Short stories This article is more than 12 years oldReviewTen Stories about Smoking by Stuart Evers - review
This article is more than 12 years oldStuart Evers's tales of sadness and solitude make Francesca Segal light upNot many short-story collections veer from Wigan to Nevada, imbuing both with a similar feeling of bleak, seedy glamour. But Ten Stories about Smoking is equally at home in Reno, Vegas and Swindon.
Sadness and solitude are more pervasive than smoke in these tales; indeed, anyone hoping for a paean to the cigarette is going to be disappointed. As expected, it is there in almost every scene, grim and seductive, but the unifying themes of this collection are human ones – the quotidian struggles of isolation, regret and longing. A hard-living artist recreates her own block of flats with a gruesome crime visible through each tiny window; a best man wanders away from the stag party he has organised to find himself smoking with a man who blows geometric smoke rings and harbours a vitriolic, all-consuming (and deeply unnecessary) loathing for the cheery TV magician Paul Daniels.
The author's spare, Carver-esque minimalism can skate a bit too close to shorthand, and in a few instances the reader is left wishing for a little more to animate a character or bring a sketched backstory to life. But there are several stories that stand out. A particular highlight is "Things Seem So Far Away, Here", in which a visit to her brother's family fuels a fragile young woman's fantasies of escape from her own chaotic life. Outdoor heaters, ramekins, honey and almond bath oils – Evers's sharply observed litany of middle-class luxuries seduces her, briefly, into believing she can leave behind her own nicotine-stained bedsit; her own loneliness.
In "Sometimes Nothing, Sometimes Everything", Joe starts his newly single life in a rented, pebbledashed terrace house with "a kind of horrific normality, as though beyond its anonymous façade bodies were buried or child pornography were filmed", and is resuscitated, slowly, by his snatched conversations with the blonde Ukrainian street vendor from whom he buys his cigarettes each week. It's a tentative, innocent friendship: "she had a cold on week twenty-four and so I bought her some soup and told her to go home. She said I was kind." Despite the promise of something more, however, Joe is too damaged to reach for her across the void, and she slips away from him.
Raymond Carver's influence is strong throughout, culminating in the final story in which Carver himself appears, dying of lung cancer and reflecting upon what would be his own final story, "Errand" (itself a homage to a man in his last hours, Chekhov). It's a dark joke of Evers's to put it at the end here.
Download it on your Kindle if you must, but the book's design is worth a comment. The paperback comes in its own sturdy flip-top carton designed to resemble a giant cigarette packet. This could have made for a gimmicky disaster, but the result is oddly pleasing: it's impossible to resist the urge to tuck the book back into its box between stories. Packaged like a guilty, disposable indulgence, the collection reminds us that the short story is perfect for bringing some colour and imagination into a day, and that we are never, ever too busy to read – nip out for a five-minute break; snatch a sneaky story with a glass of wine. The tales in this collection are observant and understated, and all in the time it takes to have a fag.
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