I just finished reading You Are Not a Stranger Here, Adam Haslett’s first and as yet only story collection, which was shortlisted for the 2002 National Book Award and the 2003 Pulitzer, according to Wikipedia and my boss, who is apparently good friends with him.
It’s a good collection. For my own idiosyncratic reasons, I liked the stories set in America better than those set in Britain. Haslett has apparently had something of a transatlantic life, but American writers writing about Britain often seem confined to a certain class profile and geographical location (public school boys, Oxbridge, professionals in and around London), and he’s not an exception in this regard. His stories about British people are good — “Devotion” particularly manages to be sad without being maudlin, thanks to the empathetic presentation of all parties involved. Something about them (“Devotion” perhaps aside) rang a little untrue for me. But that may just be personal prejudice.
The best stories are about, basically, mental illness. “Notes to My Biographer,” the first story in the collection, inhabits the perspective of what seems to be a manic-depressive man, blundering his way through a productive and paranoid mania, embarrassing and frightening his adult son. “War’s End,” the story from which the title of the collection is drawn, is confined to the perspective of a depressed man contemplating suicide and evaluating the burden he places on his wife. “The Volunteer” — well, that’s a good one, find the book and read it. A half-exception is “The Beginnings of Grief”, which is probably my favorite story in the collection aside from “The Volunteer,” and isn’t about mental illness per se, but instead a sort of self-destructive sublimation of grief into the twin projects of a disastrous sado-masochistic relationship and the building of a symbolic wooden chest. That description clearly doesn’t do the story justice: it’s also worth reading. All of these stories also revolve around a displaced or perverted or destroyed parent-child relationship: it’s a standby in his best stories, something he does incredibly well. Dead children and dead parents are in these stories: it’s great.
Finally, I found a surprisingly confused and peevish interview with Haslett online, and am obliged to include this hilarious exchange:
SE: In “The Good Doctor” a psychiatrist visits a female patient at her home with the goal of enticing her into treatment. He finds her in a very bleak and disheartening circumstance and experiences “a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person’s unknowable pain…more than any landscape, this place felt like home”. How did you choose the title “The Good Doctor”?
AH: The title just captured something about his intentions and what would become of them.
Now that’s an answer.
