The secret life of the short story

The short story likes to play the underdog. Famously unfavoured by publishers, it has none of the commercial clout of the novel. Denying itself the luxury of length, it is a martyr to the cause of shortness. When the short story writer Alice Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel prize for literature, she seemed to personify the supposed modesty of her craft. With the blessing of the Swedish Academy, the short story had finally gained the status of a standalone art form: no longer, to quote Munro, ‘just something you played around with until you got a novel’.

All this modesty seems at odds with the idea of an ‘epiphany’ — a device associated with the stories of Joyce, and the hallmark of two new collections by D.J. Taylor and Salley Vickers. Through a sudden discovery or disappointment, a twist of the wrist or a scene at the beach, a character’s outlook on the world is fundamentally realigned. As might be expected from a form with an inferiority complex, such epiphanies are, more often than not, melancholy.

The characters of D.J. Taylor’s Wrote For Luck are an unlucky bunch. Cursed by self-awareness amid the chattering classes, his loveable bluffers and tragic Cassandras fight for intellectual superiority against a slough of biddies, bimbos and incorrigible bores. Wires are crossed in Wimbledon back gardens; pseuds clink glasses with faithless spouses at barbecue parties in Putney. North Oxford looms large, as do the Norfolk Broads. Now and again we are taken to a dreamy, lyrical America, but Taylor’s comfort zone is clearly back in Blighty, making acute observations about the middle-class mantelpiece or a hostess’s choice of ‘kiwi-fruit mousse’.

You can’t help feel that D.J. Taylor would be an uncomfortable presence at a dinner party — or, God forbid, a book club.