Short stories, good short stories, take me a long time to read. When I read a novel I like, I barrel through it to get to the end, but in a collection of short stories, when they are wonderful, I take my time. I put the book away, physically reshelve it (as opposed to leaving it in the pile of books next to the couch, where all the crime books I review live) and wait until I need it another day. So it goes that reading a book of short stories can take me weeks, months, even years—I still haven’t finished Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You—because I have a choice about when I finish it.
Las Vegas for Vegans was given to me by the author back when it came out, late last year, and I started it straight away. About five months later, I finished it on my couch, the baby finally asleep in her room, an expanse of time in front of me that was exactly right for Las Vegas for Vegans. I went into the study, retrieved it from the shelf (don’t laugh, it is shelved under blue), and read the final third that I had been saving for good, like a literary front room.
Even though I hadn’t read any of it for weeks, the first story I read today—The Bronze Cow—pulled me right back into the visceral world (or worlds, or dimensions) that he has created. They are enough that by the last sentence (and sometimes that is after ten pages, sometimes after a paragraph) you have already been as immersed in the story as you might have been by a full-length novel. They are all-encompassing, ethereal, grounded, amazing. I am not clever enough to know what is happening in all of them, but it doesn’t always matter. Some I read twice because the first time I was pulled along like a current and then it would end and I wasn’t sure what I had read. These stories are not always quite real, but they are really something, you know? Like when an old American man looks over a vista with the sun in his eyes and says, “That’s really something.”
It is the kind of collection that makes you rethink how words fit together and how stories are told. Some I didn’t like. Some made me sad. (And it isn’t a recommended travel guide for traveling vegans at all.) I have folded down so many corners for turns of phrase or scenes that struck me in some way that to put them in here would probably violate copyright and have me arrested. My only regret—and I know reviewers write this type of thing all the time but I am nothing if not unoriginal—is that I’ve now read them all, that the next time I have this quiet sleeping hour free, I won’t be able to read them fresh. I’ll just have to read them again.
With Puffin Books turning seventy this year, the publishing company has released a bunch of “Pocket Money Puffins”, selling in Australia for the lovely little price of $7.95. They’re compact things, by well known authors, with Infinity coming it at less than a hundred pages but—and I only noticed this after I’d bought it—only thirty of those pages are Sarah Dessen’s short story, with the rest of the book being extracts from her novels Just Listen and That Summer.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Sarah Dessen, and love reading her blog because she seems just so darn friendly and entertaining no matter what she’s talking about. Because I am convinced that I am a Tremendously Busy Person, I thought a short story was a good introduction to her writing. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case.
Infinity is the tale of a teenager on the cusp of just about everything—growing up, getting her drivers’ licence, going all the way with her boyfriend. She is as hesitant about negotiating the awkward roundabout in town as she is about having sex with Anthony, who comes across right away as one of those total jerks who whine and moan about having sex so much they must feel making someone feel shitty about what they do with their virginity is a massive turn-on. While it’s probably a good example of Dessen’s style, which is to write realistic books about realistic issues—and an unfortunately common one at that—it was far too short for me and didn’t have enough of the main character’s life to get a feel for what else was going on for her. The story isn’t even original to the Pocket Money Puffin series, being published previously in a collection called Sixteen, which would have suited it better—and it shows. Having said that, reading the excerpts from the other novels truly made me want to go out and buy them, because Dessen’s talent seems to lie in constructing a much larger world for her characters. The only problem I have here is that I feel it was too expensive for such a short story, where more than half the book was basically advertising; the royalties don’t even go to charity. The book should have been free, or at least less than five dollars, if most of it was teasers.
In conclusion: buy other Sarah Dessen novels, but don’t bother with this. For an extra two dollars you could just buy one of those glorious Popular Penguins instead, like Meg Rosoff’s fantastic How We Live Now. Or you could donate your $7.95 to the Fiona Needs Money To Justify Buying Friday Night Lights on DVD Fund. I know what I’d choose. (Buy both, then ice cream.)
