Monsters and others

Olivia Cole

‘Make somebody up’ was the instruction to the 23 contributors to Zadie Smith’s short-story anthology The Book of Other People, published to benefit the Brooklyn children’s writing charity, 826 NYC, founded by Dave Eggers. While that might seem about as radical a command as telling screenwriters to use dialogue, the only rule being that each story should take its title from the central character, none reads as though pinched and twisted to fit the theme. That said, of course, there are those that feel they must wriggle in the opposite direction. ‘Monster’, by Toby Litt, threatens for a moment to become some sort of Bildungsroman for monsters: ‘One day, the monster set off to…’ before it remembers itself. ‘There was to be no quest for true identity. The monster had no story, unless being a monster is story enough.’

Elsewhere there are plenty of other creatures who, once given life, will insist upon elaborate adventures. Hard to forget is David Mitchell’s internet dater who has his new cyber lover (an amateur dramatics Lloyd Webber diva) told he’s been killed in an accident with a block of frozen peas rather than find a way to tell her to log off. Equally memorable is A. M. Homes’s Miami Art Fair rich witch, Cindy Stubenstock, who struggles to find purchases big enough for her house. Pollack? Rothko? ‘Everything is relative.’

There are fewer laughs in two brilliantly melancholic stories by A. L. Kennedy and Colm Toibin and dazzling contributions from Smith herself and from Adam Thirlwell. The Book of Other People is a readable, often comic but seriously weighty anthology. In an extract from a novel in progress, Thirlwell introduces Uzbekistani Londoner Nigora: an obsessive movie-watcher, prone to use The Philadelphia Story as a sort of moral guide.