Culture

Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
(3.5/5)
 
Andrew Porter’s debut collection of short stories won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in the United States. Written from different perspectives, including male and female, young and old, rural and urban, these stories present a very real portrayal of white, middle-class America. Yet the situations of each story are also recognisable and familiar; you can easily imagine them happening to people around you. Thus, through his specific fictional characters, Porter looks at the contexts of the relationships we all have with others and what we draw and expect from them. There is the modern parent, trying to wade through the challenges of being supportive but also authoritative; the college student exploring different types of romance; the high school student glorifying his older brother while also attempting to understand the deficiencies others see in him. In all these stories, the central theme that Porter constantly returns to is the three-dimensional nature of our relationships to others.
Porter’s approach to the short story is surgical: brief and incisive. Each story is told in the first person, in simple, plain language so that you can almost hear the voices of his narrators. The simplicity of the stories themselves and the language in which they are expressed are both their joy but also for me, their downfall. There were times when I wanted these stories to be less clinical, more raw, to provoke more reaction and feeling. It felt like these were stories were told to me, but that there was always some emotion held back; that somehow I was not allowed into the deep centre of the narrators. Again, though, this makes the storytelling that much more realistic. Just think of how we tell stories, how we describe scenarios to others, always leaving part of the story unsaid. We fight so hard against being open and vulnerable with our feelings, even as we confide in others. The lack of reflection by the narrators in dealing with their past relationships leaves these stories with a haunting and tragic aspect, even as you wish that they felt and expressed more.