I've just finished D.J. Taylor's collection of short stories, Stewkey Blues, and am strongly tempted to read it all over again right away, so much did I enjoy it, but as I've already promised it to Mr. C. that will have to wait.
Set in his native Norfolk, the stories have more than just location to bind them together; they are linked by the author's keen-eyed observation, his gift for an illuminating epithet, his economic, character-defining vocabulary, and his understanding of the telling behaviours which reflect our sense of ourselves and of others.
Thematically, a common ground is how things are, were, or might have been: what circumstance or event was the 'grit in the oyster' - the formative experience, for better or for worse. There are moments of self-revelation or sudden clear-sightedness, where anxieties, weaknesses or sore points make themselves felt or shed an affirming or consolatory light. Some are set in the recent past with skilled use of cultural references to enrich them. Throughout the book you'll find types to recognise or even identify with, and many of those small moments which time reveals to be major personal turning-points.
Here's a short passage from Forty Years in which a man attending a joyless school reunion sees his year-group in all their 1978 glory:
'To look at them as they stared out of the photograph - by turns hopeful, stolid, anxious, expectant, bored or half-amused - was to get a terrible sense of - what exactly? Life working its purpose out? Promise unfulfilled? Some vast, ineluctable pattern whose real implications were still waiting to make their presence felt? It was difficult to tell.'
If David's work is new to you, there's an interview I did with him a few years ago here, a post on his wonderful novel Ask Alice here, and one on the equally good Kept here.
