The elegiac and the exuberant

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.