The History of Sound, by Ben Shattuck review: 'exceptionally accomplished'

Ben Shattuck | Noam Galai/Getty Images

There is no commonly accepted name for this kind of book. I have seen such works referred to as story cycles, interlinked collections, a novel in short stories, even as the equivalent of a concept album. However you choose to designate them, it is a clearly recognisable form, and as such straddles very different genres. There is not much overlap between the kaleidoscope of loneliness in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and the postmodern hi-jinks of Cards of Identity by Nigel Dennis. Some will have central and satellite characters, such as Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid or Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad; others are circumscribed by place – Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff or Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. There does not even need to be generic consistency: JO Morgan’s Appliance uses one fictitious technology across time in various kinds of story while Felipe Alfau’s Locos: A Comedy of Gesture has one story in which characters from every other story are present in some form or another.

Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound veers more towards geographical consistency, but includes its own definition of its form: “Hook-and-Chain: A song or poem form popularized in eighteenth-century New England, in which the first and last lines rhyme and contain rhyming couplets within. As is A BB CC DD EE FF A. The second half of the couplet often completes the sentence or sentiment of the first”. It can be seen – or at least its surface manifestation can be – in “Edwin Chase of Nantucket” and “The Silver Clip”, the second and third stories, separated by over a century yet a painting with the inscription “The Captured Bird, William M. Snowe, 1795” appears in both. For the reader there is a little shudder of pleasure realising the stitches between works; for the writer I assume it is akin to a signature. There are broader significances to this device, over and above the synchronicity and deliberate coincidence reminiscent of the work of the late Paul Auster, in that it acts as a highlighter over the text, nudging the reader to notice life’s unfulfilled, disappointments, missed opportunities and the kindness of white lies.

Although I would hesitate to class The History of Sound as nature writing, or even “the new nature writing”, there is a clear sensitivity to landscape, and a concomitant reliance on pathetic fallacy. There are some evocative phrases, such as a house being “a sacrifice to the wind”, or “listening to a thunderstorm clear its throat on the horizon in three notes”. In one of the finest pieces, “The Children of New Eden”, the adepts are taught to listen as “this is how Heaven talks back. The wind, the breath, the trees, voice. Words in the sounds of water hitting stone and speaking into itself. At first, it sounds like nothing, but then, after a long period of silence, Philip does start to hear the rhythm of language, of loose vowels and snapping consonants in the thin waterfall”. It is worth quoting at length to demonstrate the technical merit of the book. The pauses and fermatas, the understated onomatopoeia, the way the parts like “loose vowels” are what they describe, are exceptionally accomplished. Perhaps, to some tastes, too brilliantly burnished. The puffery is full of words like “exquisite”, “transcendent” and “resonant” and every so often I did worry the work would disappear under the ardour of its own polishing.

This slight niggle is compounded by the number of characters either in the arts or aspiring to work in the arts: a singer turned folk musicologist, two painters, a poet considering non-fiction. Another story is ostensibly set at an exhibition of glass flowers (Blaschka, if you’re interested: the joys of reading in the digital age. I prefer their sea creatures). This does tend to exacerbate the little ache of something a tad fey or precious or mannered. Shattuck is good at undercutting it – in “August in the Forest”, one character remarks snarkily when her job in development is compared to colonialism, “Mostly power and roadways… sorry not all of us are quietly chiselling away toward the beating heart of the human experience.”

The historical pieces tend to have more sinew and less self-analysis, even if the misguided utopians and the haunted lumberjacks fit too neatly into a recognisable genre. Another early “historical” is rather stronger precisely because of the lack of action. The narrator muses “Sadie would get fleas again. The sheep would lamb. The seals would continue to stare at us from the woods. This might last another 40 years. The only unpredictable parts of a life are what comes with war and bad health” (the stories, rather than the story, of course contradict the insight), The opening story – about wax cylinders – and a later piece about a taxidermied auk both have a delightful cunning and a quirkiness that just manages not to teeter over into cutesy or whimsy.

Apparently The History of Sound is “soon to be a major movie starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor”. I might even see it, if only to see if the cinematic interlinking ends up like Magnolia or Love, Actually.

The History of Sound, by Ben Shattuck, Swift Press, £14.99