mary miller, 'after happy hour' + chris power, 'mothers'
‘A story works’, says Mary Miller, ‘when there’s momentum’. In other words, the problem is inertia. Short stories don’t have the slow tectonics of a novel; they come in batches, each one gifted just a few minutes on stage. But in Miller’s new collection, Always Happy Hour, she’s found a solution to the problem: start in third gear. You tune into each of her narrators as though you’d missed their first two sentences, and the tempo guilts you into full attention. You don’t look away before the story ends, and leaves you admiring how sparingly it’s been told.
Most of Miller’s narrators are youngish American women. They have plenty of bad sex, to compensate for their lack of money or hope. The men are unspeakable. Everyone drinks too much. Given the stagnation of these people’s lives, it’s remarkable that the stories have ‘momentum’ at all. In ‘Proper Order’, for instance, a writer-in-residence invites a class of graduate students over, and she imagines sleeping with one of them. They all stand around awkwardly, drinking beer. But Miller can imbue workmanlike grammar with psychological depth:
It is a great big old beautiful house and he stands in my kitchen and says, “This is exactly where I pictured you living”, and I take this to mean he thinks I am beautiful, that I am the type of person who should be living in a grand house.
No fuss, no frills, just a perfect loop of longing, from ‘great big old beautiful house’ to ‘grand house’ – from the flatness of the fact to what she silently wishes he would see.
Always Happy Hour is set in the American South, and it has, say the New York publishers Liveright, a ‘savage Southern charm’. This sounds like the kind of thing you would write if you’d first designed blurbs in the Fifties, and your grandpa had died for the Union. In fact, Miller’s South is a cloistered world of its own, defined by the internal strength of its atmosphere, not its place in the national id. There are sprawling old houses, RV parks, gas stations, food courts. When a girl from Mississippi contemplates leaving her man, she knows where her horizon is. ‘I’ll even move if I have to,’ she thinks, ‘to Texas or North Carolina, somewhere far enough away that he won’t bother to find me unless a bad man calls and offers him money’.
Miller’s book made me think of Joan Didion, going to the South to ignore what people elsewhere thought of it, and to taste for herself its air of ‘febrile conspiracy and baroque manipulation and peach ice cream’. In Always Happy Hour, too, the atmosphere is hot and muggy, and the weather never clears; there’s no space for the wide-eyed dreaminess of the breezy liberal Coasts. Miller’s narrators, in fact, have only the smallest of dreams, and they usually keep them to themselves; these women don’t speak much, except to order drinks or avoid questions. They all share a horror of being demonstrative or melodramatic. Instead, their sadness takes a drabber form: the knowledge that someone they love could be getting closer to them, giving them more, except that they aren’t, and they won’t. ‘To know something’s going to happen is almost like agreeing to it’, thinks one narrator, as she’s ‘crawling into bed next to Terry’. Something, almost – that’s where the story ends.
Chris Power’s style, by contrast, is a more elusive thing. Mothers is his first collection, though he’s the writer behind the Guardian’s long-running ‘Brief Survey of the Short Story’, so this is a case of a veteran poacher turning prey. Short stories are objects of conspicuous, intensive craft; like younger children, they tend to be compared to the accomplishments of others. Does he have the brash economy of Hemingway? the weird radiance of Lispector? the rhythm and crooked tone of Denis Johnson (whom Power especially likes)? As if desperate to avoid this ritual, Mothers has assimilated all the styles its author knows, and wears none of them on its sleeve. Comparisons seem to slide off it. Power’s style is frictionless and burnished; any flaws have been relentlessly crafted away.
This isn’t to say that the stories in Mothers are samey. They’re heterogeneous in ambience and voice, and their only governing subject is (roughly) the way that love and loss strike their characters’ lives over time. Where Miller is happily parochial, Power can’t get enough of the world, and with every story, you’re thrown across another border. In ‘Above the Wedding’, Liam falls for Miguel in Nice, has sex with him in Berlin, and goes to his (heterosexual) wedding in Mexico City with the hope of claiming him for himself. The longest piece is a trilogy spread through the collection, the three-part ‘Mother’, in which Eva goes from ten-year-old daughter to parent. Beset by mental illness, all she can do is depart and depart. She begins as a child in Stockholm, and flits around Le Havre, Dubrovnik, Connemara, Innsbruck. Sometimes she’s married in London.
‘Eva’, the third instalment, gives us the end of her decline. We saw her grow up in the summer of 1976; now it’s the late 2020s, and she’s in a Swedish unit for the mentally ill. Joe, the husband from whom she took leaves of absence that lasted years, feels that he should fly out to see her once more. The story is calm and devastating, and brings the collection to a natural end. But this, in fact, is the sole reservation I have about Mothers: its elegance can sometimes feel overpowering. There’s nothing amiss with Power’s prose, but nor is there much weirdness or quirk. Set Mothers next to Always Happy Hour, and you see it. The Europeans have all the parties, the travel, the whirl of drama between friends; but it’s so effortlessly done that it can leave you a little flat. When it does, you feel the lure, however perverse, of Miller’s all-American fuckups – drinking beer at breakfast, sweltering in the heat, morose and grimy and nearly alone.
