Under the skin

Why do so many aspiring writers think it best to begin with the short story and graduate to the novel? It’s madness. The short story is infinitely harder to write well. Some novelists succeed at both — William Trevor and John McGahern are the names that spring to mind — but Chekhov never wrote a novel and, coming up to date, our leading woman short-story writer, Helen Simpson, has not been tempted to do so either. I can count on a hand the names of contemporary writers whose collections of short stories are worth reading, but Polly Samson has belonged on one of its fingers since her fine first volume, Lying in Bed. That was published ten years ago. She brought out a novel which is best forgotten, and my gut feeling tells me that Samson is not a natural novelist and should stick to what she does best.

The stories in Perfect Lives are loosely linked, with characters appearing in one and reappearing in another. Most are set in an English seaside town one places as Brighton — though, English seaside towns being what they are, others would serve.

Samson is good at getting under the skin of those whose lives and relationships are apparently serene, fortunate, sorted. She knows about appearances, as she knows about self-deception — at which her characters, especially the women, are expert. Women are her real subjects, and at the centre of her unnervingly cool focus. Men do appear but even when they seem to play a prominent role, somehow we are made to look at them from the outside, not taken into their hearts and minds.