If for nothing else, you should read Devin Jacobsen’s short story collection The Summer We Ate Off the China for its wonderful prose. The characters and plots of Jacobsen’s tales are often quite strange. From the first, Possum On the Roof, we know we are in a similar, slightly deranged world to the early stories of Will Self. The grains of the ordinary are inverted and perverted. Dagonet opens with an ingenious coarse parody of an Arthurian legend.
The last story, Hitler In Love, is seriously troubling and thought-provoking. Yet often they are simply full of glorious vignettes. In The Elegance of Simplicity, for example, one character is described as “one of those solid Scottish women… built for long sunless winters and Nordic winds, with their layer of blubber and their squat, solid figure, like the compact embodiment of Presbyterianism itself”.
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And there are many such examples here of such provocative, trenchant imagery. The eponymous story in this collection is one of the best, ending with a beautifully written description of a fisherman standing before his netting. None of these stories are particularly long, and many of them are cut up into intense bursts of individual paragraphs. Yet these pieces of writing are finely tuned, and, at their best, very impactful.
Jacobsen likes to dive to the deepest meaning among stories and characters that are ostensibly mundane. At the start of Let Dogs Delight, he poses one of these existential questions straight out: “Even in the midst of living can it really be any way else? Are we really so free to step outside ourselves?” A few pages later, Elise sees it turn out that “God is not intercessory.” While Billy has worked out life’s futility, Elise is slower to the realisation.
Jacobsen paints them as in a struggle better to understand one another, in a race to find happiness. Elise thinks at one point “she had outwitted him at last, discovered the password to his fort”. Jacobsen does not try to take us too far into such existential qualms – his stories are funny, direct and slightly absurd all within the space of a few pages. Like some of the best short-form writers, he doesn’t try to overdo his brief within that space.
