TRUTH AND ORIGINALITY HIDDEN IN MIXED BAG OF SHORT STORIES
Faragher is a talented and fearless writer, but he needs a good editor, writes James W. Wood.
No less a figure than Jack London once derided editors as “failures … who lack the divine fire, who sit in judgment on originality and genius.”
If London — who was no fan of reviewers, either — were alive today, he would find himself in good company, with Christopher Hitchens asserting that authors who “moan with praise for their editors … always reek slightly of Stockholm Syndrome.”
From such comments one may conclude editors are not always popular with writers. And yet, as Nick Faragher’s new collection of short stories shows us, the editorial process in all its forms, from copy-editing to constructive criticism of content, often helps to bring the best out of an author.
For a collection of short stories, Best Served Cold is an unusually long book. One thinks of classic short story collections such as Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, at 165 pages, or Junot Diaz’s Drown, at 240 pages. Faragher’s book is probably overlong at 324 pages, and a more judicious choice of material might have helped to concentrate the quality of the better stories.
Faragher aims for a tone somewhere between the Roald Dahl of Tales of the Unexpected and Charles Bukowski’s Women, his stories seeking to reveal hidden truths behind what are often sordid and unsavory lives, recounted in vocabulary that might at times cause a libidinous Roman to blush.
This collection’s first four tales all deal with sexual desire and deception of various kinds. In Piazza del Cigni, a young Lothario poses as a musician, colluding with a restaurant owner to overpower naive girls. Whilst in Miss Nude Conestoga, the winner of a bar-room beauty contest is revealed as a transvestite. Elsewhere, A Place To Hang Out finds a pair of teenage friends murdering a pedophile who has been consorting with one of them.
The problem with such a barrage of below-the-belt material is Faragher’s real range is not revealed until later on. Stories such as Damn Boat People or Birds for Breakfast are both better realized, more accomplished and rewarding than the initial run of pieces concerned mainly with sex and death. The more subtle world of prejudice and local politics described in Damn Boat People would have been welcome leaven to the texture of the first third of this volume. It’s also unfortunate that, apart from one story set in Italy, we have to wait until the middle of the collection to appreciate the range of settings Faragher can offer, from his native northwest England in Gas through to Greece in The Watch and rural France in The Well.
One feels Faragher has not been best served by English characters who follow “trades in the soccer leagues” when they would most likely follow “transfers in the football market,” or Canadian characters describing dogs as “poor little Blighters,” the last word being the almost exclusive province of the U.K. If Faragher’s broad international experience brings a wide palette of settings to these stories, then it also brings with it the need to control tone and diction so readers feel properly grounded in each setting.
Faragher’s stories work most effectively when he allows character and situation to flow naturally, showing us what is happening and why, rather than telling us what his characters are thinking. In The Watch, one of the better stories in this book, Faragher trusts the strength of his narrative more than elsewhere, and shows a firm eye for detail, with a waiter who “looks more than ever like an egret that had spotted a fat fish.” This story succeeds because of its simplicity, the absence of a deliberate twist. Here, there is an emotional centre to the tale, and the quality of the writing rises accordingly.
At the other end of the scale, Angela’s Condition spends rather too much time inside the two principal characters’ heads for the eventual denouement to deliver much surprise. For tales of suspense and mystery to work, as they can do in this volume, what lies unsaid matters as much, if not more, than what is being described.
Nick Faragher is obviously a capable writer; one wonders what a talented editor might do to polish his surprisingly delicate talent. As Stephen King put it — without any obvious editorial intervention — “kill your darlings, even if it breaks your heart.”