The Destiny of Nathalie X
William Boyd
Penguin pbk, 195 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)
For those who never tried, the disparity between the short story and the novel might be a simple one of length. It's more subtle than that. Sometimes three minutes of Phil Spector are more pulse-quickening than a box-set opera with 12" Dub-remix. It goes without saying, of course, that it cuts both ways - Jonathan Carroll's novels are without exception superior to his short fiction - but acknowledged master of the form Raymond Carver turned miracles in a few pages and never got it down to writing that magnum opus before his untimely death. William Boyd is a celebrated novelist, but as a celebrated novelist he makes a splendid spinner of short tales.
Boyd is no Ray Carver. These stories are all together bigger, less parochial than the American's Pacific Northwest, the events they enlist more dramatic. Stylistically, however, comparisons are not so invidious - like Carver, Boyd writes in lyrical but concise prose, fooling the reader they see far less than they eventually take away. At best, Carver could implant a grain of unease in the mind days after the covers closed. Several of the pieces in here do something similar.
There is a lot more sun too. Stories set in rural France, a couple in Nice, Los Angeles, Africa, where Boyd was born. Even the one that unfolds in London has its heart in Brazil. Boyd's fiction has a sense of sun-baked place like few others.
His narrators are almost uniquely young observers, commentators on their situation, at once part of and outside of events. They confide in us the betrayals and fears that root Boyd's fiction. They are remarkable for what they don't say. 'Hotel des Voyageurs' is only eight pages, but by their end leaves the reader scrabbling to understand the complexities of the strange relationship it encapsulates. The end hangs pregnant with ambiguity. It and the larger, more disjointed 'Persistence Of Vision' grapple with an inexplicable sense of loss and melancholy native to the films of Leconte and Antonioni.
It's not all delicately scented atmospheres, mind. The titular tale is sharply satirical comedy, a take on the making of a pretentious film by a gifted young African director. Gradually it gets away from him, in this funny and seductive excursion into Player territory, told mainly in monologue.
Boyd is a smart writer, poetic and approachable - "a hot shawl of irritation"; "a pale parallelogram of March sunshine". These are stories about romantic disappointment, petty jealousy, blunt sexual encounters; small but resonant. This second collection, after 1982's On The Yankee Station, is as much an object lesson in the art of the concise, precise short story as it is a collection of marvellously realised ideas.