is what I thought love required. (p. 80)

Then there’s Francine Lalor, who has a desk beside Sophie’s in the publishing house where Sophiie is an editorial assistant. Francine was hired in the same role but her editor was fired and she became the Floating Assistant. Without an editor to assist, Francine reads her way assiduously through the slush pile, determined to find the publishable book that, statistically, it ought to be harbouring. Find it she does, eventually, only for Sophie’s editor (partly through Sophie’s mishandling of the situation, though it’s difficult to see what she could have done differently) to take the credit for the acquisition. Like Adam, and without being asked, Francine covers for Sophie’s terrible timekeeping. She is friendly towards Sophie when only the two of them are in the office but at other times is reserved.

Years later, Sophie tells Adam that Francine has sent her a Christmas card every year since Sophie left the company. The publisher has been acquired and jobs are likely to go. Francine has remained in the job in the meantime, more than 25 years altogether. Sophie finally phones Francine and thanks her for the cards but their conversation is awkward and curtailed. Sophie vaguely wonders if there’s anything she can do to help with Francine’s employment situation, but Adam has already quietly taken care of that. Francine is surprised that he didn’t tell Sophie.

And then there’s Dena. Dena has been Sophie’s friend since childhood, but she isn’t mentioned until the fifth of the book’s eight stories. Dena has a friend, Matthew, to whom she’s attracted but who isn’t interested in her. Sophie too is attracted to Matthew and at first thinks he’s showing signs that it’s reciprocal. Dena asks Sophie not to go out with Matthew. Solphie by now thinks it’s unlikely that anything will happen between her and Matthew but is unwilling to close off the possibility. She reminds Dena that she had said that she and Matthew were “just friends”.

“I hate that expression,” she says. “What’s bigger or deeper or more important than friends?”

I translate this to mean that whatever is between her and Matthew is bigger or deeper or more important than her and me; or him and me; or me.

She says, “I don’t want to lose you, Bob.” (p. 201)

They call each other “Bob”: Sophie is so named after Bob Dylan, Dena after Bobby Orr.

It would be easy for me to promise; there doesn’t seem to be any chance that I will ever go out with Matthew. But it seems wrong for her to ask — wrong to ask me to forgo the possibility of my happiness for hers, which may not even be happiness but less misery.

I say, “No.”

She stares at me. Then she says, “After all I’ve done for you.” (p. 201)

That is the end of the friendship. Some time later, Matthew admits to Sophie that Dena still calls him sometimes, asking him not to go out with Sophie.

“I don’t really understand,” I say.

“What part?”

“‘What part?’” I say. “Um, if you’re just friends, why would she care if you went out with somebody else?”

Not somebody else,” he says. “You.”

It seems obvious now, though it didn’t occur to me before. The way I phrased it in my own mind was that she didn’t want anyone to be with Matthew, not even me. (p. 205)

Sophie doesn’t spell out exactly what it is that now seems obvious to her. She may be protecting herself from feelings of guilt over the end of the friendship. To the reader it seems clear that when Dena emphasized the importance of friends, it was her friendship with Sophia, not that with Matthew, that she was talking about.

A short story should, of course, be able to stand on its own; it should be complete in itself. I suspect that each of the chapters/episodes in Melissa Bank’s two books is capable of being taken as a short story in this sense, though I haven’t attempted to read them this way. I think it’s clear that they gain in depth and resonance by being viewed in each case as integral parts of a single, whole work of fiction. Even if we refuse to describe that work as a novel, we must concede that a book consisting of “linked short stories” is something different from a collection of short stories tout court.

To say that isn’t, of course, to disparage the short story. I love short stories and I’ll be writing about more of them before too long.

Editions: The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing is published in Penguin paperbacks, 2000 and The Wonder Spot is a Penguin trade paperback, 2005.