Shortlisted for the 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award, Perth writer Laurie Steed’s short story collection Greater City Shadows is his third book after the novel You Belong Here and the memoir Love, Dad. It shares with its predecessors a generosity, sense of humour and enviable fluency in pop culture and matters of the heart. Think Nick Hornby at his best, yes; but also masters of the short story form such as Alice Munro, for Steed’s ability to interrogate the workings not just of the heart but mind and soul as manifested in complex, tender human relationships.
Oh, and memory, at its most wistful and bittersweet. Joy, loss, desire, hurt, inadequacy; men and women, boys and girls, parents and children, friends and lovers: these stories border, like all the best fiction, on passionate autofiction. Damn Proust and that madeleine.
Steed is especially good at sketching portraits which are simultaneously funny and poignant. As when ‘A bouncer hauled out some dude with hair like Krusty the Clown.’ Or when someone admits ‘I’m a bit of an idiot. I’m tall, and not in a rakish way unless you mean I look like a rake.’
And his own nostalgia shines through the spaces between the words when evoking people and places together: ‘You returned to Barrack, your city resurrected, but the bookstore was long gone, so you took the laneway to its end and sprayed ‘Beth’ on the wall.’
Or: ‘They drove out of Midland, farewelling strip shops and driving up into the Hills, climbing through and then above the treeline. As they reached Mundaring, Richie felt about as lonely as he’d felt in his life.’
Most impressive perhaps is Steed’s ability to emphasise not just relationships between people but between the individual and the greater universe. And to acknowledge that even the seemingly infinite and ageless can die:
‘I’m not sure if I loved what she told me or if it only made things harder. Stars die a lot, it turns out, and even the ones that are shining might be dead by now. We see not what is, but what once was.’
Indeed, in all these stories there is an appreciation of the transitoriness of life. And that to have one’s eyes wide open is to risk getting a lot more grit in them.
In Reflections on a Ghost Story, a postscript to the beautiful, heartbreaking All for Love, Steed writes:
‘Biv is both myself and not. He gets over hurt much easier than me, and better appreciates the aesthetic brilliance of Nike Air 180 high-tops. Biv got the girl in the end, and so did I, and once I did it crossed my mind that I’d spent way too much time in my life trying to get other girls to like me when the right one would just love me as I was.’
Exactly who is doing the reflecting here? Author, persona, avatar, cipher? Meta or matter? Maybe all of them? Do we really care, given that Steed straddles, as he does throughout the rest of this marvellous collection, the real and the imagined with the consummate skill of an author who is both crafty and knows his craft?