SHORT STORIES
Pulse Points
JENNIFER DOWN
Text, $29.99
A school faces a funding cut, people live with illnesses past and present, a young woman miscarries, a sister goes on a pilgrimage after her brother's suicide, a son lies to his dying mother, siblings put their father in a nursing home against his will, and young people seem uncommonly old and wise. In Jennifer Down's first collection, Pulse Points, the stories have different narrators, with diverse settings and plots, but they have the same feel. A youthful searching, yearning quality propels each story, and there is often an absence of someone, a significant loss.
The writing is sombre and downbeat, full of signifiers, a sharp intellect underpinning a world of observations. Down's fragmentary, philosophical style can be reminiscent of Amy Hempel, without the extreme brevity. "I don't say this to absolve myself of anything: Lux could be hard work, but that wasn't why I started with Perry. Anyway, everybody is hard work in their own way."
Her precision with language also recalls Cate Kennedy. The stories aren't melancholic like Kennedy's but there is a dour humourlessness overarching this collection. Read together as a whole, stories are flecked with a negative world view that adeptly echoes the parlous state of international and local affairs. "It's just that we've got no safety net," says one character, tellingly. For these people, there just isn't much to laugh about.
Down is exemplary at drawing whole characters and quickly giving them depth. Stories are heavy with atmosphere, and words are chosen with care: "There's a cold disturbance in the air," she describes with precision, and: "She wore classic navy trousers with the cuffs expertly turned."
Poverty, bad luck and illness commingle, and despair is never very far away. Some stories, such as Hungry for God, are little more than a slice of life, but none the worse for it. Small details give so much away: 'He'd once told her that growing up, his mother had made tomato soup by diluting tomato sauce in a cup of boiling water." It is fiction but you wouldn't make this stuff up.
Sometimes the narrative feels incomplete or just underdeveloped, or the ending too abrupt. Occasionally, there is a slip of clarity. When the narrator in Peaks answers her sister by saying "I am 42 years old", her meaning could be read one of many ways, but we haven't been given enough of the character's evolution to be able to understand her precise meaning. It adds unwanted distance between the reader and the story.
Eternal Father, the longest story at 22 pages, is the most developed. Small anecdotes build towards a larger, filmic narrative that is never predictable. The longer Down gives herself to draw a picture with words and the more storyline there is, the more clarity we have and the more we can feel.
Publishing people like to say that there's a resurgence of the short story but in truth it never really went away. Perhaps we just stopped taking notice for a bit there. Down's style is well suited to the nature and framework of a short story, particularly the long short story. There is the tantalising sense that this is just the first collection of many for her. She has a knack of talking honestly about the nature of contemporary life, and I look forward to more.
Jennifer Down is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival.