Discussions about the short story too often fall into a false dichotomy that can be characterised, in essence, by a quibble over a consonant. Carver or Carter? On the surface, it would be easy to present Philip Hensher as the Raymond Carver-like elegiac naturalist, giving glimpses of disappointed lives and misunderstood epiphanies, and Helen Oyeyemi as the Angela Carter-ish exuberant fabulist, all giddy metamorphoses and yarns within tales within stories. It would be a disservice to both collections to read them in such a manner.
All the stories in Tales of Persuasion have an exquisitely tweezer-y feel to them. The psychologies of the principal characters — an arts administrator realising how much less exotic his Italian colleague is when they are in Italy together; a manipulated man making tentative acts of kindness towards a gauche acquaintance’s lover; a cabal of complicit schoolgirls bullying a poorer boy with snowballs retained for months in the freezer — are delicately and painfully unpicked. To sketch with such deftness the difference between who characters think they are, how their words and actions reveal them to others, and the ironic distance between these and where the truth might lie for the reader, is satisfying and honourable.
There are hints of the late Anita Brookner in some of these stories. Tight-lipped second best is often the best the characters can achieve. ‘The Whitsun Snoggings’, about a mother and her children seeing her ex-husband and his new lover on a station platform, is perhaps the key story here. Its title, splicing Larkin and the demotic, indicates the concerns with ‘all the power/ That being changed can give’, even if it is not taken.
What fascinates, however, is that Hen-sher, a writer of such limber and precise prose, is so frequently drawn to the slips and solecisms of speech.
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