SHORT STORIES: Ian Sansomreviews 40 Fights Between Husbands and WivesBy Colm Liddy Penguin Ireland. 397pp, €14.99
EVERYTHING IS DOMESTIC. And the domestic is epic: just read the Bible, or the Greek myths, or the papers, or Joyce, or Homer. Feuding gods, warring tribes, tragedies, infidelities – the endless dissolution of hearth and home. Colm Liddy's 40 Fights Between Husbands and Wives, a book of short stories whose title more than fairly indicates its subject, content, and form, makes a noteworthy contribution to literature's long catalogue of marital disappointments, betrayals, and reconciliations.
This is Liddy's first book, and it possesses all of the oomph, and the pizzazz and the imagined omnipotence of the form – because of course the first book is a form, with its own recognisable tropes and characteristics. There is the unashamed offering of wisdom: we should be patient, kind, and forgiving, Liddy seems continually to be suggesting, as though he has recently trekked down from the Himalayas with such insights from some long-bearded sadhu, packed fresh and on scrolls in his rucksack. There is whimsy: each story is prefaced with a cute little indicator of its setting ("Roscommon, Ireland, 2006"). And there is wackiness: the story My ex-wife: a user's manual(excerpt) is done up typographically to look like the troubleshooting section from a technical manual. Ladies! Does your husband spend every evening stuck in a newspaper?is styled as a newspaper ad. The fate of all romanceconsists of just four cartoon-style speech bubbles. Cross wordis a crossword. A hug will be permittedis a poem.
Liddy's real skill lies not so much in his technical daring, however, as in his simple willingness and ability to sketch in great detail those little incidents between husbands and wives that might otherwise be overlooked . In what is undoubtedly the most successful story in the collection, Our last night alone, lying in bed together,a woman lies in bed with her husband, waiting to go into a hospice. She feels isolated: all she wants is a cuddle. Liddy's imagination thrives in the shady regions of such small hopes and misunderstandings.
The temptation, of course, which Liddy does not always resist, is to light out for other, brighter, more glamorous territories. Almost half of the book consists of stories set in distant pasts and places: Babylonia, 2390 BC, Kerala, India, AD 960, Siberia, 13,000 BC, and Nazareth, Judea, 1 BC. These stories seem deliberately underwritten, as though suggesting that all of the marital squabbles and disagreements they recall might just as well have happened a moment ago, in Leitrim, say, 2009.
Several other stories seem also deliberately to renounce their power. There must be fifty ways to annoy my husband, for example, is a promising little piece about a man who fantasies about having sex with Marilyn Monroe. Alas, it's almost over before its begun. Piddle faster!, set on a couple's honeymoon in Rome in 1958, is little more than a snapshot. In the end the reader may come away from the book feeling like the narrator of the story Thwack!,a man who has everything and still wants more. "She was a caring, capable mother of our two young children while still holding down a part-time position at Ernst Young. Her work clothes were chic; her figure still trim [ . . . ] But was I impressed by any of it? Was I lucky to have her? Was I satisfied? Was I f-." Perhaps it's not the wife's fault. Perhaps the fault lies with the man. And perhaps first-time writers never disappoint: perhaps readers, like spouses, are just too quick to judge. Liddy has found his form and his subject. What he needs now is a style to match.
Ian Sansom is the author of the Mobile Libraryseries of novels.