RICHARD HOLT What You Might Find. Reviewed by Alexander Wells
Richard Holt explores the possibilities of microfiction with great inventiveness and style.
The short short stories collected in Richard Holt’s startling first book, What You Might Find, are precisely constructed and darkly surprising. With impressive economy and no little irreverence, Holt has used the microfiction genre to probe away at what lies behind the events of our lives – the greater meaning, or lack thereof, revealed in a moment.
In the page-long title story a woman takes fastidious care in preparing the lucky dip for a town fair. The donated treats are boxed up carefully and hidden away in a plastic rubbish bin, concealed under a mess of shredded office paper. The arrangement looks ‘as pretty as a picture’; the marquee-covered oval seems enchanted in the pale light of morning. And then it turns:
She had her back turned, drawing a sign on daisy-shaped card, when Don wandered past looking for somewhere to put the pieces from ‘a bit of an accident’ they’d had with some jars from the jam stall.
Shifts in perspective and dark twists of fate occur throughout the collection, brought to life by Holt’s elegant, playful use of the short-short format. This hybrid genre – described by 100 Word Story editor Grant Faulkner as ‘one part story, one part poem’ – has been on the rise in recent years, and Holt explores its possibilities with great inventiveness and style. Like all good microfiction, the stories in What You Might Find make excellent use of their negative space: the haunting avoidance, the needling absence, the things left unsaid or unseen. In Holt’s able hands, the short short story becomes a place to sound out the moment, confounding our expectations and unravelling the complex webs of sense and intention that rule human lives.
In such short pieces – most are between one and three pages long – we expect every detail to stand as a symbol, so a subtle shift in emphasis and tone can be extremely disorienting, or indeed enlivening. The one-page story ‘Green’ tells of a character who buys a former share-house, discovers the former residents’ planting instructions, and continues to maintain the wonderful garden they had planted before moving out. After her first spring harvest, she gets a forwarding address from the estate agent:
Before she finished parking, she spotted him. He was lanky and handled his spade with ease. His eyes flashed at her as she approached him. They were as deep green and seductive as the leaves in her basket.
The form might be miniature, but the scope is often sweeping. Holt’s rapid shifts in perspective allow the grandiose to emerge in the specific, the transcendent in the tawdry. But first he has to sell us on the characters, which he does – almost always – with great skill and attentiveness to the subtleties of conversation and gesture. A couple on a tour of their perfect house: ‘We’ve got everything we need,’ he said. It was a half-question. An old man coming to terms with loss notices his dog lolling at his feet: ‘Since the bucket came off she’s been kind of quiet, like she misses it, somehow.’ A man in a doomed relationship listens to a doo-wop band on the train platform:
I ought to get lessons, says Daryl.
What?
Singing. I’ve got a good enough voice.
Yeah, says Rosa. For mime.
Holt’s people are all looking for something greater than themselves. Their often-bleak domestic interiors are pierced by moments of sheer transcendence, whether that’s from hope, love, beauty, art, or spirituality. They are at their best while dreaming, including poor doo-wop-loving Daryl:
It’s not the sort of music you hear every day. Layers luscious as cream cake. He could have sung like that if he’d had the chance.
This tenderness is key to the success of the stories, which might otherwise drift into metaphysics and irony.
The gamblers, preachers, and rubbish-bin rummagers who proliferate through Holt’s stories are all trying to master an absurd, chaotic world. They are obsessed with making theories, or discovering their destinies – or else they throw in their lot with coincidence, embracing randomness as a principle. But Holt will not let them get away with that, either. ‘You wish you could make random choices,’ one character says. ‘But choices aren’t like that.’
The 34 stories that make up this slim volume cover a wide range of settings – from Renaissance painters to Australian country toughs, from a gang-infested playground to a smarmy TV network HQ – but they are united, in a way, by this search for meaning. What they add up to is not a single place or a consistent authorial voice, but rather a vision: a view of the world that soldiers on between faith and disappointment, between the gritty thrill of existence and the capricious lure of dreams.
Holt’s is an irreverent mysticism, an existentialism that refuses to take itself too seriously. His stories are the tales of a trickster – gently unsettling, cheeky as hell, and always drawn to moments of change and transformation. Dark surprises, misread signs, and wild reversals of fortune run throughout the book, providing both humour and an enduring sense that deep down this world is not to be mastered. ‘There is always a twist,’ says the narrator of ‘Paperback’. ‘One ending that could be and another that is.’ Look, then look again. These are stories that command you pay attention – not just to them, but to the world.
There are a few moments that push the game too far, such as the hammy Kafkaesque reversal of ‘The Swimmer’ or the stylised religious ramblings here and there (‘God is faith, he says, which means nothing, if you ask me’). But, taken as a whole, What You Might Find is a project of great skill and great heart, a testimony to the possibilities of microfiction.
These vibrant stories are invigoratingly bohemian, not just in their occasional urban grit and sexiness, but also because of their attitude to risk – their gleeful rummaging, their constant probing at the undersides of things. Richard Holt dips his hand into the lucky dip of meaning on our behalf, knowing full well that he might just get glassed for his efforts
Richard Holt What You Might Find Spineless Wonders 2018 PB 131pp $22.99
Alexander Wells is a freelance writer and historian. He was formerly editor of the Harvard Advocate.
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