Review: Fractals - Joanna Walsh

A fractal is a model in which the patterns of the overall structure are replicated at an individual level; it is a useful image to keep in mind when reading these impressionistic stories, which view the alienation and dissatisfaction of modern living expressed through the experiences of isolated individuals. Joanna Walsh’s vignettes are probably too long to be flash fiction, but not as long as the traditional short story. Light on dialogue, they investigate the inner landscape of women who feel unable to perform the roles ascribed to them by society. The writing is tightly structured yet poetic; Walsh is skilled in using minor details to illustrate a wider point.

Throughout Fractals, Walsh expresses a sense that there has been a breakdown in the relationship between individuals and objects, people and places, aspiration and reality. It seems that the structures of capitalism have reduced individuals to the role of functionaries, expected to perform their allotted tasks in order to keep the wheels of industry turning. This inversion of roles is illustrated in Femme Maison, a portrait of a divorced woman struggling to maintain a routine: ‘you still attempt to generate one bag of rubbish each week, the bin demands it’. In Fin de Collection, we even see the calendar manipulated by the economy’s constant demand for novelty:  ‘in Le Bon Marche, it is already autumn. The new collections are in order’.

In his collection Winesbury, Ohio, published in 1919, Sherwood Anderson documented individuals within a small-town American community, each of whom had come to be defined by one particular aspect of their personality. Anderson labelled these figures ‘grotesques’. In a similar way, Walsh’s characters are identified by their dominant trait. In Femme Maison, her character is overwhelmed by choice, and the practicalities of daily existence; she is unable to start one task without setting in motion a chain of tangential activities, and ultimately achieves nothing. Shh… portrays women who pretend to be ill in order to assert some control over their lives, becoming briefly ‘visible’ by sending dishes back in restaurants. They see themselves as competing for the scarce resource of attention: ‘the women envy each other’s illnesses / scheme to concoct new ones… Part of them knows / their pain will piss off / the other women’.

The subject of Half the World Away, an author attending a literary festival who is ‘lionised, though no-one in this country has read your work’, is obsessed with value, whether she is getting more worth from her glass of wine than her neighbour does from his steak. Summer Story depicts a woman too uncertain of social protocol to seize her chance of a relationship with a man she meets at a party. One story, Reading Habits, takes this reductionism further, attempting to force individuals into the role of data in a mathematical puzzle: ‘S is clever and well-educated but a bad reader. SL is a good reader but badly educated. G is better educated but a bad reader’. Such an algorithm would of course be manna to the likes of Amazon and Google.

Characters in Fractals are rarely given names; the implication is that such characterisation is unimportant, as they are merely designed to reflect a wider trend. What is more important is geographical location. Many of Walsh’s characters find themselves in foreign surroundings; the sense of alienation and unease, combined with the European locations, give Fractals a similar feel to Bowie's Berlin trilogy. Walsh observes the way in which the rhythms of city life affect her characters; the protagonist of Summer Story finds herself in ‘the awful point of London between work and social in which nothing can happen’, while the author in Half The World Over finds herself constantly dissatisfied, looking to move on, as the expectation of deferred pleasure outweighs any current sensation: ‘you have always wanted to be old. The rest is fake, a mere waiting… No sooner do you go somewhere than you want to be somewhere else’.

This sense of dislocation is best expressed in Hauptbahnhof, the highlight of the collection. In this story, a woman waits at the Berlin train station for an assignation which is never fulfilled. Unwilling to admit defeat, and with nowhere else to go, she becomes moored at the station. Hauptbahnhof is large, clean, impersonal, with its ‘smells of coffee, of floor polish, of cigarettes, of the substances we use to correct, to mark time’. The function of the building, as a transport hub, has clearly become secondary, as evidenced by the woman’s ability to use it as a home. Instead, it is a temple to modern capitalism, filled with amenities: shops, hairdressers, cafes. Rather than sending travellers to a destination, it serves to deliver consumers to these shops, ensuring a steady circulation of goods and currency. While her physical needs are met adequately (with a little subterfuge), Hauptbahnhof cannot provide meaningful human contact: ‘You would have thought that the shopgirls might recognise me after all this time, but they never do’.

Her characters often appear passive, but rather than seeing this as a character trait, Walsh suggests that this is the consequence of a deeper sense of alienation. Fractals is a very thoughtful collection, with some keen insights. Exes looks at the way our expressions subtly condition the responses we receive, imposing our wills on those we communicate with. In amongst its examination of indecision and social anxiety, Summer Story observes that ‘elegance is a function of failure. The elegant always know what it is to have failed’.

   

If this seems downbeat, the opening story And After… does supply a more optimistic vision. Here, Walsh indulges in a sort of urban picturesque, imagining a town with unmonitored spaces, where activities can be carried out for their own sake, without an economic purpose: ‘let there be backalleys for cycles hungover with brambles, with cider cans in ditches’. Walsh revels in the opportunities of the everyday; she doesn’t exactly advocate full communism, but at least hopes for an environment where individuals can experience a natural range of human emotions (‘let there be children and old people, but few whose occupation is nether hope nor memory’), with our current onslaught of sensation and manufactured desires toned down (‘let the branches of chain stores in the high street be too small to carry the full range’).

This vision sits in contrast to the atomised, desire-driven world she goes on to describe.  While there are no direct connections between the individual pieces, Walsh cleverly demonstrates patterns and recurring motifs, turning these disparate figures into players in a coherent whole. Released at a period when the British government is targeting marginalised groups within society, and the services which form our communal heritage are being dismantled and asset-stripped, Fractals is a timely collection, illustrating, without resorting to polemic, the divisions which occur when commercial interests are prioritised over communities.