Joanna Walsh, Worlds from the Word’s End (And Other Stories, £8.99).
With a relatively small output, Joanna Walsh has carved herself a place as one of the UK’s most innovative and influential writers. Her fans include writers such as Chris Kraus and Deborah Levy. She is also prescient cultural critic. She edits 3:AM magazine and runs @read_women, a twitter account dedicated to literary equality.
Walsh published her first book, Hotel, in 2015. Part meditation and part memoir, a hotel reviewer probes the breakdown of her unhappy marriage as she moves through a series of hotel rooms. This unflinching hybrid work muses upon home, belonging, alienation and desire. In 2016 she published Vertigo, her first collection of short stories. Vertigo contains richly bewildering stories about womanhood, loss, pain and, indeed, bewilderment. Words from the World’s End, published with And Other Stories, is Walsh’s much anticipated second collection of short stories.
Walsh is a sublimely underplayed comic writer. But here, her deceptively plain prose is coupled with a newly outlandish sensibility. Worlds from the Word’s End may even surprise committed fans of her distinctive style. The novelist Sarah Baume likens Walsh’s latest work to that of Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms and that is exactly whose disobedient writings sprang to my own mind. I am reminded, too, of the short stories of experimental writer Christine Brooke-Rose, re-published in 2014 with an introduction by Walsh herself. ‘Difficulty’, lamented Brooke-Rose, ‘has become unfashionable… the pleasure of recognition being generally stronger than the pleasure or puzzlement of discovery.’ Worlds from the Word’s End is a series of fragmentary, darkly comic vignettes that showcase a deep irreverence for either expectation and convention. There is plenty of both pleasure and puzzlement to be had in their discovery.
The stories are packed full of double entendre, re-worked truisms and punning. Her story “Like a fish needs a…”, which begins with a Flan O’Brien quote, is a subversive Freudian story about bicycles and a failed love interest that alternates between the philosophical and the ridiculous. ‘I showed him mine once. A BSO he called it. A bike shaped object: looks like a bike, but isn’t.’
The title story presents the failure of two lovers to communicate against an apocalyptic backdrop in which words have fallen out of fashion. ‘It had become so difficult to say anything at all.’ The narrator charts a fantastic series of events, starting with a hipster trend and ending with the annihilation of a communal language. The story cleverly ricochets off gendered tropes about quiet women and the vocal arrogance of the narrator’s ex-lover.
In “The Story of Our Nation” a team of researchers conduct mundane tasks in an attempt to evidence a grand nationalistic narrative. ‘The story of our nation will be heroic. It will also be domestic spectacular pathetic operatic comic tragic tragicomic.’ The narrator contributes to this endeavour by the counting of leaves in the hedgerow, whilst others ‘measure the gaps between door and doorsills.’ If this collection somewhat substitutes the emotional ferocity of Vertigo for flatness, the effect cumulates throughout the collection into an astute reckoning of the insincerity of words, their depletion within soulless economies of excess and their vulnerability to misuse and misinterpretation.
Joanna Walsh’s work divides people and Worlds from the Word’s End is likely to continue the trend. The relative strength of the stand-out stories in this collection work against a few of the others, which can feel insubstantial in comparison. Nonetheless, Worlds from the Word’s End is mischievous, brilliantly subversive and unapologetically dense (“Me and the fat woman – Joanna Walsh” takes the speculative physics of black holes as its starting point). Walsh remains fiercely relevant in her investigations of contemporary culture and her latest offering demands our careful attention.