Rare skill from Gifkins

Press, 30 May 1987, Page 23

Rare skill from Gifkins

Summer is the Cote d’Anr. By Michael Gifkins. Penguin, 1987.151 pp. $14.50 (paperback). (Reviewed by Owen Marshall) Michael Gifkins is that rare creature among contemporary writers — the short story specialist. He has the insight and language for it, and the commitment Gifkins has not so far been a prolific writer, but his limited output has received considerable attention. “He dialed the number and waited. The sound ceased as someone picked up the phone. ’Hello?’ he enquired, but there was no reply. The huge dark silence simply stretched away.” Gifkins has a knack with story openings. He doesn’t start too far back, nor does he try too hard. His stories often ease into view as opportunists to see if they can beguile us.

Gifkins is noted for wit and urbanity, yet beneath it is often a sense of individual distance which is almost sadness. To be aware of it is not necessarily to criticise it: authors are entitled to their stance. Frank O’Connor termed the short story “the lonely voice," and Gifkins’ mood is often wry, particularly In his treatment of sex which might be imagined to bring intimacy in more forms than the physical. Not so here: sex as a search, a solace; sex as an achievement, a reassurance; but not much relevance of sex to love. In the best of Gifkins’ stories his detachment gives proportion, irony, clean lines; in the less successful the reader has a sense that Gifkins has produced a frieze of characters as curiousities that he will comment on rather than stand among. “Living Out The Past” appears to be a rather stale macho wish fulfilment with its booze, casual sex, drugs, and a drophead twodoor Mercedes. “The Merc was doing sixty as he took the corner with the barest motion of the wrists. The long shriek of the radials he left as an exclamation mark. Accelerating towards the post office he glanced

down and saw that the engine was barely warm so eased back on the gas. He had no intention of throwing a conrod for a lousy pack of cops." Strong stories however, such as “Head over Heels,” a flag bearer from his previous collection, and "The Dispossessed" with its distinctive mode of slightly seedy dialogue, give the collection impact In thinking of the book as a whole, three things in particular occur to me that are admirable in Gifkins* writing. The first is the authentic sense of emotional space between people. The second is the felicity of tone and language so necessary in the compressed form of the short story. "She rolled over to look into his night eyes and Felton found himself maklnf a smirk of loving-kindness in the dark.” (Natural Histories) The third feature is a sense of Gifkins’ disregard for what readers (or reviewers) might expect. His stories seem shaped only by his muse, and that is surely how things should be.