In the interest of transparency: I’m on good terms with Wendy Erskine. Although we’ve never met in person we have a track record of mutual backscratching that stretches over a few years and involves several interviews1, cover quotes, book launches, a radio show, occasionally plugging each other’s work2. It might appear that I am too biased to write about Wendy’s work. On the other hand, I don’t bother writing about books I don’t like. Firstly, I’m many bad things but I’m not a book critic. But more importantly: I’m not privileged with pockets of writing time to waste on books that I consider undeserving of readers’s time. But today I feel compelled to write about a book that certainly deserves it: Wendy Erskine’s latest book, Dance Move. So aside from the transparency disclaimer above, in order to invest the following words with at least some semblance of impartiality, I will refer to her as Ms Erskine from now on, rejecting the familiarity that the use of “Wendy” implies.
It is hard to write about short stories without engaging in a process of description and enumeration, telling readers things they can find out for themselves if they bother reading the book. Instead of doing this I will focus on what I think are some of the main aspects of the pieces in Dance Move.
To begin with the obvious — there’s a clear choice running throughout Dance Move: all of its eleven stories use the third person as the point of view of narration3. As I will argue later I think this is fundamental for the effect this book achieves. The narrative “I” is deployed in Dance Move only as part of the thought processes of characters and never by the narrator, who should perhaps be called “an observer” in this book, due to the detachment with which Ms Erskine recounts. Without wishing to undermine the author’s skill, these are stories that almost tell themselves.
Another thread running throughout Dance Move is the choice of locations — this is mainly a book of interiors, whether these be kitchens, lounges, hotel rooms, cabins, tanning beds, cars. There is certainly a world out there — and this world is many times mentioned, especially Belfast — but this world out there is something from which the characters seem to run away, in order to return to these interior — and very frequently domestic — spaces. These are stories that will speak to everyone, regardless of where they are from, simply because everyone will recognise these settings — these are the kinds of places where for better or worse we live most of our lives.
These secluded spaces are the perfect backdrop for stories that take place mostly in the characters’s minds. And these are stories that eschew spectacularity in order to focus on everyday life with its joys and sorrows. Even in stories like Cell, which follows the misadventures of a group of revolutionaries in London, from the point of view of Caro, a woman from Belfast. A story that could have taken a turn a la Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, with its spectacular and tragic finale, is here used as the excuse to explore not so much the delusional fantasies of these revolutionary cadres but the emptiness of Caro’s return to normal life, once her attempt at changing the world ends. In a certain way, there is a feeling that anyone could be a character in Dance Move. Because even when dealing with a potentially spectacular topic Ms Erskine chooses to focus on the small details: there is no need for spectacular events, because the key to Ms Erskine’s story-telling is a focus not so much on the story itself, but on the telling.
The dramatis personae of Dance Move is composed of cleaners, housewives, jaded couples, desperate mothers, smug academics, students, loners, ageing one-hit wonders, the grieving and the grieved, drifters. These are people that seem to be always on the margins, even if this margin is the margin of their own life. There is space for tragedy in Dance Move, but the main material here is the tragicomedy of everyday life. This kind of material and characters could easily become boring4, but in the hands of Ms Erskine turn into a fascinating cocktail full of resonances for the reader.
In several interviews Ms Erskine has mentioned Anton Chekhov as one of her main influences. If this wasn’t clear enough in her first book — Sweet Home — in Dance Move it’s impossible to miss. Writers don’t like comparisons5. But this similarity is not dictated by matters of style — this is not a question of Ms Erskine trying to imitate Chekhov, let me be clear about this. Ms Erskine’s writing resembles Chekhov’s because it takes a true talent like the Russian physician to chisel a perfect and warm short story using the apparently distant third person of narration. And by this I mean that Ms Erskine — like Chekhov, and in all fairness Kafka, Lispector, Carver, Berlin, Rulfo, Akutagawa and other masters — has a natural talent for actually getting in the mind of the characters she creates, a talent for living momentarily (in) these characters lives. And she does so by rejecting stereotypes and any kind of intellectual superiority or moral judgement, some of the common pitfalls of third person narration. Dance Move, much like Sweet Home, is a strong proof that it is possible to write beyond your own “lived experience” as long as you are willing to do it with respect for the characters that you’ve given birth to, to the extent that these are fictional but aren’t born in a vacuum and might resonate with a world that exists beyond the page.
This compassionate approach is accompanied by a self-effacement that feels refreshing in times when the narrative “I” is overused and many times uncritically celebrated6. And it makes sense, because in order for characters to really take on a life of their own the writer has to recede to the background, lest the narrator’s ego gets in the way7.
Where is Ms Erskine then? Ms Erskine is obviously in the mental and actual trajectories these characters trace across Dance Move — they came from her mind after all. But she’s also in the interstices between their words (call it their silences), in their many times banal sallies against the hopelessness of the human condition, in their attention to the misleadingly trivial details that surround them and that Ms Erskine captures so painstakingly, in their turns of phrase and use of language. And in the economic way in which she presents her characters to us — a series of unassuming brushstrokes that furnish just the relevant details, never an autopsy or a caricature resulting from over-characterisation in this book. Ms Erskine as narrator is present in her absence and that’s the kind of presence that’s impossible to resist, because it betrays a narrator self-confident enough not to come across as too eager for our attention. When I put down Dance Move I put it down having learned more about these imaginary (?) Belfast lives, but I put it down knowing more about Ms Erskine: she’s not only a talented pen; she’s a fearless and sympathetic observer who has reached an enviable level of authorial maturity with this work.
It is hard to write an outstanding debut but it is much harder to follow up with a book that builds on that initial success. Sweet Home was a perfect lesson in short story writing. Dance Move, with its radical empathy, is a masterclass.
Dance Move is published by Stinging Fly in Ireland and Picador in mainland UK.
And another one.
I chose Wendy’s Sweet Home as one of my favourite books of 2019; she has mentioned my work in some interviews.
At a risk of repeating myself over and over, for this reason and others discussed below, I would prefer to call this a “book of short stories” rather than “a collection”. These stories feel part of a whole, not collected and disparage things. If this distinction is of interest you can read about it here.
I am thinking here of so many stories in which nothing happens but nothing happens badly... A poundshop Beckett is a sad affair…
Among many other things like hard work, paying taxes, and any form of commitment, so one can’t always listen writers.
Yes, this is about autofiction. And before the autofictional brigade come screaming “YOU WANT TO ERASE ME!” at me: my latest book could be easily labelled autofiction — the term is even used in the blurb. I worked for ten years with these stories that use the narrative “I” and “lived experience” as the source; I did it to explore the possibilities of autofiction but also to try to explore its constraints. What I’m tired of is not so much the label or the narrative “I” but the contemporary tendency to read every first person fiction piece as autofiction, and every piece of autofiction as a brave statement, generally born out of a necessarily subaltern position that mirrors a subaltern “lived experience”. Some personal stories aren’t brave or born from a subaltern place. Other personal stories, because they are too personal, are written using the third person. Sometimes the use of the first person is just an aesthetic decision. Let alone that it would be almost impossible to find a story that isn’t to some extent born out of “lived experience. If anything, the whole autofiction debate is constraining.
Ms Erskine does insert herself in the story called Memento Mori, but she inserts herself in the background,. This feels more like Hitchcock doing one of his mandatory cameos than a Woody Allen film (I’m aware Woody Allen is now cancelled but I can’t find a better example). I don’t want to give much of this story away, but if Ms Erskine had appeared in a more leading role it would have felt like when some awkward relative or friend tells a joke in a funeral because s/he can’t understand the protagonist is someone else right now...