In most adult
fiction the subject of stories is the world of adults. Children, where they
figure at all, are seen through the eyes of adults; their lives serve to
illustrate the concerns and problems of parents, relatives, teachers and other
grown ups who populate their world. In his debut collection of short stories
Joshua Furst takes a different approach. Short People is a thematically
related collection of short stories about children of varying ages, in which
the world of the children is foregrounded, with adults seen in a secondary
role. It is of course, a distinction that is impossible to maintain. The lives
of children and their parents are intimately entwined, and so it is with the
characters of Short People. While it might be thought that the task of
childhood is growth and maturation, Furst shows that adults too grapple with
their own maturity, often under the unforgiving eyes of children whose absolute
standards are, after all, the lessons learnt from those same adults. Shawn of This
Little Light has internalised his parents’ austere moral values, only to
find the Mum and Dad are not the paragons of virtue he takes them to be. This
realisation is at first devastating, then leads to a resignation that, while
liberating, brings with it a profound sense of loss.

There are nine
separate stories in this collection, and they cover the lives of children from
babies through to adolescents. The world of children is explored through
relationships between pairs and groups of friends, and through the family lives
of the characters. Children like Evan, of Merit Badge find a coming of
age through their peer group. Others, such as the teenage girl in Mercy Fuck
have childhood ripped away from them. For the offspring of the dysfunctional Good
Parents, childhood begins once their precocious behaviour precipitates a
crisis that leads to Mum and Dad’s re-evaluation of their latter day Puritanism.

In the final
story, Failure to Thrive, the protagonist is a nurse, but the focus of
the story is the lives of the babies in her care. Her particular method of
saving them from the future she reads in their eyes is chilling and disturbing,
the more so for he bland conviction she displays. 

The writing is crisp
and direct, and Furst commits himself well to the task of mixing the authorial
voice with that of his child protagonists. In a few places the voice slips from
one to the other, so that six year old Billy reflects on the fact that ‘scientists
should be dispassionate’, whereas he is sentimental. I found myself wondering
what a ‘steep oblong angle’ looks like, and why an already tense teenage boy
needed to grip the wheel ‘tensely’.

The stories are interleaved
with case histories, the purpose of which is not entirely clear until the
conclusion of the book. These are both intriguing and frustrating, as they are
not related to the stories preceding them, and they seem to have a didactic
function, as if the power of the individual narratives is not sufficient to
convey the message that childhood propels individuals ineluctably towards an
uncertain future. Joshua Furst need have no such uncertainty. These are
compelling stories.

What is satisfying
about the stories of Short People is that as a reader you get the sense
that they matter. It is often said that American fiction is ‘flat’, that
stories have few significant events and little in the way of epiphany. That
criticism cannot be said to apply to Short People. The people are real,
the situations disconcertingly ordinary and familiar. Short People will
stay with you, and you might find yourself wondering about how grown up
children can be, and about the maturity of their parents.   

© 2003 Tony O’Brien

Tony O’Brien, Lecturer, Mental Health Nursing, University of Auckland

Categories: Fiction