Short stories This article is more than 11 years oldReviewBinocular Vision by Edith Pearlman – review
This article is more than 11 years oldA genius of the short story will finally have her due, says Mark LawsonThe literary establishment tends to be sceptical about the phenomenon of undiscovered greats. Even before digital self-publishing offered a corrective, it was a common view that agents, publishers, reviewers, readers and the law of averages would, between them, eventually discover the authors most deserving of an audience. The legends of bestsellers repeatedly rejected by the gate-keepers – Gone With the Wind, Dubliners, The Day of the Jackal – paradoxically consolidated the consensus that the system ultimately works.
If it does, then American author Edith Pearlman has had to wait an embarrassingly long time for vindication. At 76, she has spent four decades publishing short stories – at least 250 of them – in regional or academic periodicals. Prizes such as the O Henry and the Pushcart increasingly went her way: last year she won four trophies and was shortlisted for three for Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories.
This volume of 34 stories from across her career has popularised the view that an American writer from the decade that produced John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Anne Tyler had been seriously under-valued and may even be their equal. Even now, though, the book's British launch comes from a plucky smaller publisher, Pushkin Press.
There are hints within the book of why Pearlman has been a latecomer to the sort of recognition that she clearly deserves. It is notoriously tough to achieve literary fame without writing a novel: even Alice Munro, superstar of the brief piece, has dabbled in longer narrative. Three of the stories in Binocular Vision, which follow the same characters through the second world war, seem to be reaching towards a novel, but she is clearly happiest over the rapid span. Those stories, however, cover such a range of tones and locations that her variety may also have made her harder for the radar of literary taste to detect than authors with a more constant theme or geography.
Although several of the pieces are set in the fictional Massachusetts suburb of Godolphin – where a retired gastroenterologist faces her own mortality in the haunting "Self-Reliance" – the book also travels to Central America, where, in "Vaquita", a veteran health minister looks back on a period as a political exile, hiding in a barn with a cow. In a characteristic piece of misdirection, Judaism, one of the book's recurrent subjects, is unexpectedly at its most urgent in another Central American tale, "Day of Awe". Here an American retiree, come to meet the child his gay expat son has adopted, panics at the absence, in this Catholic culture, of enough other Jews to make a quorum for Yom Kippur prayers. Other stories just five or 10 pages long stop off in Japan or wartime London.
It's standard to marvel at the amounts of energy and time that can be covered over the fictional sprint distance, but Pearlman is gold medal class at such compressed athleticism. In barely 1,500 words, "Fidelity" charts a long marriage and its interrupting adulteries, while also glancing wryly at journalistic ethics, through an account of a dying travel writer who, from his death-bed, sends ravishing sketches of invented cities to the editor with whom he and his wife have enjoyed a close friendship.
Also fitting plot, subplot and a sense of complex lived history into a length that many novelists would regard as paltry for a chapter is "How to Fall", in which Jocelyn Hoyle, the sidekick of an American vaudeville television star, receives fan letters from a viewer who suggests that it's Hoyle who deserves to be top banana. Issues of racial assimilation and forbidden longing are accommodated with improbable ease in another example of Pearlman perfecting the short-story's Tardis-like trick of having more going on inside than seems possible from the external dimensions.
This is achieved through exacting standards of economy in both prose and dialogue; a sentence – even a single word – will be crammed with detail and meaning. Asked by a tempting lover to turn and look at him, a woman replies, "I don't dare", three words which match the dramatic ambiguity of a line by Harold Pinter. A character who later proves to be dangerously intense has used in a letter the odd adverb "millimeterarily". A one-line biography of a mixed-race couple in an American suburb runs pithily: "Mitsuko made filigreed cookies for school bake sales and Keith served on the search committee when the principal retired."
There are echoes of Updike in the rhythms and observations of that sentence, but such are the multitudes of subject matter, place and structures in this collection that Pearlman finally seems beyond compare. The traditional literary system has worked, though grievously slowly, in giving a genius of the short story her due.
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