Pretty Ugly
by Kirsty Gunn

In 1947, the year Landfall was launched, the chief concern of founding editor Charles Brasch was to place literature in the hands of every New Zealander. His first editorial argues that the arts have ‘been divorced from everyday life’ and serve ‘a minority only’. Perhaps it is still true that literature in Aotearoa is still enjoyed by an interested minority only. Despite the critical success of recent short story collections, surviving the economic pressures of selling to a small local market is difficult. The decision by Otago University Press to publish the new the ‘Landfall Tauraka’ series of short story collections by New Zealand writers does not appear to be an economic one – to which I say, bravo!

Kirsty Gunn’s story collection, Pretty Ugly, is the inaugural title in the series, edited by Chris Prentice. Gunn, born in Wellington, is an award-winning fiction writer and Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee, and she dedicates the book to the late Vincent O’Sullivan, her friend and mentor. This is her first collection since Infidelities (2016), which won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize: other past winners include Colm Tóibín, Claire Keegan, Tessa Hadley and Sebastian Barry. Gunn is celebrated for her technical invention; she is, perhaps, a writer’s writer. Certainly, the stories in Pretty Ugly will enhance her reputation as revolutionary and help to expand the boundaries of Aotearoa’s contemporary literature into new and interesting places.

Story Club, a Substack community hosted by George Saunders, recently discussed ‘the purpose/utility of [short] stories in our culture today’. The comments supplied the kind of answers you might expect: catharsis, empathy, education, curiosity. Some spoke of guidance. There were many metaphors, references to mirrors and windows, portals and homes, puzzles and lenses, rehearsals and searches for breadcrumbs. One asserted we ARE stories. Some quoted authors like James Baldwin and Ursula Le Guinn (‘We read books to find out who we are) and one quoted Saunders himself: ‘The only agenda is connection’.

The tone of the comments was self-congratulatory, perhaps with an air of assumed moral high ground. Then someone cited a class with Robert Macfarlane in which Macfarlane challenged the assumption that well-read people, specifically of fiction, are likely to be wiser, more moral, and more empathetic: well-read people, he argued, are just as likely to be awful. Which leads us to a more primal, intuitive response to what exactly we might use stories for: simply, as a means of pleasure.

There’s a great deal of pleasure to be found in the stories of Pretty Ugly. Other Writers might enjoy the variety of narrative perspectives, and the share quantity of references to story craft. The story ‘Poor Beasts’ begins with a character, about to lose his livelihood, announcing ‘You couldn’t make it up’; the narrator’s response, more than once, is that it’s ‘like a short story … It has all the elements. A lovely place, a way of living that seems unchanging, and then in one summer …’. Another narrator, this time in ‘Dangerous Dog’, begins with ‘I could start this short story with a dream’.  Anna, the protagonist of ‘Dreede’, tries to tell her mother something but ‘her mother’s eyes had stayed closed. Anna had that whole sentence written, a sort of story, in her mind’. From ‘”It is lonely being a young man Sent Abroad to Fight,” she said’:

There comes a time in all short stories when the register of the narrative shifts: a character is introduced who changes things, or the mood alters, the tone, the story has a different feel. Up until now, everything has been quite straightforward—the conversations, the explanations—but at this moment, the paragraph above sitting there on its own like that … I supposed you could say that this was the moment in this story when I realised things were coming together in a way that a reader might find quite alarming.

Pretty Ugly is so self-aware that in an Afterword (‘Night-Scented Stock’) the book reviews itself. A character named Mary Masterson returns home from ‘the launch of a collection of short stories that was called Pretty Ugly’ to find flowers on her doorstep. The enormous bouquet is swiftly employed as a metaphor for the book:

Great fatted Chrysanthemums held by skinny stems jostled up next to double-headed tulips and phlox; massed foliage poked out above the many greasy hearts of lilies. And were those thistles? Yes. Thistles, too, and other unkind-looking items were arranged among the rest. This was a posy with no theme or unity—and was it even…fresh?

It is great writing – the precision of language, those ‘greasy hearts’, vivid juxtapositions occurring in quick succession – with a self-deprecating sentence that offers a peek behind the veil. This metafictional device is most effective in the opening story, ‘Blood Knowledge’. On a BBC Radio 3 podcast, Gunn said: ‘I always know how a story’s going to begin, and I have a feeling of a kind of emotional and physical temperature.’ Her control and manipulation of the ‘emotional and physical temperature’ is most evident in this story. It suggests the stylistic influence of Mansfield and combines the kind of character study you might find in a William Trevor story with the subtle shifts in focalisation of the stories of Alice Munro. It is an affecting story, disturbing and profound. For all its play with point of view, the story compels the reader with a simple first sentence. ‘There was something wrong with the garden.’

The protagonist, Venetia, wants you to pay close attention to particular words; to ‘silly’, ‘haven’, and most tellingly to ‘show’. Venetia abhors the phrase, ‘a show, a real show’, when spoken by her husband. It is a phrase that holds terrible implications by the story’s conclusion. Venetia is a writer, a ‘famous, kind of’ writer best known for a series of historical novels called ‘Home is Where…’. Her husband prizes the novels for their ‘beautiful predictability’. The reader senses, of course, that Venetia yearns for the opposite. She has something else to say, something less ‘predictable’. You might say, something ugly.

A number of these stories are unsettling, in a beautiful and unnerving manner. Gunn has described them as ‘difficult, dangerous, and really horrible’. The most uncompromising is ‘All Gone’, originally published in Landfall in 2023 and the cause of brief controversy when it was re-published online, billed as ‘the most disturbing short story to ever appear in ReadingRoom.’ I was reminded of Eudora Welty’s famous short story, ‘Where is the Voice Coming From?’, written in response to the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Welty’s hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. Evers was murdered on June 12, 1963. Welty’s story was published in the New Yorker on June 28. Details were changed out of respect for Evers’s family, although it is the narrative voice, that terrible music, that is most repulsive. Such was the speed to publishing, Welty’s story reads like a fever-dream of violence and hatred. Perhaps what distressed some readers about ‘All Gone’ is the narrative shape, the framing device that has a journalist retell a racist’s story, and the pleasure the narrator seems to take in delivering the final line, like some knockout punch.

Gunn confronts readers with uncomfortable stories. She wrote about this in two articles, A need to write about white racists (published in Newsroom) and in ‘Mad, Bad & Dangerous: Why you should read fiction that challenges you’ (in the New Zealand Listener). However, not all the stories in Pretty Ugly are intended to devastate. ‘Praxis, Or Why Joan Collins is Important’ has quite a different tone, a jaunty first-person narrative voice telling a propulsive story in which, delightfully, nothing much happens. And in the ‘Afterword’, Mary thinks of the bouquet she discovers, and implicitly the book, as something that ‘spoke of generosity and love.’

Still, Gunn is asking in this collection, like so many writers before her, how should we live in a world so cruel? A question, of course, not for the writer of fiction to answer, except to provide an example of someone who does not look away from the ugliness, someone strong enough to sit with the pain, knowing there are no consolations. Gunn has written in the spirit of the story-within-the-story of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan and his younger brother Alyosha have been discussing why evil exists in a world overseen by a loving God, and Ivan tells a long story, teasing his brother for being ‘so corrupted by modern realism’ that Alyosha can’t grasp the ‘fantastic’ elements of the story.

After the story’s terrible descriptions of cruelty, we see Ivan react to a kiss from Alyosha: he promises not to lose his desire for life. In Pretty Ugly Gunn embraces all of this: the conflict between our destructive impulses and what Dostoyevsky describes as an ‘incurable love’ for humanity, and an abiding imaginative and intellectual curiosity about the possibilities of storytelling.