The problem when novelists write short stories

Rose Tremain walks on water. Her historical novels are absolutely marvellous, brilliantly plotted, witty and wise, with some of the best characters you’ll find anywhere. Indeed one of their number has a good claim to being the natural heir to Falstaff, his bawdy antics giving way to a more melancholy conclusion: he is to be found in both Restoration and the eponymous Merivel. Tremain’s contemporary fiction is similarly strong. With tremendous insight and sympathy, The Road Home describes the life of an Eastern European as he tries to make a new life in England. The novel is a powerful corrective to the notion that economic migrants have an easy time of things. If Nigel Farage et al haven’t read this book, it’s about time they did.

The American Lover is a short-story collection. It would be fair to say it is a bit of a hotchpotch, with stories of very varying length, theme, tone and style. The majority have already been published in newspapers or magazines, and when assembled they don’t flow as a purpose-built collection should.

There are short-story writers who also produce novels (Lorrie Moore, for instance) and, more common, novelists who also write occasional stories. Sometimes these sorties into other kinds of storytelling have excellent results, but as a general rule writers are at their best in the form they most often turn to. The novelist is skilled at extending, the short-story writer at compressing. A successful story should leave the reader with the luxurious sense that something generous, almost wasteful, has been bestowed; like one of those recipes which demand that you boil a whole lobster with a pint of white wine and a quart of cream but only retain a couple of tablespoons of liquid at the end.