Review of Collected Stories
[In the following review, Bliss lauds the selection of short stories in Carey's Collected Stories, particularly complimenting Carey's ability to leave “himself emotionally naked when writing of his own experience.”]
Peter Carey's Collected Stories contains little that is new, but what is new is wonderful, and what is old is wonderful as well. I intend that adjective literally: the stories excite wonder and are full of wonders.
The collection holds virtually all the short stories gathered in the books which marked Carey's debut, The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979), both published by the University of Queensland Press in Australia. Less than half of the stories from these two volumes were subsequently culled for The Fat Man in History and Other Stories, published in 1980 by Random House in New York and by Faber & Faber in London. In the new Collected Stories all but two of the selections omitted from the London and New York groupings have been reprinted: still absent are “She Wakes” from The Fat Man in History and “Ultra-Violet Light” from War Crimes. Both are very short and somewhat slight pieces, although “She Wakes” shows Carey confidently handling an uncharacteristically realist mode. Moreover, it is puzzling why these two were not included, if only to make the collection complete. Still, what the collection does give us displays Carey at his quirky and inventive best.
Among the familiar wonders for Carey fans to revisit will be the Fastalogian genetic lottery of “The Chance,” which allows people to trade their bodies for more politically correct ones; the fanciful and metaphorically devastating conceit of “‘Do You Love Me?’” in which unloved and underutilized regions, structures, and persons begin to evaporate; and the inspired absurdity of “Life & Death in the South Side Pavilion,” a description of a character caught in the Catch-22 of being unable either to accomplish or abandon the ludicrous task he has been assigned. The collection also provides the astute cultural commentary of “American Dreams,” in which a small Australian hamlet sells its soul for tourism, and the moral profundity of stories like “The Fat Man in History” and “War Crimes,” which explore how far people will go in the name of a misbegotten sense of duty or allegiance.
Collected Stories also supplies four previously uncollected items which will be new experiences even for many readers of Carey. Most impressive among these is the openly autobiographical piece “A Letter to Our Son,” written in 1987 and first published in Granta. “A Letter,” which closes the volume of stories, is an excruciatingly full, honest, and personal account of the frightening events surrounding the pregnancy of Carey's wife Alison Summers and the birth of their first son. All the jumbled emotions are there: the joy, the pride, the terror, the disbelief, the helplessness, the anger, the confusion—all out in the open and given the text's last word. Here is how the letter ends: “I held you against me. I knew then that your mother would not die. I thought: ‘It's fine, it's all right.’ I held you against my breast. You smelled of lovemaking.” What strikes me as wonderful about this recounting is that Carey is a writer whose sardonic distance from his characters, especially in his short stories, often leaves the reader confused as to how to feel about them. Yet he leaves himself emotionally naked when writing of his own experience. Having read “A Letter to My Son,” I feel as though I know the writer as I never had before. Of Carey's many gifts to his readers, this is perhaps the most wonderful of all.
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