Book review: Furnace, Wayne Price

IN THIS first published collection of short stories, Wayne Price displays a masterful command of a notoriously tricky form. He knows where to come in on his tense, tender little vignettes, and where to leave them, and exactly how much information to provide in between in order to create a pall in the air and a tug at the heart.

Most gratifyingly, he’s not prone to the sort of self- conscious floweriness to which many writers turn in compensation for a modest word count.

Profundity in Price’s stories is hidden in plain sight: his style is crisp, firm and lucid, and his plotting dependent on the slow seep of realisation rather than tricksy twists or grandiose experiments with form. He’s particularly good on the shady, needy rhythms of sexuality, and their capacity to expose the sweetest and the worst of us: his stories buzz with encounters undertaken or evaded for the wrong reasons, and attractions stimulated or cancelled out by mysterious power shifts.

He gently implicates a passive traveller in an illicit seduction in Where I Live; confronts a young boy with the strangely erotic changes wrought on a woman’s personality by a terrible head injury in A Piece Of The Moon; and creates a workplace love triangle of uncertain dynamics in Underworld. “Men are just beasts, and after the same thing everywhere,” asserts the subject of a hopeless crush in Five Night Stay, but Price doesn’t simply set his male characters up to be misunderstood by women: his female characters are breathing creatures too, moved into their physical connections and separations by drives more complex than simple lust.

Short stories remain a difficult form to sell to readers and publishers, as fitting as you’d think they would be for our time-poor lives and strobing attention spans, and perhaps it’s because they can feel like an unrewarding form with which to engage: just when you’re hooked by a plot, it’s over. Certainly Price’s stories, with their self-contained mystique, leave you wanting more of his vivid characters.

Those who favour longer forms will ache to know what this assured writer would do with a novel. But as a story writer, there’s no question that he’s fully formed: a writer of uncommon linguistic gifts who is able to compress the epic anxieties of lovers, travellers, parents and other humans into telling, touching little packages. His use of physical detail is piercingly evocative and his sense of place keenly applied.

Quibbles are few here. Personally, I am pro-quotation marks, and I wish that Price hadn’t gone for that arid quirk of stranding his characters without any; and in My Teeth In His Mouth he uses the term Latino repeatedly to describe someone who is a woman and thusreally ought to be Latina.

But these are barely worth mentioning in the context of a collection that truly impresses with its breadth, precision and confidence. «