Elliot Perlman The Reasons I Won't Be Coming
Picador $17.95pb, 314pp,
0 330 36161 9
THERE WAS A TIME when emerging writers used to cut their teeth on a volume of short stories -- Joyce's Dubliners comes immediately to mind -- before taking a bite at a novel. Elliot Perlman, whose novel Three Dollars became an overnight and on the whole deserved success after its publication early last year, has gone in the opposite direction. The title story in this varied and pleasing collection won The Age short story competition in 1994. Accordingly, besides other interests, this publication provides a glimpse at Perlman's development into a writer of considerable promise and achievement.
'The Reasons I Won't Be Coming' is, in some ways, the weakest of these stories. Its narrator is a bureaucrat, a functionary in 'the Office of Probate in what is now called the Department of Justice'. Like several of these stories, this charts the disintegration of a relationship. The proprieties of suburban life prove inadequate protection against guilt, bad faith and sorrow. Other stories also survey the predicament of such hollow men and women caught in the trammels of middle-class urban life.
Sexual betrayals and indiscretions are frequently pitched against the imperatives of professional and corporate life -- agents of entrapment or at least barriers to candour in Perlman's markedly gloomy view of our time.
So in 'The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine', the speaker -- for this, like the opening story, 'Your Niece's Speech Night', is cast in the form of a monologue -- an apparently successful and highly-regarded lawyer and academic, addresses his absent, lost lover: 'I cannot sleep, think, read. Where are you now? I kiss you though you are not here. I am so used to waiting for you, so good at it that I cannot stop...'. Here, as elsewhere on occasions in the collection, Perlman contrives to generate considerable emotional charge from situations and states of mind that might seem cliched or at least commonplace. 'The Reasons I Won't Be Coming' struck me, by contrast, as schematic and contrived: the relatively inexperienced writer relying on well-worn formulae. Its litany of domestic (and quintessentially Melbourne) trivia irresistibly conjured visions of Sandy Stone.
Most of the other stories are more assured, and were, I assume therefore, written somewhat later -- though I realise that in matters of the imagination such assumptions can be wholly misplaced. They traverse worlds that Perlman obviously knows intimately: the rituals and ceremonies of legal and corporate life, for instance. To cite one example, 'Manslaughter' is a tightly constructed and absorbing courtroom drama focussing on a jury's deliberations in a murder trial. Perlman endows this substantial fifty-five page story with considerable tension as well as a measure of psychological and moral depth. Other stories of this kind are, perhaps, slighter, but equally vivid in most cases.
Incomplete:
Andrew Riemer' is the chief book reviewer of The Sydney Morning Herald.