Elizabeth Smither: Listening to the Everly Brothers and Other Stories

By JANE WESTAWAY

A smither character called Rhoda, called on to explain why she cut up the suits of a faithless husband and poured sugar in his petrol tank, says simply that she got the idea from a book.

Few of the characters in Elizabeth Smither's latest collection are recognisably bookish, but many get ideas from books, riffling pages for clues about life, or being inadvertently affected by what they read. None is without resources or native intelligence, but in an uncertain world, other people's words help them to find - or lose - their bearings.

An elderly man suffers a temporary loss of faith because of the picture of an apatosaurus in Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals Fact Finder - "I don't see how I can believe in a God who would create such a hideous creature."

In Fire Snake, Zoe and Daniel chart the progress of their courtship through Secrets of Chinese Astrology. Polly, in White Horse, applies the Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus template to her relationship with Johnny, while Mitzi consults A Dictionary of Superstitions. And four characters in the final story, The White Hotel Reunion, pledge to meet a decade on from reading the D. M. Thomas novel.

Words aren't always delivered in book form, though. The title story sets Susan's early life to an Everly Brothers' soundtrack, and in Carte Blanche, newly widowed George carries a note from his wife to reassure women he has her permission to date them. Bonding counterpoints the contemporary cliches of team building - charter and vision of success, effecting change in a workplace, dealing with rumours by the open dissemination of knowledge - with Tennyson's Break, break, break,/On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!, and Isobel's refreshing private lexicon - balderdash, rigmarole and farrago. Smither characters make reluctant team players, or else discover they have been recruited by the wrong team.

Eleanor, a lonely captive in her son's spare bedroom, reads a biography of Lady Jane Grey and realises that each of them is a pawn pushed into a situation that was not only not of her choosing but one she could never choose. Advancing age is just such a situation, and she is not the only Smither character to suffer its cruelties. Eleanor still manages, though, to organise her own rescue.

Smither is a librarian and her love of books shows. But these stories are much more than mere literary commercials. She is probably better known as a poet, but this is her fourth story collection, and she is expert at the craft.

Her stories are beautifully written, with a poet's eye for the striking image - the mobile phone with a flap like a crayfish tail; an elderly mother's funds seen by a ruthless son as conservatively accumulating like a layer of dead leaves in a drain.

But style never overwhelms point of view, so the stories are also warm, intelligent, and humorous. They play with language but never lapse into cleverness; steer clear of sentimentality but are never cold-hearted.

In a country where many short stories are written but few are published, let alone bought and read, it is gratifying that Penguin have published this stylish collection.

Penguin

$27.95

* Jane Westaway is a Wellington writer.