The Saki of sex

How I love short stories! Long before the internet realised that we can’t sit still long enough to commit to the three-volume novels of yore, these little beauties were hitting the sweet spot repeatedly. I especially love female short story writers — Shena Mackay, Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley — as they often read quite gossipy and friendly-like, as opposed to men who have to go out and shoot something to make some depressing point, or at least try to prove they’re the strong and silent type. Strong and silent writers should be true to themselves and simply shut up.

The young journalist Emily Hill is, on the strength of this gorgeous debut collection, the Saki of sex: she shares his grim good humour and glinting malice, grounded not in cheap scepticism but in a vast imaginative grasp of how fantastic life can be and how odd it is that we choose to make it so narrow. (The final story ‘Super-Lies’, documenting the operatic nightmare of a muse’s meltdown, even sounds like one of his titles.) ‘Julia’s Baby’, the opener, is as perfectly constructed a short story as I have ever read.

The femme fatalities in these stories are past-mistresses of painting on a smile and putting the best red-soled foot forward; Hill takes a scalpel straight to the screaming skull beneath the expensively smoothed skin, zooming in on the hallucinogenic hollows of heartbreak. She is both compassionate and merciless, full of scorn and sorrow. And droll, too:

The 21st century is full of second chances. The stakes aren’t very high for anything any more. Not when it comes to love. Think of all the romantic heroines of literature. There wouldn’t be a story, today. Anna Karenina would have divorced that dullard Karenin.