Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Darker with the Lights On
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Norwich
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Irish
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2018032928
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2018032928
HEADING: Hayden, David (Writer of short stories)
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670 __ |a Darker with the lights on, 2017: |b t.p. (David Hayden) p. 4 of cover (one of the most interesting short story writers; this is his first collection)
PERSONAL
Born in Dublin, Ireland.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked formerly in bookshops and at publishing companies.
AWARDS:25th RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story prize, shortlisted.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including gorse, Yellow Nib, Moth, Stinging FlySpolia, and Warwick Review. His poetry has appeared in PN Review.
SIDELIGHTS
David Hayden is a writer and poet. Born in Dublin, he has spent his life working with words. Employed by bookstores and various publishing companies, Hayden has traveled around the world for work. He has lived in the United States, Australia, and spent time traveling around South Asia for a Japanese publishing company. Hayden’s short stories have been published in gorse, Yellow Nib, Moth, Stinging FlySpolia, and Warwick Review. His poetry has appeared in PN Review. He lives and writes in Norwich, United Kingdom. Darker with the Lights On is his first book.
Darker with the Lights On is a collection of short stories that range from surreal to grisly. The collection, Hayden’s first, is comprised of nineteen stories. The book opens with ‘Egress,’ a short story in which a man seeks to end his life. The protagonist jumps off a building ledge and, instead of meeting a quick end, falls. His leap seems to defy gravity and time, and he falls endlessly in space as the seasons, years, and civilizations change. The story sets the tone for a book in which reality and desires morph and mutate in both dark and pleasing ways.
Words and literature are a central theme in Darker with the Lights On, as seen in ‘Memory House’ and ‘Reading.’ In the former, the narrator distorts and plays with words, labeling each item in the house by describing it as something else. In ‘Reading,’ the afterlife exists as the setting of whichever book an individual read last. In ‘How to Read a Picture Book,’ professorial Sorry the Squirrel lectures a group of children on the power of image and words, while ‘An Apple in the Library’ describes how one pursues and devours knowledge, literally. Just as Hayden explores the alluring power of words in the stories, he also repeatedly includes mysterious forces acting upon his characters. This is seen in the unknown energy that holds the protagonist of the first story up in the sky, or later, in another story, when a character is lifted up in the air by a bale of hay.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote: “the surreal and the mundane coincide brilliantly in Hayden’s inventive debut collection.” Jude Cook in Spectator penned: “Hayden steers us through a series of dreamscapes of Tarkovskyan density and strangeness.” Justine Jordan in the Guardian Online described the book as a “brilliantly disturbing and unclassifiable debut collection,” while Brian Dillon on the White Review website labeled Hayden’s prose as “laconically precise and extravagant, recondite, floridly metaphoric.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of Darker with the Lights On.
New Statesman, January 19, 2018, Richard Smyth, “Slightly Foxed,” review of Darker with the Lights On, p. 47.
Publishers Weekly, March 19, 2018, review of Darker with the Lights On, p. 45.
Spectator, January 6, 2018, Jude Cook, “A Banquet of Delights,” review of Darker with the Lights On, p. 26.
ONLINE
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (December 14, 2017), Justine Jordan, review of Darker with the Lights On.
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (September 9, 2017), Houman Barekat, review of Darker with the Lights On.
White Review, http://www.thewhitereview.org/ (January 1, 2018), Brian Dillon, review of Darker with the Lights On.
‘You could do anything with that blank page, which is horrifying’
David Hayden gets why ambiguity can make short stories a hard sell – but he revels in it
Tue, Jan 2, 2018, 05:00
Ian Maleney
David Hayden, author of the acclaimed short story collection 'Darker with the Lights On'. Photograph: Gabriel Hayden
David Hayden, author of the acclaimed short story collection 'Darker with the Lights On'. Photograph: Gabriel Hayden
David Hayden has one of those enviable Twitter accounts that seems to be little but photographed pages of books you would very much like to read some day. Hayden, born in Dublin but now living in Norwich, has spent a good part of his life working in bookshops and at various publishers. That career has taken him across the world, with several years in Australia as well some spent trekking across south Asia for a Japanese publisher.
Upon arriving in Australia, he made a list of 50-odd Australian authors and read them all, just to familiarise himself with the local scene. The names of writers both popular and obscure, new and old, pop up continually in conversation with him. He is, he says, an inveterate recommender. It seems like he’s good at recommending books because he’s spent his life trying to read all of them.
Darker with the Lights On, Hayden’s first book, a collection of 20 stories, wears this erudition lightly. It does not readily give up its influences. It could be called a modernist collection, certainly, because it is self-conscious, it thinks out loud, it is “experimental” – which is to say that it is trying things out, it’s looking for something new.
While the settings of many of the stories in Darker with the Lights On might be inferred, they are never named. They seem distorted in enigmatic, cryptically important ways. Hayden describes this process of defamiliarisation as a “peeling back”, a way to make the stories stronger both as stand-alone texts, and as a complete collection.
“When I took that specificity away, I ended up with something that became much, much more interesting, more uncanny, and more generalisable to people’s experiences of different kinds of discomfort,” he says. “Taking the specifics out, the recognisable accents and language, for me anyway it made it more interesting, it made it stronger, it made it possible to develop the theme of the story more strongly.
“Sometimes I think specifics – the identifiable place or voice, tone – can work to make the story stronger and become parts of the sinews of the narrative, but in some cases they actually become what you focus on, and a misdirection from the heart of the story. So what I try to do with each story is for it to reside within itself in as concentrated a way as possible.”
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Concentration
“Concentration” is a theme that Hayden returns to again and again in describing these stories. Their intricate sense of patterning, the way they seem driven as much by the words as the ideas, corresponds with what Hayden calls a “concentration of the resources of language.”
Hayden brings an intensity to the sentences which requires a certain scrutiny – not everything is as it seems. There is something going on behind the words, between them. The effect is of feeling very close to the voices we’re hearing as we read, listening intently as whatever fragment of their story unfolds.
“When I read through a story, if I find anything that sounds overfamiliar, unintentionally, then I’ll rewrite it,” Hayden says. “I’ll take it out because it weakens the lines. You want to hold the space, really, as a writer of a story, and to use a term that Claire Keegan uses, it’s a piece of time. A story is a piece of time. That might be narrative time, but for me it’s mainly the time that the reader is engaged in the story. That is really, really important to me, compositionally.”
Hayden compares Keegan to others he admires, giants of the short story such as Chekhov or Eudora Welty, and says they share an ingenuity, what he calls a “means”, which is entirely and unmistakably their own.
“The thing that strikes you most about those is just how original they are,” he says. “Time after time. How they just hold that. For the readers that like that kind of voice, that kind of approach. Lots of readers hate short stories, but for those of us that are in, they’re doing something extraordinary again and again and again. Obviously my aspiration is to be able to do that. To hold the reader in the ways that are original to me.”
Coming up short
Hayden, as someone who has spent a good deal of his life working in bookshops and at publishing houses, is all too aware of the regard in which short stories are held by the mass pool of readers that larger publishers are concerned with reaching. He quickly fires off a list of reasons for this: they’re over as soon as they start, there’s little or no development of character, sometimes they simply don’t make sense. He acknowledges and understands people’s hesitancy to embrace the shorter form.
“They want to read fiction for an immersive experience, and actually you don’t get that with the short story in that kind of way. What you get is a feeling of being persistently discomfited. An awful lot of the impact of a short story happens after the last word, in the silence after the story has ended. A lot of the work of the story happens right there, and that’s often quite an uncomfortable space.”
Darker with the Lights On, however, revels in the discomfiting, the unpredictable, the ambiguous. Each story appears fully formed, a resolute little capsule of mood and voice. They cohere only through their inscrutability, their mischievous humour and a glimmering thread of concern about fatherhood, masculinity and inheritance. They never reveal a formal tick, a unifying logic. Each opening sentence feels like a gambit, with no indication of what will follow. Each story is, in an exciting, trepidatious sense, an adventure into the unknown.
“I sort of feel that literature is about an open field – it’s about having space to do what you want in it, being playful,” Hayden says. “When you sit down to write, you have a body, you have memory, you have your entire somatic functioning and everything that’s embedded in that, and you write out of that. You write out of your skin and out of your memory and out of your blood, and out of everything that you’ve ever read, everything you haven’t read, everything that you’ve misheard. Your entire sensory experience. That’s what you write out of. There’s an almost infinite number of connections that you can make, and if you can make those in language, then you’re writing. Which makes it sound easy.”
He laughs, catches himself, and begins once again to qualify, to concentrate.
“You could do absolutely anything with that blank page, which is pretty horrifying. But also, potentially, on the right day, it’s very exciting. If you can convey that onto the page, then you might have something that’s worth other people reading. That’s what I hope for.”
Darker with the Lights On is published by Little Island Press
TWENTY QUESTIONSOCTOBER 2, 2017
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Twenty Questions with David Hayden
Writers and thinkers take on twenty questions from the TLS, revealing the books they most admire, nagging regrets and the occasional hidden talent
Is there any book, written by someone else, that you wish you’d written?
If I was the great-grandson of Herman Melville I might have written Genoa, but I’m not and Paul Metcalf was. He wrote a family story that is a counter-history of America, and a narrative of how violence insinuates and stains, sinks and rises – again and again.
What will your field look like twenty-five years from now?
Either very different, or very much the same. Or both of those things.
Which of your contemporaries will be read 100 years from now?
I wouldn’t deign to call her a contemporary, but I’d venture Toni Morrison.
What author or book do you think is most underrated? And why?
Time Lived, Without Its Flow by Denise Riley is a very short book about time and loss, living and telling, that immeasurably expanded my sense of each of those things.
What author or book do you think is most overrated? And why?
Gone With the Wind. Not because it’s critically “rated” but because it has a very wide readership prepared to overlook its promotion of white supremacy. Hilton Als has put this well in his essay “GWTW”.
If you could be a writer in any time and place, when and where would it be?
Right here and now with the people I love.
If you could make a change to anything you’ve written over the years, what would it be?
I regret what I haven’t written. Letters, mostly.
Which is your least favourite fictional character?
William Frederick Kohler in The Tunnel by William Gass.
Let’s play Humiliation (see David Lodge’s Changing Places): What’s the most famous book you haven’t read?/play you haven’t seen?/album you haven’t listened to?/film you haven’t watched?
I’m reading, seeing and hearing great things that are new to me all the time, some of them famous. If I ever lose the desire to, I imagine I would find that humiliating.
Do you have any hidden talents?
I’m a competent baker.
Quick questions:
George or T. S.? Both
Modernism or post-? Both, but post- sparingly
Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë? Both, and Emily
Camus or Sartre? Merleau-Ponty
Proust or Joyce? Both, and Dorothy Richardson
Knausgaard or Ferrante? Neither, so far
Jacques Derrida or Judith Butler? Judith Butler
Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Hamlet
Bram Stoker or Mary Shelley? Mary Shelley, and Charles Maturin
Tracey Emin or Jeff Koons? Neither
David Hayden’s first collection of short stories, Darker With the Lights On, is out now.
About the Author
David Hayden's writing has appeared in gorse, The Yellow Nib, The Moth, The Stinging FlySpolia, and The Warwick Review, and poetry in PN Review. He was shortlisted for the 25th RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story prize. Born in Dublin, he has lived in the US and Australia and is now based in Norwich, UK.
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Print Marked Items
Hayden, David: DARKER WITH THE
LIGHTS ON
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hayden, David DARKER WITH THE LIGHTS ON Transit Books (Adult Fiction) $15.95 5, 15 ISBN: 978-
1-945492-11-2
Short stories that will puzzle, perplex, and provoke.
Irishman Hayden's first book is a collection of 19 stories that invite readers into some puzzling and
unfamiliar places: symbolic, surrealist, and language-based worlds. His tales are reminiscent of his
countryman Samuel Beckett's Stories and Texts for Nothing. Hayden's book might be subtitled Texts with
the Stories Gone. "Dick" is drawn directly from the Beckett playbook. It begins: "Dick is buried up to his
belly on a cold shingle beach." Little happens; descriptions of the surroundings are given. "He laughs. He is
full of words. They bubble out of his mouth and dribble down his chin." Hayden eschews conventional
plots, characters, and narrative flow for ambiguity and words. Striking images and metaphors and new,
compound words--"thatmakes," "andeverything"--abound. He invites readers to participate, to peel back the
prose, reveal the very process of reading. "Reading" imagines readers as writers living in their own books.
As the eponymous narrator of "The Auctioneer" tells us: "The essence of the book is another thing entirely,
not the words as such but what lies beneath the words, that is what can set you free." Some stories have a
fairy-tale quality to them, like "How to Read a Picture Book." Meet Sorry the Squirrel--"My real name is
Maximilian Liebowitz," he says, "but you wouldn't be able to pronounce that now, would you kiddies?" He
instructs a group of "little darlings" on how to read a picture book. Some stories possess a grisly, Brothers
Grimm quality. In one, a platter with the "blackened, smoking corpse of a man" is on display at a dinner
party. Another begins: "My name is Leckerdam and this is how my children killed me." In the ghostly
"Memory House," the narrator keeps seeing (maybe) a stranger in his house or maybe it's himself, a "piece
of me."
Those seeking challenging, nontraditional wordplay stories will find much here to ponder.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Hayden, David: DARKER WITH THE LIGHTS ON." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375210/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8bd30ef8.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375210
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Darker with the Lights On
Publishers Weekly.
265.12 (Mar. 19, 2018): p45.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Darker with the Lights On
David Hayden. Transit, $15.95 trade paper
(219p) ISBN 978-1-945492-11-2
The surreal and the mundane coincide brilliantly in Hayden's inventive debut collection. The first story,
"Egress," follows a man who steps off a building through his years-long journey to the sidewalk. In "The
Bread that Was Broken," a fancy dinner party centers its attention on a dead man, roasted whole in his sport
coat on the dining table, a place card by his feet. The delightful "Reading" poses a man's theory about the
afterlife: a person is sent into the world of the last book he or she read. The man only reads books like
Goodnight, Moon to ensure his own eternal peace, encouraging others to drop their business books and
magazines. In "How to Read a Picture Book," a squirrel named Sorry teaches a group of young children a
few specific facts about books, telling them, "There are all those things that are right in front of you that you
don't recognise. Things or ideas or feelings that you can't fit into what you know." Hayden's work is strange
and at times disconcerting, but with touches of the familiar. This collection is a joy to puzzle over. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Darker with the Lights On." Publishers Weekly, 19 Mar. 2018, p. 45. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531977304/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9e993037.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531977304
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Slightly foxed
Richard Smyth
New Statesman.
147.5402 (Jan. 19, 2018): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Darker With The Lights On
David Hayden
Little Island Press, 248pp. 12.99 [pounds sterling]
David Hayden's stories are, by and large, dreams, or in any case are told as if they are dreams. At the end of
one or two you half-expect a worried coda: "What do you suppose it means?" Like dreams, they have
nagging motifs (foxes, damaged hands and, most of all, teeth: chattering, breaking, sprouting, falling out)
and like dreams they are haunted by oblique fears--of death, of alienation, of losing innocence or sanity.
The framing of this debut collection by Dublin-born Hayden is insistently absurdist. Men (and they are
mostly men) rock up in strange cities to face double-talking receptionists or enigmatic secretaries. Pilgrims
travel through landscapes pitched somewhere between late-Sixties Bob Dylan and John of Patmos. A
couple of stories make cerebral--or cerebral-seeming--play with quirky conceits: "Hay" concerns a mine
flooded by the miners' tears; in "Reading", a pair on a railway station platform posit an afterlife in which
everyone is trapped within the last book they read. The latter in particular is good, chewy fun.
When, in "The Bread that was Broken", Hayden lingers on the charred, dead body of a young man served
up at a dinner party ("bloodied bows of ribs showed through ... the skin and bent fingers a glossy charcoal
..."), or when yellow maggots are seen "fizzing" in the jaw of a fox in "Memory House", it seems that the
author, in time-honoured modernist style, is attempting to discomfit the reader. The effect, however, is too
artistic to be viscerally grotesque.
Two stories, side by side, read like didactic exegeses on the surrounding texts. They are both lectures. "How
to Read a Picture Book" features Sorry the talking squirrel, also known as Max Liebowitz, and combines
zaniness with a fast-talking treatise on words, pictures and narrative:
Sometimes there are two stories being
told at the same time ... Between the time
of your beautiful incomprehension and
the moment that you finally lose the will
to see goodness you'll be able to see both
stories and find the two of them funny.
"Play"--the more successful of the two comprises a rambling and ultimately tragic lecture on the subject of
its title and a wisecracking chorus of student hecklers.
The unwary or unwitting reader is often wrong-footed by Hayden's habit of signing off a story on what feels
like a punch-line, only without the "Aha! " moment (or indeed the "Haha!" moment). The timing and
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balance suggest resolution but it remains elusive. No curious reader minds feeling lost or baffled or even
unsatisfied, but these inconclusive conclusions can feel like a taunt.
We're being asked--by Hayden's capital-A Absurdism and carefully intelligent style, by the publisher's
minimalist design and prestige paper--to take on trust the weight of the intellect hidden within these often
baffling stories ("Sometimes people practise concealment for their own amusement," says Sorry the
squirrel). We are encouraged to believe that this is work that will repay study, but at times it does little to
invite such close reading. I wasn't inclined to spend long rootling for meaning in the numbing philosophical
skit "An Apple in the Library", or in the folklorish "Limbed"--which of course isn't to say that it's not there.
There is some terrific work in here. The raking hallucinations of "Dick" ("Dick is buried up to his belly on a
cold shingle beach") provide perhaps the best example of how Hayden's raw surrealism can muster an
unexpected emotional gut-punch. There are forceful explosions of imagist prose. The odd line of everyday
idiom (An unpleasant woman on a bus has a "Face twisted up like a cat's knitting") is a welcome intrusion.
"Mareg" and "Last Call for the Hated" are darkly witty cryptics. The wonderful story "Remains of the Dead
World" inserts a Ted Hughes-ish crow into a twin narrative of apocalypse and madness (a passage wherein
the crow wears the narrator's father's dentures--"I didn't know crows could get cold, only I found out when I
heard the teeth chattering"--is among the best in the book).
Darker With The Lights On will send many readers skidding along the spectrum between "I don't know
what this means" and "This doesn't mean anything". Yet it would be foolish to approach this complicated
book with the conviction that all puzzles have solutions and all symbols have counterparts. Sometimes, a
mangled fox really is just a mangled fox.
Richard Smyth's books include "A Sweet, Wild Note" (Elliott $ Thompson) and the novel "Wild Ink" (Dead
Ink)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Smyth, Richard. "Slightly foxed." New Statesman, 19 Jan. 2018, p. 47. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526117152/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b287f31e.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526117152
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A banquet of delights
Jude Cook
Spectator.
336.9880 (Jan. 6, 2018): p26.
COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
While the short story is currently undergoing one of its periods of robust, if not rude, health, its two
dominant modes--the classical or Chekhovian, and the postmodern or experimental--have become harder to
define, with authors happily borrowing tricks from both approaches. None of the collections here can
definitively be confined to either camp, and this should be celebrated.
William Boyd's decision in The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth (Viking, 14.99 [pounds sterling]) to jettison
conventional character names is gently experimental, if not always successful. From the start we encounter
exotics such as Ludo Abernathy and Arkady Lemko. Later, there's a Zack, a Moxy and a Sholto. Later still,
a Max Bassman, a Jurgen Kiel and (boldly) a Raleigh Maltravers. Just when you think Boyd's ingenuity has
been exhausted, he hits you with a Findlay McHarg, a Tarquin Wolde and a Jadranka Juranic.
These ludicrous names inevitably draw attention to themselves and undermine each character's solidity.
Fortunately, they don't spoil the first eight stories, of which the most satisfying is 'Humiliation', a splenetic
tale of literary rivalry and revenge. The novella-length title story is also a treat, a feast of Boydian irony and
urbane observation.
Fresh Complaint (4th Estate, 16.99 [pounds sterling]), Jeffrey Eugenides's first collection, ranges widely in
subject matter and location, with characters from his novels making startling cameos. In 'Air Mail', Mitchell
from Eugenides's novel The Marriage Plot is transplanted to a tropical island, where he observes, while
suffering from an epic bout of amoebic dysentery, traveller girls with 'truly accomplished suntans'. 'Baster'
tells the story of the 40-year-old Thomasina, a Manhattan career woman seeking sperm from a dwindling
pool of available men, 'a ragtag gang of adulterers, losers ... village-burners'. 'It's terrible,' the narrator
observes sardonically, 'that women need this stuff ... It must make them crazy, having everything they need
to raise life but this one meagre leaven.' The richest story, 'Great Experiment', follows a writer of
'unremittingly bleak' villanelles as he becomes an amateurish embezzler. Always at home in morally cloudy
situations, Eugenides has produced a taut, readable collection of tales.
The stories in the Folio Prize-winner Akhil Sharma's first collection, A Life of Adventure and Delight
(W.W. Norton, 14.99 [pounds sterling]), appear straightforward, but the underlying emotional complexities
are anything but. Oscillating between composure and hysterical declaration, his male protagonists find
themselves slowly unmanned by life's vicissitudes. In 'Cosmopolitan', a naive divorce's pursuit of his
worldly neighbour ends in tears, while in the title story, an Indian undergraduate adrift in New York
experiences a series of poised, luminous epiphanies. The prose's serene surface always belies great
turbulence below, with each story's conclusion understated, ambiguous and quietly devastating.
Another writer supremely attuned to emotional nuance is the late Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, whose careercapping
At the End of the Century (Little Brown, 20 [pounds sterling]) takes stories from across her
previously published volumes. Anita Desai, in her introduction, rightly says of 'The Widow': 'The voice, the
point of view, is so perfectly captured, one would not add or alter a single word for greater effect.' This
could perhaps describe the ideal short story; it sums up the perfection to which the form aspires. In 'A Loss
of Faith', a man who lives a compromised existence of duty and deference, bullied by his mother, brother,
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employer and own wife, finds a single decisive act of rebellion sufficient to redeem his dignity. Taken
together, these tales of infatuation, regret and wonder make for a magisterial collection.
The teasing title of Joanna Walsh's new collection, Worlds From the Word's End (And Other Stories, 8.99
[pounds sterling]) prepares the reader for the dexterous and subversive linguistic games within. In
'Bookselves', a bookshelf begins reading its own books: it 'reads, not like you, but like an ideal reader';
while the title story addresses the impossibility of any utterance: 'It has become so difficult to say anything
... In the republic of words, I love you induced anxiety.' In the best story, 'Hauptbahnhof', a narrator deserted
at a station meditates on departures and arrivals. What's not said says everything. Ludic, contrarian, wry,
sometimes savage, these associative vignettes stimulate and inspire.
Finally, the most determinedly leftfield of these collections, David Hayden's Darker with the Lights On
(Little Island Press, 12.99 [pounds sterling]) offers the greatest aesthetic rewards, while taking the most
risks. With a poet's transformative eye, Hayden steers us through a series of dreamscapes of Tarkovskyan
density and strangeness. 'Egress' is narrated from the dead by a suicide, its speaker recalling the day and the
building he jumped from in intense detail: 'The honey-coloured glittering skin of stone ... the freshness vast
and edible'. 'Dick' is apparently the story of a man entering the afterlife: 'Every face is known in love or rage
or pity'; while 'Elsewhere' is a surreal evocation of boyhood.
If the dialogue is occasionally mannered or artificial, and some of the stories no more than cryptic
bagatelles, ultimately these extraordinary performances act as thought bombs, multiplying meanings long
after reading. The finest story, the Nabokovian 'Golding', is a disquieting masterpiece, bequeathing its
atmosphere of precipitous terror to the reader. Too long consigned to the margins, Hayden's is a unique
voice.
So which mode wins? Labelling Boyd and Eugenides traditionalists neglects the experiments in form and
tone that their collections take, while Walsh and Hayden are often not so defiantly avant garde as they first
appear. However, it is Sharma and Jhabvala, who aren't self-conscious about literary modes, concentrating
instead on timeless human transactions, whose lapidary stories are most likely to endure.
Why spend time on the pedestrian tales of the Hollywood superstar Tom Hanks (also recently published)
when you could tuck into this banquet of delights?
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cook, Jude. "A banquet of delights." Spectator, 6 Jan. 2018, p. 26. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524739294/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fe7db5f4.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A524739294
Darker With the Lights On by David Hayden review – stories of the subconscious
An undercurrent of primal violence runs through this Irish author’s brilliantly disturbing and unclassifiable debut collection
Justine Jordan
Justine Jordan
Thu 14 Dec 2017 03.59 EST Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.36 EST
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‘In Remains of the Dead World, the gothic tale of a weird family living in the woods becomes a creation myth, and then a destruction myth...’
‘In Remains of the Dead World, the gothic tale of a weird family living in the woods becomes a creation myth, and then a destruction myth...’ Photograph: Alamy
Once in a blue moon, a book comes along that really is like nothing you’ve ever read before. The 20 stories in this debut collection from David Hayden are strange, uncomfortable fables of memory, metamorphosis, time, disassociation and death: hard to fathom, but impossible to ignore; twisty and riddling, yet with a blunt impact that reverberates long after the final page. They are dreamlike, but they feel like one’s own dreams, with the ability to change you from the inside out. A kind of primal violence runs through all of them, as though they are taking place in some collective unconscious. People come apart or are chopped into pieces, change from one thing into another, move through scenes that shift by the sentence yet are as starkly delineated as a child’s drawing.
In the first story, “Egress”, a man steps out from a high ledge on his office building, to fall “with fresh delight” – and keeps on falling, somehow outside the laws of gravity and time, as the seasons turn and in four and a half elegant, surprising pages civilisation reaches its end. “Many years have passed since I stepped off the ledge,” he concludes. “All that I wanted to keep was saved.”
It sets the tone for a collection that holds its obsessions close – bodily collapse, birds as auguries, the seashore and the sky – but is constantly mutating. In “Remains of the Dead World”, the gothic tale of a weird family living in the woods becomes a creation myth, and then a destruction myth, with interjections from a talking crow: the scale can shift on a sixpence. “The Bread that was Broken” records the mannered conversation at a glittering dinner party where the centrepiece is a blackened, smoking corpse. What begins as a provocative Peter Greenaway-style tableau opens up into a tentative exploration of ritual, mourning and blame.
In 'Memory House' every object is described as something else – it's a riot of synaesthesia, or one hell of an acid trip
In the frankly terrifying “Leckerdam of the Golden Hand”, a man brutally wounds his son and daughter – “She asked me, ‘Daddy. Why why why why why why?’ But that was just her age” – and is killed by them in turn; it’s like a mashup of an Irish Cuchulain myth and a Nick Cave murder ballad. In “Memory House” every object is described as something else: a riot of synaesthesia, a detective story about how we navigate perception and reality, or just one hell of an acid trip. The penultimate “Golding” is a key piece, the narrator progressing through a dreamlike series of transformations, flitting from man to woman, and from river to library to forest to seashore, discovering that “I was my own stranger.”
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There are modernist echoes here too, something of Beckett’s naysaying banter in the teasing dialogue (“I believe that we haunt our possessions. They’re dead of course but we are only slightly less so”) and Borges’ austere inventiveness in stories such as “The Auctioneer” or “Hay”. Several of the jauntier pieces consider books and reading, especially the ability of literature to manipulate and contain time. “Reading” plays with the idea that the afterlife takes place in the last book you read; “An Apple in the Library” riffs on the pursuit, consumption and (literal) regurgitation of knowledge and meaning. “How to Read a Picture Book” features Sorry the Squirrel (“that’s just my creative name”) giving a masterclass to a group of children on the power of image and text. He tells them how “you can fall through words down into a seething belly world of billions of objects and notions, all shrieking or hiding”, but also how a book that takes 10 minutes to read “has all this time packed inside, and when you remember reading it that time returns to you adding to your own small portion”. It’s funny, knowing and charming – as well as light relief amid all the intensity and dismemberment.
Hayden’s sentences certainly roll off the tongue – in a sunlit yard, “into the bright stain staggers a raw strip of dog” – but it’s not just language he’s making fresh here: the collection as a whole shows a radical approach to rhythm and structure. All these stories explore our interior, subconscious selves, “‘the dense, soft, wet, flickering place where ... dreams are happening” when “the skull boat floats away without moving”. To let in too much daylight – too much reason and realism – would obscure the realm that Hayden is so cleverly illuminating. It is, as his title says, darker with the lights on.
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REVIEW BY:
BRIAN DILLON
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
JANUARY 2018
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Darker with the Lights On
by David Hayden
Publisher:
Little Island Press
248 pp
DAVID HAYDEN’S ‘DARKER WITH THE LIGHTS ON’
In his 1970 essay ‘The Concept of Character in Fiction’, the late William H. Gass wrote that those entities we call characters are often curiously incorporeal. ‘I have known many who have passed through their stories without noses, or heads to hold them, others have lacked bodies altogether, exercised no natural functions … and apparently made love without the necessary organs.’ This is in no way a failing in fiction; the making of character is an art of subtraction – like most arts. And if we can accept characters who are only thought, feeling or sensibility, then we ought not cavil at those who are all biology, all of the time. Such are the enigmatic personae in David Hayden’s austerely carnous short stories: often, they seem to be made of no more than names and troubled flesh.
There are precedents, of course, for characters whose adventures mostly happen in their guts, on their skin, along the subtle channels of the nerves. Certain stories by Kafka, Beckett’s prose, latterly the violent involutions of body and language in the work of Ben Marcus. These writers invent a somatic fiction whose protagonists are ever alert to, and appalled by, the things their bodies contain, or get up to. With Hayden, a kind of grotesque – you could not call it horror, though it is sometimes horrific – is sutured to absurdist narratives about mundanely mysterious characters in dreamlike settings. DARKER WITH THE LIGHTS ON involves a daring abdication of much convention that survives in ‘experimental’ fiction.
‘Egress’, the first of twenty stories, is typically fantastic and visceral – scatological, even. The narrator occupies an office amid the clouds, appears to hover weightless above a city, pissing and shitting on the populace below: ‘I rolled over, unzipped and sprayed onto the street with relief, without regret.’ And elsewhere: ‘Sir Arthur throughout his life carefully selected a representation of his most memorable movements which his valet carefully dried in the sun before wrapping in Japanese tissue paper.’ In other stories, bodily anxiety prevails, a hypochondriac vigilance lest parts detach and are found clogging the sink. In ‘Memory House’ the narrator wanders through an oneiric palace of recall (or is it forgetting?) and suffers from this perennial dream-fret: ‘I feel like my teeth are going to fall out. My teeth fall out and then fall back in again.’
It’s not only bodies, but inanimate objects too, that appear in Hayden’s fiction to supply or supplant his characters’ motives and emotions. Gass again: ‘anything … which serves as a fixed point, like a stone in a stream or that soap in [Leopold] Bloom’s pocket, functions as a character.’ ‘The Auctioneer’ concerns a protagonist who has seen most of his possessions sold off; but a residue of stuff remains and, Beckett-like, he would rather be done with all:
‘I feel the need to review my few remaining things and throw more of them away. The last rug, my dictionary, the corner table with its lamp; they have started to oppress me tonight and they must go.’
As the narrator of ‘Egress’ puts it: ‘everything seemed to frangible and impermanent.’
At their most skewed and suggestive, Hayden’s stories employ a repertoire of more or less alarming motifs, repeated and adapted. His characters are forever being seized by obscure forces and flung up into the air: ‘I could see that the ground was farther away from me than I could have expected it to be. … Andy realises that the man is being lifted into the air by a bale of hay.’ Bizarre and sinister rituals are enacted in ‘Limbed’: women fight naked on a platform and bleed milk – a crowd sucks it up. In the same story, a tower that is also a giant axe descends and chops men to pieces.
All of this is rendered in prose that is by turns laconically precise and extravagant, recondite, floridly metaphoric. There are images in DARKER WITH THE LIGHTS ON that vex the mind and will not go away, such as the moment in ‘Memory House’ when the narrator sees ‘a frozen lark fall at great speed before exploding on the concrete path, scattering its music all around the garden in numberless, glittering fragments.’ Over the course of twenty stories, such moments are perhaps ill-matched too many times by an awkwardness it is hard to read as essential to Hayden’s estranging style. It seems rather a species of inelegant variation, which obtrudes sometimes at the base level of word choice. As for instance: ‘Birds with mighty, cloud-spanning wings gyre above.’ Never mind W. B. Yeats, it is hard to read ‘gyre’ without also hearing Lewis Carroll’s less elevated ‘gimble’. Or how about: ‘The leaves turned sere, descending a scale of gold-orange-yellow-brown and flopped in fat, spicy drifts.’ It would be easier to defend ‘sere’ for ‘dry’ if it were not also for ‘flopped and ‘fat’, which sound quite wrong for an assembly of dried leaves.
The more fundamental issue is that many of Hayden’s metaphorical turns, or even just adjectival twitches, result in tautology. Consider this, from ‘Egress’ again: ‘There was a larger movement inside and I pulled down my pants and strained it out of me and watched the brown stuff fly away and thump in the street where, I imagine, it broke into turdy pebbles.’ My guess is that no matter how coiled and granular you wish your language to be, if you find yourself describing a turd as ‘turdy’ something is awry. Likewise (italics all mine) an airport’s ‘low avionic hum’, buttered toast that ‘glistens lipidly’ and ‘a chandelier wrapped in a soft yellow cloth tied to a pendulant hook’. You could argue for the first two as strategic redundancies, things being thrown back on themselves, estrangement through insistence and repetition. But the last? If the hook, and not the chandelier, is ‘pendulant’, the whole may come crashing down.
It’s precisely because Hayden’s writing is so exactingly strange at the levels of incident and character (or its vestige) that such lapses matter at all. They may not do, to many readers. DARKER WITH THE LIGHTS ON arrives trailing praise from the likes of Eimear McBride and Kevin Barry, and is already widely admired for its rigours, its innovations and its comedy of bodies and implacable systems or institutions. (These last recall Donald Barthelme as much as Kafka.) The admiration is justified – this is a bracingly unusual and ambitious book. But my sense is that there is a more brilliant collection of a dozen or so stories – more taut and less tautologous – sunk inside it like a patient growth.
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR
BRIAN DILLON ’s most recent book is ESSAYISM (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017). IN PIECES: WRITINGS ON ART, ETC. will be published by Sternberg Press in 2018. He teaches writing at the Royal College of Art, London.
David Hayden’s exquisitely weird short story collection
Darker with the Lights On is fizzing with restless energy and dazzling, ludic virtuosity
In ‘An Apple in a Library’ a man scoffs an apple and then contrives, impossibly, to un-eat it: “a waxy, green ribbon peels out from the reader’s mouth...” Photograph: Istock
In ‘An Apple in a Library’ a man scoffs an apple and then contrives, impossibly, to un-eat it: “a waxy, green ribbon peels out from the reader’s mouth...” Photograph: Istock
Houman Barekat
Sat, Sep 9, 2017, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Sep 9, 2017, 06:00
Book Title:
Darker With the Lights On: Stories
ISBN-13:
9780995705258
Author:
David Hayden
Publisher:
Little Island Press
Guideline Price:
£12.99
If I told you David Hayden’s short stories feature decapitations, cannibalism and sudden, unexplained immolations, you might reasonably surmise that he was peddling some kind of gothic horror. But his treatment of the macabre is so exquisitely weird and so unobtrusively deadpan as to defy easy categorisation. The severed head rolls away and sings a ditty (“One day I will be made whole”); the cannibalism occurs in a ludicrously genteel setting, with the sacrificial victim clothed in a tweed jacket (“His arms and hands were raised and rigid like a pugilist hare’s”) and dished up next to a plaque bearing his name, amid “the murmur of . . . chatter, chortles, giggles, bronchial coughing and, concealed in the admixture, several portions of social silence”; and as for the small troupe of dancers who have unaccountably caught fire, they “keep in step, bending and swooning, circling, circling, until, mostly naked and hairless, they fall as one, a stack of charred sticks,” whereupon the story proceeds without them.
Many of the tales gathered in Darker With the Lights On, which is Hayden’s debut collection, resist straightforward interpretation. In Hay a hydraulic engineer is hired to fix a mine which has been flooded by the tears of the miners who work in it; they will not stop crying. The owners turn the situation to their advantage in ingenious fashion, planting zucchini, pak choi and peppers, and engaging the workers as “shift weepers” to irrigate the vegetables. Whatever its import, the scenario is marvellous in and of itself, and there is a melancholic poignancy in this strange vision of a large contingent of burly miners in a state of collective lachrymosity: “The rise, rise and fall, fall of men sobbing finds a shape, each shudder mounting on the others.”
Art for art’s sake
In An Apple in a Library, a man scoffs an apple and then contrives, impossibly, to un-eat it: “a waxy, green ribbon peels out from the reader’s mouth and spins around the fruit until it is complete”. We are in the riotous realm of art for art’s sake, where enjoyment in language and fancy takes precedence over plot and characterisation. There is a striking richness to Hayden’s prose, a measured, dextrous eloquence animated by a quietly rhythmic cadence that wanders, from time to time, into a lyric timbre. One of his narrators, a father speaking from beyond the grave, tells of his yearning “to gather up my bones, to dispose of them in various poses; to dance, to fight, to feed, to fuck, to punish”.
Hayden’s storytelling is oblique and elliptical, conspicuously lacking in the rudiments of scene-setting
Some of the stories do, however, lend themselves to allegorical inference. In How to Read a Picture Book, a giant squirrel named Sorry delivers a monologue to a classroom of young children on the subject of writing, advising them on perspective, point of view and so on, in a manner redolent of creative writing manuals. His suggestion that “you can make scary things funny or silly or good. Or good things scary” would seem to be a nod to Hayden’s method. Ditto his recollection of having been told off in drawing classes for leaving too much blank space in his pictures: à la Sorry the Squirrel, Hayden’s storytelling is oblique and elliptical, conspicuously lacking in the rudiments of scene-setting. In a few instances the sense of obscurity is perhaps a little overcooked, but the majority of the tales in this 20-strong collection are taut and engaging.
We encounter another eccentric pedagogue in Play, in which an academic gives a talk on the developmental importance of play. (Hayden’s description of the professor is characteristic in its droll, impassive repetition: “His glasses slid down the bridge of his nose. He pushed them up with his index finger. His glasses slid down the bridge of his nose.”)
Here, again, it feels as though the author is winking at us. The lecturer’s declaration that: “Being in play pushes us to the edge of our skin” doubles as an affirmation of this volume’s restless energy and its dazzling, ludic virtuosity. One of his students, having observed that his lectures have a story-like quality, proposes to collate them as literature: “If the text behaves like a story I’ll submit it to a magazine.” Touché.