No Substance #191: Rita Bullwinkel's Belly Up

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The last two weeks I’ve sat down to write this newsletter and something crazy has happened in America. Last week, someone shot at Trump. This week, Biden has dropped out of the presidential race. I turned on social media and people were accusing Kamala Harris of organising a coup. You couldn’t write this shit, I tell you.

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Anyway: I finished reading Rita Bullwinkel’s 2018 collection, Belly Up, a couple of weeks ago and I want to write about that a bit. It is, by and large, an excellent collection, and I recommend it. I look forward reading to Bullwinkel’s novel, Headshot.

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My favourite story in the collection is, perhaps, the first, ‘Harp’. It’s a story about a woman who once dated a man whose uncle had two families, one in Malaysia, and one in the US. On her way to work one day, she sees an accident and remembers the uncle, and becomes obsessed with the dual life that he led. After a while, she starts to lie to her husband, and starts an affair with another man she meets, as if she can cut herself in half for two relationships. The story has a nice lack of judgement seeded within itself, allowing the narrator’s choices to take on a strange disquiet that echo through her interactions in the story.

I was a fan of the choice within the piece, though Bullwinkel doesn’t maintain the ambiguity throughout the collection. She deviates from it mostly in ‘Decor’, a piece about a woman who works in a high end furniture store. One day she receives a request from a man in jail for a catalogue so that he can build a house in his imagination. The narrator provides the catalogue but deliberately doesn’t look up the man and what he has done. She is concerned that it will change their relationship if she does, because unlike some of her friends, she believes some people should be killed for certain crimes. She believes it particularly about sexual abusers. The story implies that she has, at one point, been abused. Unsurprisingly, the man in jail does turn out to be such a criminal, and the piece gets a little heavy handed towards the end.

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Bullwinkel’s style is a detached, laconic one. Sometimes, this results in pieces that feel more like thought experiments, or craft exercises, especially in the smaller pieces like ‘Nave’ or ‘Hunker Down’. There’s about half a dozen throughout the collection, most no more than a couple of pages, all of them technically fine, but really no more than this. I would probably say that this is the biggest complaint that you can make against Belly Up. It’s not one unique to Bullwinkel’s collection, either. In the short fiction landscape, the small pieces, the ones that are a couple of pages in length, feel like they’re the hardest to make work.

I don’t know why that is, mind you. Maybe it’s a personal preference (so much is, after all). For me, a good short story length is between 5,00 and 7,500 words, or anywhere between 15 and 20 pages, if you prefer such measurement. It’s the upper length for a short story and I know a lot of people prefer it to be shorter, but I like a piece with a bit to it, I guess. I often find myself disconnected from short, short pieces, the demands of the form often meaning that the elements that I enjoy in fiction are sacrificed. Of course, with that said, there are things I do like. I even liked some in Bullwinkel’s collection, like ‘Phylum’, for example.

(If you’re curious, the definitions and word counts work like this: Anything below 1,000 words is flash, a short story is 1,000 to 7,500, a novelette is 7,500 to 17,500, and a novella is 17,500 to 40,000. Anything beyond that is a novel.)

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My other favourite stories include ‘Mouth of Fish’ about a sick man who, whilst in hospital, comes across an even sicker man in wheelchair and later carries him to a small lake so that he can swim in it. It’s a story with a nice pathos, even if it does spend a lot of time on the body horror of the ill. But it’s a nice, evocative piece.

I likewise enjoyed ‘Burn’, which had the collections best opening line: ‘People kept dying and I was made to sleep in their beds.’ In the story, the narrator deals with the dead who come back for the living, sometimes to be a pest, and sometimes not. Eventually, the narrator marries and later dies, and finds himself one of the dead who are hanging round, especially his wife’s ex husband.

There’s other pieces I liked as well, including ‘What I Would Be If I Wasn’t What I Am’, perhaps the longest piece in the collection, ‘Arms Overhead’ about two girls who want to be plants, and the final piece, ‘Clamor’, about a medium and the people who come over to talk to do the dead that day. There’s a nice variety in the work, though you could argue that Bullwinkel’s case are, for all their differences, affluent and white, and represent a certain upper middle class view, but not every collection can be everything, and a reader should take the diversity of their reading into their own hands, anyhow.

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Next week… look, I don’t know what next week will hold. I hope you all stay well and outside the crazy as best you can, however.

Ben

(Ben Peek is the author The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories, amongst others. His next book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)