British humor, especially literary humor is often lost on American audiences. One need look no farther than to the blanket seriousness that greeted Philip Hensher’s darkly comic Northern Clemency when the Booker Prize finalist’s book arrived on US shores. Arguably one of the main reasons for the divide is that American sensibilities often favor the bombastic, whereas the best of English comedy is often a comedy of manners, born of a classist society that finds its greatest jests in its most rigid and ancient of institutions—the individual hierarchy.

Highly celebrated as a playwright since the success of Beyond the Fringe, the author of The History Boys sets his sights on fiction, and, for the most part, offers a relatively successful effort.

Smut is not really a collection but rather two novellas, “The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson” and “The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes,” sandwiched together to provide, as the title alludes, a lurid foray into the worlds of two middle-class English families in order to draw a stark contrast between the public façade and the private wont. Yet those seeking a Rothian style romp will be left disappointed; Bennett does not indulge in the graphic nature of sex, nor is he interested in its more gratuitous elements, rather he seems intrigued by the awkward nuances that accompany the act, which, when observed, can offer a truly comic discomfort.

In Smut Bennett’s skills as a playwright are forefront. In “The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson” the cadence and pacing of his writing is rapid, with the bits of narration offered almost more a voiceover provided to quickly relocate the reader than traditional prose used for introspection, and his dialogue, often subdued, satirical and dripping with double entendre needs only blocking for a complete and seamless transfer to the stage.

Mrs. Donaldson, the namesake of the novella, is a middle-aged widow who, since the death of her husband has taken up acting out maladies at the local medical school as a way to supplement her time and income. In and of itself, this is the classic trope of widow with new lease on life, though Mrs. Donaldson is never offered some grand existential truth nor is her liberation the traditional kind, for it comes in a manner that even the most adventurous have probably failed to realize. To go into further detail is to damage the enjoyment of the plot, yet the comedy which ensues, as well as the awkward but pointed way in which Bennett narrates the scenes where Mrs. Donaldson receives “payment” from her latent tenants is brilliantly handled and strikes to the heart of the English comedic stylings that live to mock jilted English propriety.

As a long-form story, “The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson” succeeds on all levels, and perhaps would have been better off as the second of the pair because the subsequent “The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes” fails to equal its partner. Though Bennett’s dialogue remains impeccable and pointedly comic, the bravura opening quickly fades into a convoluted tail that loses most, if not all, of its opening momentum. In an attempt to tell a multi-layered tale of a closeted banker, his overbearing mother, ugly fiancé, henpecked father and jilted gay lover, where everyone seems to be sleeping with everyone else, Bennett tosses too many balls into the air, and more than a few of them hit the ground. Still, Smut does entertain, manages to remain light despite the darkness to which it occasionally alludes and is perhaps a proper starting point for those intrigued by, but not familiar with, contemporary English comedic prose.

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By their nature, reviews of collections often prove difficult if only because the strain of narrative is fragmented by the shifting of stories and the trajectory is less a linear journey than a series of points that, when taken together, serve to become something greater than their individual selves. Good collections are rare, as they have slowly become either proving grounds for young authors or tired compiling of the random works of older ones, and as the collection, in the American market, continues to be seen as a less viable option for publisher and writer alike, traditional collections are being replaced by novels in serial vignette form.

Still, from time to time a book arrives that eschews the common notion of the collection and its viability as a continuing art form. Francois Emmanuel’s Invitation to a Voyage (L’invitation au voyage) is one of these. While short, Emmanuel’s collection is dense, yet reads as though the reader is caught in the hazy limbo between sleep and consciousness, a place where neither the world of dreams nor the world of reality dominates but where the two melt together to strengthen the best qualities of the other.

The Belgian Emmanuel is a writer in love with language, and it is clear that the choice of poet Justin Vicari as translator was a wise one. The lyricism of Romance languages rarely crosses into Germanic ones, and this proves especially true for those like Baudelaire and Apollinaire, whom Emmanuel’s prose will at times recall—the book’s title is a not-so-subtle homage to Baudelaire’s poem of the same name—but Invitation retains a freshness and crispness and cadence in English that leaves one wondering how truly marvelous the original French must be.

Invitation to a Voyage is a very continental book, and those who have, for the past two years, been following Dalkey Archive Press’s Best European series would be well served to acquaint themselves with Emmanuel. Invitationis a book in which the destination is superfluous, where the intention is not to arrive a specific endpoint but to become sidetracked during the journey, to loop back over terrain already traversed if only to discover how distant hills might differ in appearance in dawn and dusk. Emmanuel’s work falls somewhere between the circumlocutive elegance of W.G. Sebald and a Jamesean stream of consciousness that produces six stories that exist almost entirely between the lines of what is written, as though Emmanuel is giving his readership the outline of a form while slyly winking as he simultaneous offers them the tools to paint alongside his watchful eye.

Francois Emmanuel

The notion of longing, of distance and of the unspoken is paramount in these stories, and it is as though Emmanuel, a psychiatrist by trade, is using his prose to further examine the human psyche, to trace out through his fictions questions that science, in its cut and dry fashion, is ill-equipped to answer; and what he seems to crave, more than anything else, is the answer to how much, how well and how deeply can we ever know ourselves and, especially how might we construct the image of another as all we are ever truly offered are the dots of a pointillist image, a Bonnard that from one angle is a ship yet from another is no more than a scattered series of colored dots forming and reforming over and over again our minds.

In Invitation to a Voyage we have impressionistic writing done exceedingly well, as Emmanuel manages both to ground his reader in a palpable reality even as he continually spirals away from it. No matter how esoteric he might become, Emmanuel never loses himself in solipsistic narrative, and though he might flirt with it at times, the beauty and power of his prose supersedes what in a lesser writer would be navel gazing. And it would not be too much to say that Invitation, in its way, is a narrative version of Monet’s series Le Cathedrale de Rouen, for though the subject might often appear the same, it is the subtle change brought about by the shifting angle of shadow and glow of light that enables the same façade to be rendered so eloquently and so differently over and over again without ever becoming stale or redundant.

Once again Dalkey Archive Press has managed to find a gem from abroad and undertake the effort to exhibit it here; Emmanuel’s prose is elegant and refined, his subject matter heady yet accessible, his execution nearly flawless, and his Invitation to a Voyage is one that should be accepted quickly and readily by those who enjoy literature that seeks not to explain but to question and examine the life that exists around and within them.

*Author Photo by John Foley

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In her debut story collection, The Tiki King, Stacey Tintocalis has crafted a book whose quirks beautifully dovetail with its deep, dark undertones. Tintocalis’s characters and neighborhoods, ostensibly shiny, are disguised by veneers that are beginning to peel and crack after years of stress and strain. With ten stories that run the gamut from the emotional musings of a man watching a female stranger iron his shirt (“Iron”), to the existential plumbing of an abandoned woman adrift in lust for her husband’s brother (“Geishas”), The Tiki King is as varied as it is pleasurable

At its best, Tintocalis’s prose is crisp and fluid, each sentence seemingly jumping off the back of the last and creating a cascade of paragraphs down through these declining relationships and environments. Such is the case with the title story—a meandering tale told through the eyes of a charming eleven-year-old boy who, simply through his narration, allows a reader to peer into the inner sanctum of his parents’ lost “Apple Pie America.” Their fantasy of permanence and happiness is as naïve as it is fickle; these wounded adults cling to it for psychic survival, but the dream has no resonance for our sardonic, pre-pubescent narrator:

I know what it [Apple Pie America] means but can’t bring myself to respond. All I want to say is “I know all about Apple Pie America, dad. I know it’s Joe DiMaggio and Superman comics and backyard barbecues and the American flag on the moon. In other words, it’s a lot of stuff I don’t really care about.

Stacy Tintocalis

Each of Tintocalis’s stories, in their own way, is informed by this twinge of nostalgia, though it is never twee, clichéd, or overly rose colored. Instead, the desires that afflict her characters function as weights they wish to cast off so the characters might, like Old Alexander Valinchuk of “Another Kind of Sleep,” live in the present more fully, with whatever remnants of themselves they’ve managed to hold onto. For Tintocalis perfection, even happiness, is a myth, and the ideal is ostensibly a statue which gleams of gold from afar but, up close, proves to be made of tin. This is true for Zahlah, a Lebanese immigrant living with her sexually repressed husband in Southern California. Zahlah wants to be reveling in the glitz and glam of her environment, but instead becomes more trapped than she ever would have been in Beirut. After yet another botched attempt at lovemaking, this time with Zahlah playing the part of lusty seductress,

Zahlah quit the bed and saw her dark reflection in the full length mirror, her body hard and ugly, her nipples righteously erect. An American woman. That’s what she saw. Liberated and humiliated. She grabbed a dirty robe from the hamper and left the room to sleep by the empty pool.

The moment, like many in The Tiki King, shows the character’s need for release without offering any easy solutions beyond a grin-and-bear-it approach and another go-round in the cycle of unhappiness.

The Tiki King is not without its slower, less emotive moments. The opening story, “Too Bad about Howie,” feels meandering and immature in contrast to the stories that follow. Its denouement, based upon a rather coy reveal, misdirects the trajectory of a collection that otherwise continually impresses with its pith and urgency. All in all, The Tiki King is an eclectic, ambitious effort, united by its fundamental theme—that life is the quirk, the laugh, the strange moment that vanishes before we can fully register it, but of whose memory we are never really free.

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Carin Clevidence’s debut novel, The House on Salt Hay Road, takes as its subject three generations of the Scudder family, who inhabit a large quasi-Victorian home on the eastern tip of Long Island. Set on the eve of World War II, the setting serves as an isolated bastion at the edge of a world that will soon evolve in violent and radical ways. Clevidence attempts to examine the inner workings of a family whose expectations, beliefs, and desires continually grate against one another; at times the novel recalls such contemporary British writers as Patrick Gale and Andrew Miller, who tend to employ multiple viewpoints that operate independently or intertwine only tangentially with one another.

One of the most interesting aspects of The House on Salt Hay Road is that, while a distinctly American novel, it lacks a clear protagonist around whom the story revolves. While it feels as though the book is tailored to follow Nancy Poole, a nineteen-year-old firebrand who is first introduced defiantly galloping around Long Island on horseback, it soon becomes clear that it isn’t a single character that serves as the focal point of the book, but the house itself and all that it represents. Early on, Clevidence writes:

Inside the house was dark and cool, the rooms hushed. Nothing seemed to change here. The upholstery on the chairs in the sunroom had faded, the yellow flowers bleached nearly white, and the sewing room where her grandmother had made dresses for Nancy’s dolls had been turned into Clayton’s bedroom. But the rugs with the sand worked deep into the nap of the wool were the same, frayed a bit more around the edges. To Nancy, the house felt suddenly like something that had been given up on.

Clevidence often teases the reader with passages such as this one, beautiful and insightful, wedded to both the place and the characters that inhabit it, but her prose can too often be hampered by an overuse of similes that suggest she does not fully trust her descriptions to convey her ideas. Lines like “He bent down to retrieve the half-plucked carcass of a goose and stood holding it for a moment, like a bachelor with a baby,” or “Happiness bobbed inside her like a silver bubble,” can leave a reader feeling that The House on Salt Hay Road was constructed by two different writers.

Carin Clevidence

More frustrating is that, while Clayton and Nancy and Scudder and Mavis and company are interesting characters in and of themselves, Clevidence chooses to examine them separately, in their old worlds, rather than letting their idiosyncrasies chafe against one another. Though the house ultimately becomes a tinderbox, with the characters providing the fodder, Clevidence never lights the match—rather than diving headlong into crucial moments, the narrative distance feels as though we are not watching real people but an experiment. The characters’ movements are described, their thoughts can be guessed at, but their essence remains off limits, as though behind glass.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with Nancy Poole who, though originally portrayed as a woman capable of bucking the conventions of marriage and family, seems all too easily to relinquish her individuality when a handsome stranger, Robert Landgraf, shows up on the porch of the house. His arrival is enough for Nancy to jettison both her career ambitions and her disdain for Enid Snow, a former friend who has since taken up with a husband and moved west to Brooklyn. And so, when Nancy interrupts a family dinner to announce that she is going to become Mrs. Robert Landgraf, what seems like a climactic moment peters out into a few lines of dialogue, the most ambitious line of which is, “It’s very sudden. And right in the middle of dinner…”

The fine line between subtlety and avoidance is constantly blurred in The House on Salt Hay Road; moments are interrupted, but rather than examining them from different perspectives, Clevidence too often simply drops them. Much of the story feels as though it is being controlled by a skittish cameraman panning and moving and jumping from shot to shot, unsure as to whom or what to focus on.

In the third and final section of the novel, Clevidence describes the massive 1938 hurricane that ravaged the eastern coast of Long Island. Here her writing is nothing less than a bravura enterprise, in which her ability as a stylist, as well as the urgency necessary to great literature, is fully apparent:

Gripping the door frame, Clayton stepped out into the storm. The sound of the wind vibrated though him; it was as if the power of the wind lay not in its velocity but in that insistent, penetrating sound… Looking out toward the bay, he saw white water. Swirling in it, like twigs in a puddle, were enormous pieces of broken boats and scaffolding… Clayton grabbed three cork jackets and a length of line and made his way back upstairs.

Reading the final, heartbreaking result of the storm, one feels that this section might have served as the bulk of the book, with the preceding sections condensed to what is most necessary to set the stage for the hurricane. Instead, too much of The House on Salt Hay Road tries to describe the mundane and pedestrian without endowing it with the special urgency and importance that a novel of this sort requires.

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It is rare to find that comic novel which neither borders on the absurd nor reeks of an author trying too hard to be funny. It takes a writer with a sharp wit, pithy delivery, and a keen ear for the musicality of language to charm the reader. In The Country Where No One Ever Dies, Albania’s Ornela Vorpsi succeeds on every level. Unlike the work of her countryman Ismail Kadare, whose The General of the Dead Army portrays the character and landscape of the Albanian people through the watchful eyes of a foreigner, Vorpsi’s narrative is one of immediacy, rooted in the voice and experience of an imaginative young Albanian girl whose name and age change with nearly every chapter.

Whereas Kadare’s book is haunting in both its subject manner and its delivery, from the beginning Vorpsi shows her reader that she is capable of having fun. She understands the necessity of comedy, as well as sorrow, in uncovering the soul of her people—and The Country highlights their foibles with glee. Everything and nothing is sacred, and Vorpsi’s ironic wit, devoid of sarcasm and delivered with honest charm, wins repeatedly on the page.

Vorpsi’s novel is a Milan Kundera-esque critic of the totalitarian state, whose grand Party, “mother of us all,” claims to have enacted a utopian socialist society that is “the envy of the entire world.” One so advanced it requires teenage girls to train with rifles in trenches to defend it from imminent invasion, because it will soon advance to the highest phase of socialism—Communism—which means that “Mankind will have reached such an advanced stage of development that we will all be able to go shopping without any money!”

Ornela Vorpsi

Where Kundera concerns himself more with the metaphysics of man’s existence, Vorpsi prefers to dwell on the mundane aspects that make life in Albania unique. For the Albanian is lucky: “Albania is a country where no one ever dies. Fortified by long hours at the dinner table, irrigated by raki, and disinfected by the hot peppers in our plump, ever-present olives, our bodies are so strong that nothing can destroy them.” The Albanian, Vorpsi states, is someone whose lexicon lacks the word “humility,” who is prone to “megalomania—a condition that sprouts everywhere, like a weed,” and who has only one obsession “dearer to them than death… the quintessence of their existence… Fornication.”

Delivered in a series of tightly focused chapters that break down further into vignettes or specific moments of memory and reflection, The Country touches on life and death, sex and beauty and the state, and how they all manage to inform one another. Vorpsi’s voice is candid, ringing with both the pointed, no-nonsense immediacy of a curious child and the wisdom that accompanies true experience. Blithely aware of her position in a society that, despite its claims to the contrary, has both clearly defined strata and fixed societal roles, her keen eye is that of a satirist, capable of delivering even the most off-handed minutia with profound candor. In assessing her place as an Albanian woman, she repeats well-known maxims which say women “grow like leaves on a tree,” and “a good-looking girl is a whore; an ugly one—poor thing—is not.”

The Country Where No One Ever Dies is a journey of a consciousness, that of a nameless young girl and of a people deeply in love and deeply at odds with this Albania, this broken down Shangri-La. Though her narration contains a sublimated nostalgia, Vorpsi skillfully avoids anything hinting at melancholy or melodrama, even as her narrator recounts the internment of her father in a “re-education facility,” which affects the narrator only in that, as the daughter of a political prisoner, she had to be sure that “even more than the other students—[she] got a good communist education.” Yet, even under the watchful eyes of Mother party and the leering gazes of lecherous men, it is as though the Albanian is not capable of happiness anywhere but that country “created out of dust” and “thirsting for tragedy.” For, as she concludes in a notably ironic epilogue entitled “The Promised Land” (a euphemism used primarily to refer to Italy, where supposedly all the women look like Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida), “In this country Albanians discover they’re mortal… loneliness accumulates until it becomes a stomach ulcer… They don’t want to hear another word about the Promised Land. The Promised Land taught them they were mortal. And they never want to die.”

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