VG Lee’s collection of short stories is a fantastic read. Beautifully written, eclectic in subject matter, they range from life in small town Idaho in the 19th century to two friends on a shopping trip to Bluewater. What is consistent throughout, however, is the subtle and engaging way each story is told.
It’s evident that Lee is a great observer of humankind and has that knack, reminiscent of Dickens, of being able to describe human foibles deftly, wrapped up in sentences of caustic wit. Lee is fantastic at peeling away the delusion that shrouds her characters. In We Share a Party Wall this is done by the expedient of having the relationship between neighbours Derek and Lizzie told from both points of view, thus revealing the gaping chasm between their expectations and how each of them regards the other.
Sweet, narrated by a young orphan called May, tells how Clothilde Morris and her friend, Eva, dare to upset the social mores of 19th century small town America and the heavy price they pay for doing so. It’s hard to decide whether you should admire Clothilde and Eva’s bravery for taking such a public stance or chastise them for their recklessness.
This brings us on to another trait in Lee’s writing. Lee’s attitude to writing reminds me of the great film director Ernst Lubitsch’s theory about film making: that it was his job to do the sum i.e. 2×2 and for the audience to work out the rest. In other words, Lee shows doesn’t tell. Never more so in the unsettling story Father & Daughter.
Another gem ensconced in Lee’s writing is the humour. Fortunately, there is a lot of it, particularly when it comes to describing the relationships between spouses, family members or friends. Lee skilfully uses her wit to reveal what her characters really feel and think. Her descriptions of unhappy marriages, mismatched friendships and family dynamics are funny as well as highly relatable. The Lovely Nieces and The Three of Us are a fantastic portrayal of such family dynamics as well as petty jealousies and family secrets.
The stories are populated with a wide-range of characters from the dreadful Deidre, to the seemingly glamorous twins to a mother devoid of any maternal instincts. And although you suspect that the cold mother has less to do with Lee’s vivid imagination and more with her lived-in experience, Lee still finds room to plead the case of a ‘pretty, hopeful, young woman’ ending up as a single mother in a dead-end job.
There is also a more rueful side to some of these stories, populated as some of them are by middle-aged women, no longer desirable to the opposite sex or women too scared to admit their feelings to the one they love, so they decide to go online to find ideal remote control vibrators to have some fun by themselves.
The title story Oh You Pretty Thing relates how Julie, one half of a seemingly perfect couple, as she never ceases to remind herself, realises she’s in a gilded cage that she is too scared to leave. It’s an enthralling tale of one woman’s struggle to come out, and in the process reject everything she’s been told she should want while living at a time when homophobia was a given and the LGBT community was invisible to those not in the know. Again you suspect that this too is a retelling of Lee’s own experience and it also proves that Lee has no trouble directing her own sharp wit against her own foibles.
Whereas to the outside world ‘Julie may seem to be the careless villain of the story, but she has spent years pretending to be someone she is not‘, thanks to Lee’s striking depiction of Julie’s struggle you appreciate how hard a step it is to take to shrug off a lifetime of social conditioning and expectations and enter an unknown world.
In her introduction Lee writes ‘I’ve written these primarily for lesbian readers.’ It’s the only thing in the entire book I find fault with. She hasn’t. She’s written for anyone who enjoys good writing, a unique voice and great stories told well.
