It's Beginning To Hurt - Book Review

The key with a book like “It's Beginning To Hurt” [James Lasdun, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 240 pgs] is knowing the end or the proponent of the intent at the inset. Every good short story is based in this realm with the best being the most concise and the most clear minded. Some stories here work in tandem. Others do not. The exercise is to get the right pitch. The first story “Anxious Man” follows a father who has become so overwhelmed by his finances that he almost loses his daughter on a lake. He and his wife let the young woman spend the night with a female friend that she just met. When she goes missing, he thinks of every possible bad thing that might have happened to her and swears he will stop worrying about money if she is found. She turns up safe but he simply thinks it is coincidence. Reversion in the shadow of reverie. It almost hurt but it began to feel like it.The next story “Natural Order” has a man on a trip through Europe writing a guidebook with an old friend that seems to be very effective with women. I found this amusing since I was on a train through the Alps to the border of Italy in Switzerland as I was reading it. The man in question believes his friend's luck is simply because of confidence and attention to appearance. He tries his hand at seduction initially but always keeps thinking back to his wife and new daughter in Connecticut. When the possibility happens a second time, he seems to go through with it and wonders why he has. The woman leaves her name and number in lipstick. He has to throw it away. This is when it starts to hurt.“Incalcuable Life Gesture” involves a man worried about a growth under his chin. He thinks it might be something serious and works out all the scenarios in his head of what might happen. Meantime, his sister, who is a bit of a leech, wants to take over the house left to them by their parents. When everything turns out alright with his health, he decides to give his sister an olive branch which she regards as a slight. He then wonders if he should have done it. Simple but not overwhelming.“The Half Sister” has a guitarist free spirit who never quite made his break teaching young kids music to make his ends meet. One of his clients is a rich couple who seem to have it all. After discussing and talking to him a bit, the couple invites him over for tea. He finds that their step daughter has come back home. She is not attractive but would make a good wife and they would be well taken care of with money. They try to set him up with her at the opera. He thinks that it might not be a bad life but he thinks he needs to turn it down. He would be stuck in the life without change. He wants his freedom but he wonders if it is the right choice. This bases down to the human equivilent of choice.“The Old Man” has a banker offering financial help to a mother and daughter who have moved into town and want to start a business. They are hard working and do what they say. He begins to romance the daughter and finds that she is responsive to his attractions. The women invite their elder uncle to come in from the city to rent the cottage behind them. The banker sees something interesting in the old coot but can't put his finger on it. He finally comes to the point and proposes to the daughter. As they plan their wedding day, he notices that the old man is gone. The women say that the old man couldn't pay his rent and left. The mother and daughter asked the banker to move away from his house and move in with them. Something doesn't seem quite right. This story hints a little bit at foreboding but the reality is that the aspect of what might be hidden beneath the service is not very clear.“Annals Of The Honorary Secretary” is a bit more medieval in its basis with an ode almost to the supernatural. A man is involved in his work, at least in point, with a society that pursues spiritual breath perhaps in a kind of osmosis. Most people in the club speak in theoreticals but a woman secretary comes along and says she has a practical application. She can affect a mood of a room and change its dynamic which is a very new and altering feeling for those in the circle. She becomes a vying focus and her power over the months seems to grow stronger. She is able in certain instances to make objects disappear from her hands. At certain times, they vanish all together. At other times, they wilt and die. At a culimating performance on New Year's Eve, the secretary seems to lose control and exude her energy all at once which completely overcomes the party throwing them into a corpse, wraith-like visions like something out of the end of “Raiders Of The Lost Ark”. The man, who tells the story through his POV, has a slightly different vision but one again tainted by death. They never see the secretary again which probably is for the best. This story has many elements, all of which point to an effective tome in perhaps “The Outer Limits”.“Cleanness” is the simplest and most effective piece in this book so far. It involves a grown man returning to London for his father's wedding to a younger woman. It revolves in tandem with his ride to the actual wedding and the aspects swirling in his head. He misses his turn and arrives at a farm. He gets out and asks for directions. A woman answers invites him in and, as he is about to leave, the husband arrives. The man gives him a weary eye as if the son was making moves on his wife. The reality as seen in the back of his mind is that he was a man who was plagued by infidelity and it wrecked his marriage. He sees a red tractor outside and he thinks he has seen it somewhere else. He wants to get out of there. He knows that he has to walk on a plank lifted on mud to get to his car. He flashes back to when he first took a walk with his dad's new bride where they discussed his mother, who was a horror in real life but endeared herself to him at the end. He also remembers that the red tractor was what his son was holding when the boy walked in on him and the nanny in the greenhouse screwing. At this moment, he loses his footing and he simply embraces the mud in his grand tuxedo as a cleansing, an undeniable inevitability. The man gets up, places leaves in the car for him to sit on and heads to his father's wedding. He missed the ceremony and heads straight to the reception. He stands there dirty and dejected while his father huffs but his new mother-in-law comes over in her bright wedding dress and hugs him in the midst getting herself dirty. The ending might be a bit trite but the use of interweaving images, points and metaphors is very effectively done with just a slight wisp of the absurd.“The Woman At The Window” in comparison to the previous story is much more two sided. The story begins in the mind of an Englishman in NY enjoying himself but reporting back dutifully to his girlfriend in London every day and night. As he is going home, a woman calls up to him from an above window saying that she is locked inside her apartment. He agrees but all kinds of things run through his mind, most specifically that he is going to get mugged. When he finally helps her and breaks down the door, nothing is out of place. The girl seems happy and offers him a drink. He doesn't think any more about it but doesn't read anything into her flirting. After he leaves, the story switches to her POV and her setup which involves her rather risky behavior as a youth which translates into adulthood. She now lures men to her apartment now to see if it becomes a sexual tryst. She did it once and felt completely elated. It didn't work with the Englishmen so she will try it again with someone different. She resets the lock on the door. The separation in the story gives it a nice requisite ring in terms of its punchline but works in that regard without being too exceptional.“A Bourgeois Story” tends the story about the past coming back to haunt the aspects of the contented. A man is recollected of his misspent youth from a returning friend. Our man is happy with a beautiful wife and child. His wife does not block the interaction but has her concerns. The worry for him internally is the pull of the past. The money is of discretion but the ideals are still central. He can't understand what this person would want after this time. The insinuation turns into a stand off where the conservative but content family man is the one of stability and truth. But still the mind wanders. The story here renders itself too finite in its gestures while still exploring the basic truths that exist.“Oh Death” has the permanance of a colonial tale or a Mamet play but retrieves the essence of one driven by pure archetypes of love and loss. Told from the perspective of a neighbor over a number of years, the plight of a man in the mountains goes from simple to complicated when a woman, a survivor of life, and her two kids move in to his house after escaping a dreadful husband. Over time, the couple develop a relationship although the one-sided nature of it seems plain despite the introduction of two new children. The man works with his hands but the ntrusion of technology takes away his work. His wedding celebration is also an exercise in conflicting worlds. His bike and butcher friends bring a live pig in for him to slaughter like in old pagan times. The woodsman instead gets a shotgun and blows the pig's brains out to the chagrin of others as the blood flies. It is Shakespearean in structure as is his “Cabin Of Solitude” which is discovered at the end. The interim procedure of a downward spiral, told in disjointed episodes and thoughts, fits a withdrawn, detached story style and reveal. The final thought of the funeral after the man is found dead in an apparent suicide makes the story one of misunderstood redemption, one definitely of classical themes but one that has definitely been done before.“Crangley Meadows” follows the story of an older man who loses his job and fears losing his younger wife. She seems passive but detached in terms of her interest. She used to be an astronomy student and he a professor but his enthusiasm seems to have outlasted her. All his friends now are hers, and she is not quite sure what to do in terms of relating to them. There is one member of the staff that tried to rebel when it was first circulated that there would be cutbacks hence his firing. This man has since become a shell of his former self. Now that she is pregnant she has her doubts of their future and she wonders where her wants went. Her husband just wants to make sure he hasn't lost her but no one is saying anything either way. This is a story of struggle of an internal variety, the way it can only be done in a book, which is interesting. But the aim is miscommunication, not resolution.“Toddy” brings to mind a modern day version of some parts of “The Hours”. The woman in question is raised well but then enters a society in a certain part of British times which almost encourages scandal and affairs which she did after her daughter was born. Seemed like the “in” thing to do. In her divorce, she got the summer house and tried to move there to reassess her focus but trouble always follows. Turns out that the husband from a nearby house knew her ex and actually tries to make a move on her which she refuses. He has a very shy son whom he always insults and verbally abuses. The son walks her home and it is obvious that the boy likes her but doesn't have the guts to tell her. She sees this and even discourages him. He tells her of his love of music. She starts learning one of the pieces by one of his favorite composers. When the father starts making advances, she learns that the best way to keep her distance is to play into it. She makes a move on the father at the grocery store which she knows he can't reciprocate. He instead sends his son. The key for her is within the lesser of two evils. She must resign herself to who she is.“Peter Kahn's Third Wife” shows that the continuing selection of these stories is quite intrinsic. This story follows a girl with a customer that comes in every couple years. She models the jewelry for him and there is an ease of comfortability as he goes through his romantic life which always seems to fall apart. He comes in with no one with the exception of his third fiancee and even then the girl models a necklace for him. At a later dinner  some months later, the jewelry girl finds out that the man, who is a wine importer, left his fiancee at the altar. The jewelry girl meanwhile is in a relationship with a man who abuses her and whom she despises. She tells him that she is having an affair (even though she isn't) and takes off to find the man from the jewelry store. It functions a little bit too much like a fable without any real world personification but hope seems like a rare commodity.“Lime Pickles” is a story of lost love reminisced. A boy and his childhood sweetheart go out to dinner with her father who is introducing them to his new fiancee. He takes them for her birthday to an expensive Indian restauarant. They go back to the fiancee's flat to hear her sing then her father leaves them alone for the night. This puts too much pressure on the young couple to have sex when they had planned it out for a later date.  The father had altered the scheme of things. As a recollection from several years later, these moments seem removed in essence from what should be. The boy, now a middle aged adult, returns to find his sweetheart divorced (not from him) with two kids. He sees the nautilus he gave her on that night many years earlier and wonders what went wrong. It hurts but there is nothing he can do.“It's Beginning To Hurt” is a simple and very effective story much like “Cleanness”. A man is asked by his wife to bring home salmon for dinner. He is late arriving and lies saying he was at a meeting when in fact he was at a funeral for a woman he had an affair with some years earlier. As he is picking up the fish, he thinks back when this woman and him would show houses in terms of real estate and then take on the personas of the house almost like role playing. At times, they were newlyweds. At others, they were movie star lovers evading the paparazzi. One day the woman said that had to stop seeing each other because she was starting to fall in love with him and that it was “beginning to hurt”. He never saw her again. But the hurt still maintained. Extremely effective and poignant as a story especially since it only took 2 pages to execute.The last story “Caterpillar” seems like it could be one of those old school Disney cartoons with a moral at its center albeit this story has a slightly darker tone. In the story, a father who holds himself in high regard takes his son and his girlfriend on a walkabout at a retreat to look at caterpillars overtaking the countryside. His son is young and overweight and he hopes that this outing will help motivate the boy. The father ends up getting mad at a SUV which is driving up a garden path. He proceeds after they pass to put osbtacles in their way so they wont be able to get back down. His son meanwhile comes across a new batch of larvae and looks at them. It turns out that he inhaled some spores and he begins to have an allergic reaction. He needs a hospital but they have no way to get out of there. The girlfriend ends up asking the people in the car for help. The father gets out each time to clear the obstacles that he had made which now threaten his son's life. The repercussions are cyclical although the resolution is not.“It Is Beginning To Hurt” is an interesting collection of short stories that balances between the metaphorical and the literal. In the long run, two stories (“Cleanness” and “It's Beginning To Hurt”) are the most effective because they realize the emotional structure of their characters and the regret and forgiveness needed to move on.