Short People
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
In Short People, we encounter, among many others, Jason and Billy, best friends who discover by the age of six how to conquer the world, only to see this idyll then shatter before them; Shawn, whose baptism compels him to make life a holy hell for everyone around him; and Evan, who finds that his pursuit of a Boy Scout merit badge is luring him into uncharted social territory. In the meantime, an agonized couple exhausts their expectations for their own kids, with an aftermath that afflicts them all. There's also Mary, whose sixteenth birthday precipitates an adulthood she is scarcely prepared to enter, and Emmy, who began that same transition when she was only twelve. Finally, and perhaps most harrowingly, is the nurse who with eerie prescience delivers so many babies to their destiny.
In a remarkable display of imagination and compassion, Joshua Furst reconstrues our preconceptions about innocence, purity, faith and memory through an unflinching, pitch-perfect gaze, with both authority and originality. Each new story enhances a collection whose importance is thoroughly contemporary and at once hilarious and heartbreaking.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like medical case histories put through a mangle, Furst's 10 stories are detached, distorted chronicles of the vicissitudes of childhood. Often narrated from an obtuse angle first-person singular, future tense; first-person plural, present tense they seem to freeze their subjects in place, stripping them of their defenses. Furst turns the literal-mindedness of childhood into a stylistic quirk, with decidedly mixed results. This tactic is on full display in "The Age of Exploration," in which two six-year-old boys while away a summer day. Any echoes of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine are soon dispelled by the plodding earnestness of the prose: "Billy would deny it, but he wishes he were as silly as Jason. Life can't be all books. You have to go out and play sometimes." Few children do play in Furst's stories, and when they do, their games turn into painful Darwinian struggles. In "Merit Badge," Evan finds himself on the wrong side of the adolescent divide at Boy Scout camp, when a treacherous friend lures him into a humiliating act and then exposes him to general ridicule. Black comedy takes center stage in "Red Lobster" when a deadbeat dad buys his kids dinner, and one of his sons takes his edict to clean his plate a bit too literally. Brief vignettes between stories give the collection extra structure. Their provenance is cleverly explained in the second-to-last story, "Failure to Thrive," in which a maternity ward nurse writes reports fantasizing about the futures of the premature infants in her charge and decides to save them from their cruel fates, with tragic results. This is an ambitious debut, but Furst is at his best when he abandons his prosy experimentation with voice and perspective and tunnels directly into the unpretty minds of his young protagonists.
