Monsters and others
Olivia Cole THE BOOK OF OTHER PEOPLE edited by Zadie Smith Hamish Hamilton, £16.99, pp. 287, ISBN 9780241143636 £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 M ‘ a ke somebody up' was the instruction to the 23 contributors to Zadie Smith's short-story anthology The Book of Other People, published to benefit the Brooklyn children's writing charity, 826 NYC, founded by Dave Eggers. While that might seem about as radical a command as telling screenwriters to use dialogue, the only rule being that each story should take its title from the central character, none reads as though pinched and twisted to fit the theme. That said, of course, there are those that feel they must wriggle in the opposite direction. 'Monster', by Toby Litt, threatens for a moment to become some sort of Bildungsroman for monsters: 'One day, the monster set off to...' before it remembers itself. 'There was to be no quest for true identity. The monster had no story, unless being a monster is story enough.'
Elsewhere there are plenty of other creatures who, once given life, will insist upon elaborate adventures. Hard to forget is David Mitchell's internet dater who has his new cyber lover (an amateur dramatics Lloyd Webber diva) told he's been killed in an accident with a block of frozen peas rather than find a way to tell her to log off. Equally memorable is A. M. Homes's Miami Art Fair rich witch, Cindy Stubenstock, who struggles to find purchases big enough for her house. Pollack? Rothko? 'Everything is relative.'
There are fewer laughs in two brilliantly melancholic stories by A. L. Kennedy and Colm Toibin and dazzling contributions from Smith herself and from Adam Thirlwell. The Book of Other People is a readable, often comic but seriously weighty anthology. In an extract from a novel in progress, Thirlwell introduces Uzbekistani Londoner Nigora: an obsessive movie-watcher, prone to use The Philadelphia Story as a sort of moral guide. 'Events,' she thinks, 'are a sure guide to character. Our characters are nothing but events. Everything else is romance.' His self-consciousness and winning meditations on life's comic timing seem particularly apt for an anthology that so successfully gives insight into such a wide range of writers' methods.
As well as a constellation of genuinely starry names, just as many of the stand-out stories (and there are far too many to mention) come from American writers of roughly Smith's generation with perhaps less of a following over here. In 'Soleil', the sunshine (with cyclones) effect of a weekend visit from a supposedly grown-up college friend is recounted by her classmate's wide-eyed daughter. Vendela Vida maintains a deftly understated line in a kind of Americanwhimsy-with-daggers.
To return to the monsters, my favourite would have to be Roy Spivey, who appears in a blackly comic story by another US writer, Miranda July. Spivey is an A-list actor, physically beautiful but psychologically one part naive, two parts deranged. As a reaction to a lifetime's invasions of his privacy he's developed secret forms of communication — like biting attractive passengers on planes. 'That means I like you!' he tells the narrator, trapped in the next seat. 'Do you want to bite me? You don't like me? Is it because I'm famous?' Anything less subtle and it might get into the hands of the 'bloids. I bet she didn't make him up.
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