The Manet Girl - Charles Boyle

Manet’s art captured fleeting moments of everyday life – picnics, café scenes, crowds watching horse races – with brushstrokes which conjured up the sensation of seeing, rather than detailed and accurate representation. In his first collection of short stories, Charles Boyle employs a similar style, giving fragmentary insights into his subjects and favouring atmosphere over action. Throughout The Manet Girl, we see characters abandoning the constraints of their lives to pursue their desires. Boyle resists resolution, his poetic turn of phrase (‘the folds of her dress cascade, he still has the ghost of it in his fingers’) rendering his characters almost spectral. There is a dreamlike feel to the entire volume.

Often, Boyle takes the part of a passive male onlooker, bewildered by female strength, ingenuity or unpredictability.  The Manet Girl itself is a perfect example of Boyle’s style. Set in a coffee shop, we see Richard, the narrator, become intrigued by Imogen, a former art student who works there. They watch couples come and go, fleetingly becoming involved in their lives as they pass through. The only ones who stick around, the regulars, are the mad ones, who end up getting hurt. Gradually, Richard comes to take Imogen’s place behind the counter, as she moves on, first to a law firm and then further up the corporate chain. Her vivacity, in contrast to the institutionalised figures around her, enables her to progress from place to place, changing people and then moving on. Richard, meanwhile, is stuck, lacking the impetus to take control of his own destiny.

In Flibbertigibbet, a man describes his mother, an apparently lightweight, childlike woman who in one incident (remembering a child who has left behind after a family outing, and retrieving her, whilst other parents flounder) demonstrates all the overlooked strength she had shown whilst raising her own family in difficult circumstances. Again, Boyle employs poetic images – the central character freewheeling downhill at the wheel of a hearse, her children in the back – and uses a seemingly minor anecdote, recalled from a distance, to flash light on the true nature of his characters.

Back Row, Fourth From The Right takes as its starting point a group photo taken on a work outing. The characters are bought together for a brief moment in time. Soon, the group dissolved, the contract was lost, the firm liquidated, but the photo is the key to a moment when disparate storylines briefly intertwined. There are moments of drama – an affair, a robbery, the engagement of a private agent – but Boyle resists conclusions. The story builds and then fades away as the characters drift apart. There is no definite ending, only conjecture and reminiscence.

White Dogs moves into more unusual territory. Here, we are told of an ageing TV star who has been writing letters to the editor of a local newspaper, which she claims have been dictated by her dog. The letters argue passionately for animal rights, and are backed with appendices full of statistics and references to Chomsky. The dog is then kidnapped by a budding film director, who is determined to get the owner to star in her adapted Chekov screenplay. Once more, the story is oddly framed – it is told as an anecdote by a taxi driver to a painter, as if Boyle is deliberately trying to stop the reader from getting too close to the people he describes.

Sometimes the sense of drifting and the lack of resolution can grate – Lives of the Artists feels flimsy, for example. An older woman tries to choose between a widowed lawyer and a mysterious young man, and yet we don’t really see much of any of them, other than enigmatic glimpses. The narrators feel somewhat passive and unformed, drifting along themselves, while describing others who possess the necessary spirit to seize the day. In individual stories, this is fine, but across the course of an entire collection it can grow wearying.

Overall, The Manet Girl is a very stylish piece of work, with some interesting concepts and impressive writing – the individual stories don’t generally carry a lot of weight, but they are pleasingly evocative, and Boyle has an eye for a memorable image. It will be interesting, though, to see whether he could adapt his talents to a longer narrative. His characters need to be developed further, given greater depth. The model for his style (inconsequential men swept along in the slipstream of memorable female characters) could be Breakfast At Tiffany’s, but his women need more fleshing out before they reach those heights. One of my favourite books of last year – JR Crook’s Sleeping Patterns – took a similar approach to narrative, but fleshed out the writing with references to literary theory and the death of the author woven into the text. Boyle will need to find a similar angle to anchor his words.