Depictions of grimy real life
Daring stories that reveal human malaise bring Paula Green surprising joy.
Tracey Slaughter’s daring short fiction deposits you on a rollercoaster, hoists you in the air, puts you in a dank, dark cupboard to eavesdrop, spins you round and round, makes you feel things to the nth degree.
Her short fiction has won awards, attracted widespread admiration in journals for years; Deleted Scenes for Lovers is her second collection.
She teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato. If the quality and originality of writing is a yardstick for the quality and originality of a creative writing teacher, then students should flock to Slaughter’s courses. This book is something special.
The stories, without exception, gravitate to the grimy, tough aspects of life but, strangely, wonderfully, the first effect on me as reader was one of joy. Charlotte Randall’s sentences have had the same effect on me.
Slaughter’s sentences are resplendent with detail that punches out physical settings and human descriptions that shine so bright it almost hurts. She writes with the ear of a poet because each sentence is like a musical phrase in a sonata. I am rocking on my seat as I read.
This is not the book to read on a wet Sunday in one gulp. Each story leads to some kind of human malaise – to damaged connections, grey relations, deprivation, smashed hopes, unbearable compromise. I could only read a few at a time because the intensity of my response sent me to look at the sky. Amidst an infectious immunity to media bombardment, few things make us feel life like this.
Each story is utterly poignant; from the abandoned woman wandering in her slippers in an unfamiliar world to a young woman left to die in the snow for the sake of fame and science. Or the blind woman banned from arranging the church flowers after her husband’s fall from grace. Heart-wrenching.
There is something cinematic about these stories. Like a camera hungry for aching realism – we see the threadbare carpet, the gloops of fat, the blue-knuckled hands, the sleazy eyebrows, a sunset sour on a wall. Slaughter adopts unexpected points of view like a camera searching for an angle that tips the narrative.
Instead of witnessing the shooting and the family torn awry, we sit with the man and his folder of forms in the kitchen. Before anything bad happens. Jump cuts amplify what is not told. But unlike the homeless-anddispossessed sound bites we get on the news, these stories make you feel the inside of the car, the implications of consent, the abandoned children, the dead mother, the loveless sex.
Slaughter has delivered a masterpiece. If universities struggle to be the conscience of society, to uphold the vital role art places on who and how we are, then this book reminds us. Essential reading.