Stephanie Johnson: Drowned Sprat and Other Stories

Well-known as an award-winning novelist, in the past couple of years, Johnson gathered up her poetry, written over a couple of decades, to publish Moody Bitch. Now she has done the same with a collection of 23 short stories, written over a similar period of time.

These stories profile people at points in their lives where they struggle to find a
meaning; they're stories of the supernatural, and stories of chance meetings or reunions. They are clever but chilling tales as they target emotional and physical frailties.

The drowned sprat in the last story is the telling metaphor for a man's exhausted heart. Clumsy Machine is a description of the failing body of an aging doctor desperate to hang on to his fading empire. And in The Colour of Flesh, the shade of a younger woman haunts a home and a wife and husband (conjuring up the American novel The Lovely Bones).

While Johnson's novels provide the luxury of space and time to develop the characters and their stories, and do that in such an accomplished, polished way, these short stories are less successful. This first
collection has too much of the feeling of a book cobbled together; the good stories supporting the also-rans of a commercially driven publishing job.

At times the technical failure of the stories over-
powers the reader — unsatisfying endings are abrupt, intrusive, sometimes almost dismaying, revealing how terribly difficult it is to master this tricky literary form. Beginnings, too, are desperately important, and the good stories in this collection have a way of showing up the less intriguing ones.

Bali, Baby is one of the good stories and deserves its place at the beginning of the book, with its portrayal of a marriage with an old, sad secret. And my favourite The Night I Got My Tuckie is as pure and tragic as its small heroine.

In this story set in the American Midwest, subject and format are a perfect fit, but too often, Johnson takes on weighty subject matter that is not to be sorted out in a few pages. So, an unrelenting seediness stains these pages, the wit can be hard and cruel, there is often little trust between the point-scoring characters, and there is hardly a pause for beauty or true sensuality.

Even women's perfume is punished. "Perfume was something — yet another something women were
territorial about. He'd made some mistakes in the past impressing different women with his scent recognition. They immediately wanted to know how he knew, how he did it."

If you don't start to empathise with the characters, you can hardly care what becomes of them. It is in her novels that this writer's compassion can be found.

Random House
$27.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.