ADDRESS BOOK
by Neil Bartlett
Inkandescent. 214 pages, $14.09
THE BRITISH WRITER Neil Bartlett has constantly astonished me, first with his debut novel, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1992), then with novels such as Skin Lane (2007; reviewed by me in the March-April 2009 issue), and now with Address Book, a collection of seven first-person short stories that take their titles from the address where each occurs.
The stories cover a range of times. In the first, a man remembers a sexual experience he had as a teenager in 1974. The second, in AIDS-drenched 1987, has a disco queen describe a moment of rage at a contemptuous straight world. The third takes place in 1891, where a teacher writes about the Italian laborer he uses as a model for a banner of St. Michael. Next, in 2004, a man tells about giving a speech at a celebration of a civil partnership between two lesbians. Then it’s back to 1965, and a pregnant woman narrates her interaction with her gay neighbor. In the early 2010s, a priest tries to intervene in an immigration case. Finally, in more or less the present, a man confronts his grief over his recently deceased husband.
The repeated story arc isn’t a failure of imagination. Instead, the recurring pattern suggests that underlying all the differences is a universality of experience, a plot line that fits all of these lives, a possibility for revelation in everyday reality. For example, the disco queen’s story is about shopping for a mattress—about as ordinary a narrative as possible. With his hardship stipend in hand, he goes into a store that’s above his price range and encounters a disdainful saleslady. Already piqued by her attitude, he notices that the mattresses have furnishings around them: “Like every bed in the showroom was supposed to be part of somebody’s actual life. And some of the cabinets even had little ornaments on them, little pictures or china figurines or whatever. … But no ashtrays, you noticed, and no packs of Marlboro Lights; no condoms, and no KY. So this was all real life, but just not ours.” In his rage, he buys a mattress he can’t afford. When he gets it home, brooding about his foolish purchase, he has a revelation: “[W]hen the sight of it lying there starts to make you think about the future—and oh yes my darling, here it comes; here it actually fucking comes, the point; when the sight of this empty double mattress lying there on your actual, real and very-own back-bedroom floor starts to make you feel that the idea of the Future might be a real actual fucking thing for once in your dancing-queen life.” And he makes a list of the things he needs to buy to go with the mattress, to create that future for himself.
The same arc structures the narrative of the Irish man who gives a toast at the lesbians’ commitment ceremony. Preparing the speech dredges up childhood memories of a priest who condemned him and a boy who beat him up. The anger surges and then breaks: “Because until I was up on that chair [giving the toast], you see, I had never quite realized that I still absolutely believed all of that stuff. At the grand old age of thirty-four. And now—I don’t.” The fact that a gay marriage is actually happening lets him realize that he is capable of what he at first calls “happiness”: “I don’t think we should even be calling it by that name any more—at least, not until I’ve had the chance to get used to it. No, I think we should try calling it vertigo. You know … the sensation that catches you sometimes in dreams, when you think that the glass in some high window is about to give way, and you can just imagine how your arms are going to flail and your hands turn to claws in the air. Well, in fact, you’re going to discover that you’re flying.”
But Bartlett is doing even more. While reading the collection, I began to pick up links between the stories. The boy of the first story is an off-stage character in the second, now a medical student the narrator tries to pick up. The second and third stories take place in the same apartment, but a century apart. In the 1891 story, the narrator creates an alibi about visiting a friend in Hackney Downs. In the next story, the civil partnership ceremony happens in Hackney Town Hall, and the narrator wonders why anyone would call an apartment building in the area “Downs,” given that there is “nothing rural at all.” In addition, the landlady in 1891 is the great-grandmother of one of the lesbians in 2004. Attending the celebration are Roger and Todd, “just about the longest-running couple there”; the last story has Roger mourning Todd’s death. Finally, as the first story has an adult narrator looking back on his fifteen-year-old self, the collection ends with its narrator thinking about another fifteen-year-old boy, pointing to the future, wondering “what this brave new world that we’re all supposedly living in actually feels like, for someone his age.”
There are odder continuities. Every story but one contains a quick mention of “a front door [that]is painted black all over” or “regulation black front doors” or “cracked black paint on the nineteen-thirties-looking front door.” It’s appropriate for a book whose story titles are addresses. But the doors take on additional meanings, as a door to new experience, or to exorcising an old one, or to finally having a home. As the disco queen says: “Is that what having a front door feels like, these days?” The exception is the story about the priest and the immigration case, where a painting depicts a house with “a heavy, black-painted door-frame—but no actual front door.” “In other words, there is nothing to keep you out. … And I had such a sudden sense of home, looking into that darkness. Of a place of safety, and of refuge.”
There are other echoes. Three stories feature a bare mattress in an empty room, sites of sex or potential sex. Oddest of all, perhaps, most of the stories contain the sequence of words “left-right-left.” They can describe directions: “and then we go left, and right, and left.” Or: “I turned left, and then right, and then cut down left to Mare Street.” It also describes the movement of the banner of St. Michael “swaying left, and right, and left again.” It’s like a hidden rhythm buried in the stories. Bartlett doesn’t underline any of these links or echoes, and no story depends on noticing them. They are simply there to be discovered. But once you do notice them, they create a kind of secret history, a connectedness across time and across individual lives. As with the repeated narrative arc, Bartlett uses them to create a universality underlying the varieties of experience.
Even without these patterns, the stories themselves are deeply rewarding. I’m generally allergic to stories of triumph and happiness, but each of these melted my resistance. For all my appreciation of Bartlett’s technical virtuosity, what I admire most of all is his ability to move me, sometimes to tears, by these extraordinary stories of ordinary lives.
Michael Schwartz is an associate editor for this magazine.
