Books |
Smut: Stories
Alan Bennett
By
Published: Jan 11, 2012
Category:
Fiction
Oooooo…..a dirty book.
And short — 160 pages — so you don’t have to wade through acres of prose to get to the good parts.
And by a distinguished author — Alan Bennett studied history at Oxford, was one of the founders of Beyond the Fringe” and is much-honored for such plays (and, later, movies) as “The Madness of King George” and “The History Boys” — so you don’t have to feel you’re slumming with a pornographer.
The title’s kind of raunchy. But on your Kindle, no one will know.
I see you’re still with me. Bet you want to know: How raunchy? Tab A in Slot B? Or more graphic?
Let me hold off on that — I’m getting there, really I am — just long enough to say what a pleasure it was to read these two stories. Precisely because Bennett is a playwright , these pieces read almost like scripts: minimal description, maximum dialogue. To read them is like watching Federer play tennis against a worthy opponent. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle download, click here.]
The stories share a common theme, what my sainted English teacher liked to call Appearance and Reality. In this case Appearance is English middle class behavior: rigidly moral, desperately concerned with the opinions of others. And then there’s Reality: what we actually do.
In the first story, "The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson," we meet a new widow, 55 years old. Though still attractive, she is resigned to her status. Her problem is money. Because her husband hasn’t left her quite enough, she takes a part-time job as a kind of actress — she role-plays the part of diverse patients in a diagnostics class for medical students at the local hospital. It’s interesting work, and she’s good at it; around the hospital, they call her "Bickerton Road’s answer to Meryl Streep."
Still, she needs more money. She takes in lodgers, a young couple. At first they’re prompt with the rent. Then they’re not. But they suggest a way they might reduce their debt in exchange for — well, let’s call it a bookend to the kind of acting Mrs. Donaldson does at the hospital.
I don’t want to give away more. So let the author take it from here.
In the second story, "The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes," Bennett focuses on the mother of an extremely handsome young man who has everything but a wife. There’s a reason: Graham Forbes is gay. But now he’s getting married to rich but plain Betty — and everything changes.
Mr. Forbes starts spending quite a lot of time on the Internet. Graham finds heterosexual sex surprisingly pleasant, though not so pleasant that he limits himself to it. One of his male partners turns out to be trouble, and that trouble finds its way to his mother, who…..but I’m not going to spoil it.
Here’s the author, reading from the story:
And the moral? The literary point? The way to see this book in relationship to Bennett’s many others?
Alan Bennett would prefer — and I would agree — that those are boring questions.
“I’m 77,” he told an interviewer. “I don’t think in terms of the progress of my writing.”
Then he added, “I don’t really care what effect it has.”
But you might.
