Canned laughter

A courtroom sketch artist, a retired wrestler, an editor of canned laughter, an escape room attendant and a maritime forecast presenter are all connected, in Eley Williams’s second collection of short stories, by their complex relationship with language, as they manipulate it to grapple with the peculiarity and awkwardness of everyday life.

The collection opens with “Scrimshaw”, in which the nameless narrator ruminates on a digital conversation with a love interest. The story takes place during the brief exchange, but the reader gains little insight into the interlocutor. Instead, the narrator shares an intimate, sometimes excruciating portrayal of their insecurities and desires as they draft and redraft messages in an attempt to maintain the conversation: “I don’t want you to dwell on it. I don’t want you to dwell on the fact I only want to dwell on you”.

As in “Scrimshaw”, the most successful stories in the collection plant us firmly in the subjectivity of their protagonists. In “Message”, we find the anonymous narrator and their partner in a restaurant: one of them plans to propose. Someone else’s proposal, in skywriting, is on display through the window, inadvertently creating tension at their table before the narrator finds solace in the unexceptional nature of their feelings: “Maybe at other tables hands clasped their cutlery a little tighter, or looser … glances were exchanged … a whole host of other small, momentous things”.

These “small, momentous things” form the unifying theme of the collection, and Williams uses wordplay to underscore their significance. A timorous sound editor in “Sonant” considers how linguistic and cultural conventions intersect while dwelling on her behaviour at a recent dinner party: “It struck me that the phrase is canned laughter rather than tinned. I wondered whether the difference was important. What else is canned? Canned can mean binned”.

Just as language is shown to be connected, grammar seems to take on a physical form. The protagonist of “Cuvier’s Feather”, a courtroom sketch artist who notices a resemblance between a defendant and her date, calls dimples “parenthetical” and describes shadows as “stretched speech marks”. In the collection’s title story, the narrator, a maritime forecast presenter who imagines their lover listening to their broadcast, observes rain bouncing off a windscreen as “reflecting the red of street-lamps to hyphens and asterisks”.

Williams oscillates between the abstract and literal, the frivolous and sincere. At her best, she does so with precision, allowing simple language to deliver an exacting blow: “We had dispatched small talk, sweet talk, sweet nothings and then came your message stating that you were feeling unhappy”.

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