Unlike what I have overheard a couple of ‘creative writing’ teachers tell their students, Wendy Erskine’s stories in Dance Move do not start with a stylistic, linguistic or narrative bang. They start quietly, unobtrusively.
This is the first line of ‘His Mother’: “In her bag, Sonya has a paint scraper, a cloth and a big bottle of soapy water.” The next few lines describe Sonya walking down a road and removing posters from walls and shutters. It is only gradually that the reader realises that Sonya is removing one particular poster, and it takes a bit longer before the nature of her labour is revealed: she is removing posters about the disappearance of her son, a young man who had just “nipped out” one evening and was later discovered dead. The story ends with Sonya encountering another poster, again of a young man who has disappeared more recently. “Sonya is almost indignant. So there’s a new guy, another one. Curtis is what, old hat now?” The story stays there, poised between Sonya’s attempt to remove reminders of her tragedy and her resentment of the world passing it by, between her own loss and her realisation that the second youth also has a mother.
Unstated depths
In all the other stories — and some are more intricate than ‘His Mother’ — Erskine seems to start with ordinary, unremarkable images and words, and then unwind them until they lead her to unstated depths. ‘Mathematics’, for instance, begins with a list of abandoned things that an apartment-hotel cleaner, Roberta, has recovered from the rooms she cleans and brought home, but then develops into a story about a small girl she finds in an apartment she has to clean: a girl sitting alone in a room, waiting for her mother to come back. The apartment, of course, is empty now, having been the site of a wild party the previous night, and as Roberta takes care of the girl, and her mathematics homework, she is about to be sucked into a larger human tragedy.
“Bye-bye, Mrs Dallesandro!” is how ‘Mrs Dallesandro’ begins, and it unfolds into what seems to be a mundane story about an upper middle class and middle-aged wife dolling herself up for her husband’s birthday. ‘Dance Move,’ the title story, has the seemingly unpromising first sentence: “A woman Kate knows went to beginners’ pole dance.” ‘Secrets Bonita Beach Krystal Cancun’ seems to be about two women, Linda and Rae, who met through a common acquaintance, and have been ordering takeaways from the same place every Friday for the last nine years.
Precisely located
In all these stories, Erskine collects small facts and gestures with such precise attention and such unobtrusive craft that, without putting it in words, she ends up saying much more about the human condition. But it is not just any human condition; it is precisely located, mostly in or around Belfast in Ireland.
“Erskine collects small facts and gestures with such precise attention and unobtrusive craft that, without putting it in words, she ends up saying much more about the human condition”
Erskine is significant not only because she is a brilliant short story writer, but also because she is at the cutting edge of an impetus beyond postmodernism and magic realism. To say that it is a return to realism is to miss the point, as these are writers — closer home, Neel Mukherjee comes to mind — who are aware of the ‘post’, and are going through it to something else, sometimes by a kind of focused but slanted realism, which Erskine and Mukherjee adopt in different ways, and sometimes by a return to the gothic, as in the stories of Mariana Enríquez.
This is a heartening development. Postmodernism, and its cousin, magic realism, hatched from the valid need to talk about what cannot be transparently narrated — a need that runs through all of good literature. But, over the years, they mostly shifted to a privileged inattention to people and things outside the mind of the writer and, at times, the reader. It is an indication of the privilege that encompasses vast sections of those who run the global literary scene, including many established writers. It is good to see the ‘outside world’ re-entering the printed page, full of sharp edges, not unalloyed by the mind of the writer or the reader but not muffled into narrative convenience either.
Academics have not found a name for this shift yet as its multi-generic spread cannot be easily slotted into some compact ‘ism.’ But I once heard the French bilingual writer, Sébastien Doubinsky, refer to it as edgy literature. It is not a bad description.
Dance Move; Wendy Erskine, Picador,₹1,581
The reviewer is an Indian novelist and academic who teaches in Denmark.
