Book Review : Slices of Life Minus a Few Ingredients

They Sleep Without Dreaming by Penelope Gilliatt (Dodd, Mead: $14.95)

London-born, Northumberland-raised Penelope Gilliatt is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. She has written reams of film criticism, the screenplay of a film (“Sunday Bloody Sunday”), a libretto, four novels and four previous collections of short stories. All but one of the 11 stories in this collection appeared first in magazines: seven in the New Yorker, the others in British Vogue, Grand Street and the London magazine.

At a time when many writers complain of the scarcity of outlets for short stories, when fiction itself is deemed “difficult to market,” a collection like this prompts the question: For what audience are these stories intended? Or, more simply, what is it about these stories that people would like? “People” of course, in this case, cannot be taken to mean hoi polloi, the so-called mass-market readership. This, presumably, is fiction for the selective reader. Who, then, would enjoy these stories; what qualities do they have that would appeal to the discriminating palate?

One tries to conceive of the audience: a hypothetical selective reader embarking upon Gilliatt’s coolly conducted tour of contemporaneia, pausing to admire a pretty piece of verbal economy here, a hint of unexpected oddness there (Gilliatt eschews major surprises--too old-fashioned, too O. Henry--in favor of minor oddnesses, rather in the manner of a fashion designer who causes eyebrows to be raised by using hospital gown fabric in an evening dress). The reader notes, respectfully, how strange details take on peculiar significance only to be allowed to trail off into insignificance, while larger story-patterns are deliberately elided. The reader must keep his/her eye peeled: The verbal felicities are few and far between, and very small when found. (Perhaps the scarcity is supposed to evoke associations with pearls.) But preciousness is an attribute with two shades of meaning: genuine worth on the one hand, affectation on the other.

Carefully Positioned

Most of these stories seem to have been carefully positioned between two contrasting but equally fashionable modes in contemporary fiction: the paper-thin slice of life and the ingenious literary parody. But instead of combining the best of both, Gilliatt merely takes advantage of the loopholes of one to escape the demands of the other. Read for their wit, for their “point,” so to speak (a good parody always makes a point, even if only to ridicule pomposity), most of these stories seem too pointless, too randomly structured, too loosely developed. We are invited to consider them as slices of life, their randomness a justified reflection of life’s randomness. Considered as snapshots of reality, however, these stories simply do not seem “real.” The characters have no quiddity beyond their names, no life, no thought, no emotions beyond the unspeakably arch dialogue they are made to spout.

“They sleep without dreaming,” notes that story’s purportedly clever, Northumberland-raised heroine of the hordes of mediocrities around her. One of the few clever things she says, it’s not all that clever. The one story that most baldly exemplifies the tendencies of the rest is “The Wind-Child Factor.” Six English university dons assemble in a Chinese restaurant to meet with Bertram Wood, an eminent polymath. Leaving them behind, the narrative whisks us back to Bertram’s boyhood. We observe him having some teeth removed: “I hope the other teeth today are more interesting,” the precocious child tells the dentist. Later, he promises his (equally precocious) father not to become a constitutional statesman, the presumption being that someone as brilliant as he will be beset with such offers. Back at the restaurant, with the same remarkable aplomb he displayed as a lad, Bertram evades the dons’ questions about stuffy things like Balzac and puzzles them all by discoursing at length upon his dislike of badly parked automobiles. If there is anything at all to this story, it is aplomb for aplomb’s sake.

A Slave to Fashion

If the stories in this collection can be said to have a theme--or perhaps attitude would be a better word for what they share--it would seem to be the affirmation of a basically unsubstantiated sense of superiority chiefly derived from the flaunting of eccentricity. It is disheartening to recognize the degree to which their author has become a kind of slave to fashion, bent on making an effect, sacrificing her intelligence and genuine individuality, anesthetizing her sensitivity and emotions to achieve a certain “look” whose appeal is bound to be transient.

There is little of lasting substance or sustenance to be gleaned from this volume. Some of the same witticisms are even repeated from one story to the next. The value of these stories is a little like the value of currency: Like paper money, they are “marketable” only insofar as the reader is prepared to accept their declaration of value in place of something more enduring.