A good story is made of bones. It’s the reader’s job to flesh it into intimacy. In Helen Simpson’s adventurous new collection, In Flight Entertainment, the best stories rattle like skeletons; the worst, squelch.
The title piece is about a bullying businessman on a plane, up-graded to first class, pontificating: the scam of carbon-offsetting; the reason it’s pointless to stop using airplanes (‘In a word, pal — China!’); the inconvenience that the flight’s going to have to land in Iceland because some selfish guy in the seat across the aisle has just died. He’s brutally, comically awful. You long for him to die, gurglingly. Simpson, more sophisticated, lets him live, enrage you and get off at Chicago.
Many of the stories in In-Flight Entertainment are like this: a gasp and a getting on. Simpson holds back from saying too much. She leaves us to fill in the local damage. Is that business man me? Doesn’t he sound like the fellow living two doors down? Cancer, deafness, pornography, domestic suffocation, the oafishness of men, environmental miserableness and our inability to cope with it: a good game to play with Simpson’s work is to guess which of these subjects she’s experienced herself and which she’s simply sat at her writing desk and, feeling dyspeptic, hauled down from imagination.
In the first type she’s fresh and startling. In the second, too expected. She’s definitely been a middle-aged, bigoted man. She knows a lot about hotel life and marital entrapment. ‘Channel 17’ is superb: a poignant, humorous observation of three or four different responses to a woman rolling and unrolling her stocking on a hotel porn channel — you know immediately that she has been (or been with) all of these characters.
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