Almost the whole story: The Secret Lives of People in Love by Simon Van Booy

For Simon Van Booy’s collection of short fiction, The Secret Lives of People in Love, the title could not be more apt. Though the nineteen short stories revolve around love and its many forms, it is “secret” that is the operative word. Defining events in the characters' lives are mentioned, hinted at, but rarely revealed, almost never elaborated on, although those secrets reverberate throughout the characters’ lives – death, divorces, accidents, disappearances, even origins. It takes guts, especially when common thought bids a writer to ease the reader into the story, to get on the reader’s good side by offering him glimpses of lives. In this collection, Van Booy has taken Anne Sexton’s words to heart – “Tell almost the whole story” – and has elevated it.

It’s more than inspiring curiosity, more than hooking the reader into staying with a story until a grand revelation. For one, grand revelations so very rarely happen in the collection. For another, more wondrous detail: I never, not once, felt cheated for the lack of grand revelations; I never felt that Van Booy skirted the issues, never felt that he got lazy. The (conventional) story may be elsewhere, but the narratives Van Booy serve us are more than rich enough to satisfy. It’s in the hinting, too, where the stories most shine. It’s always part of the lives of his characters.

The withholding is at its most basic in “Little Birds,” a story about a misfit who was adopted by a misfit. The boy doesn’t know where he comes from — He was left at a train station when he was very young, the train doors separating him from his tourist parents. That in itself could be a story, albeit a melodramatic one. Or perhaps the events that follow that, scarred Michel taking the boy under his wing. Or maybe the boy in search of his parents. Instead, we are at the present, a pretty mundane one with the occasional quirk. Our orphan spies on his neighbors: A person’s life is a slow flash, and I watch my neighbors argue, make up, make love, and fry meat. I can tell that one of my neighbors is unhappy, because he sits by the telephone and sometimes pocks it up to make sure he can hear a dial tone, but it never rings when he’s at him. He makes a life with Michel, who can be shady at times, but loves immensely. And then, well, that’s it. The story is the moment, the present. The past, just details. Interesting, yes, raises a question or two, inspires a reflection here and there — but best not to dwell on.

Van Booy knows how to take advantage of his secrets too. In the opening lines of “Snow Falls and Disappears,” the narrator declares: My wife is deaf. Once she asked me if snow made a sound when it fell and I lied. We have been married twelve years today, and I am leaving her. Secrets almost often surprise, and in several stories, it’s the aftermath of that surprise that gets explored. The author knows when to make the reader do a double-take. And the author knows that one of the things going for him is his handling of the language.

See “As Much Below as Up Above,” which has lines that demand the reader to stay still and brood. The narrator has spent his day at the beach, watching the people around him frolic on the sand, watching the people around him play with the froth of waves before diving into the water — All seas are one sea. Every ocean holds hands with another. There is a charge in the opening paragraphs, a hunger this man feels toward what lies before him and yet he just sits there. He looks back on his childhood in Russia, he thinks about the love he shares with Mina, whom he plans to propose to very soon. He thinks about his days with the navy, the people he spent the bulk of his days with. All these rememberings, interspersed with the present. All that want: I want to surf along the lip of one of those waves; I want the sea to carry my unceasing love to their still bodies. I want the sea to tell them I’ve found someone I want to marry and that I have to say goodbye — but that I’ll try to keep them going by remembering our good times together — at least for as long as I am alive.

And you know there’s something hidden, some vital event that’s being kept from you. Why all this longing? Why this inexplicable sadness, overweight man at the beach? He would tell us, but not quite. I want to feel it somehow happened like that because things happen for a reason. I want to believe this more than anything because if it were just an accident, then God must have died before he could finish the world. And as he relents, little by little, you know every reflection points to this event, and at the same time, they’re mere distractions. And, here, as in the other stories, we are told so beautifully.

The language is one of the strong points of this collection. Lyrical, dramatic, and unafraid to be sentimental. It’s deeply affective, and affecting. The danger to this, though: It all gets tedious when the stories are read one after the other.

In “The Reappearance of Strawberries,” for example, the language can be stifling. Here is a dying man, the man in the ninth bed of the Bonnard Hospital ward, who has requested nothing but strawberries for several days. Why is he there? Why does he want nothing but strawberries? Van Booy takes a trite scenario — the remembrances in the deathbed — and injects it with as much lyricism as possible: Pierre-Yves remembered how she had talked a great deal about when she was a girl. She had explained how when she was very young, she believed that when she stepped in a puddle, a wish was granted. For the slow, lugubrious years after the war, Pierre-Yves never forgot this and would close his umbrella in a storm so he could cry freely as he negotiated a path home. On its own, it could’ve been a good enough story, if a tad purple in its prose. But bearable. Snuggled with eighteen other stories that aspire to “prose stylist” label, it can be a bit too much.

As I went through the nineteen stories, a pattern emerged. It’s formulaic genius—describe something mundane, inject an utterance. Story after story. Of course, I was tempted to just plow my way through them, but it gets dizzying fast. So it is best to take it in sips. Because it’s really, really good. Linger, let it soak, and then wait.

Hand in hand with secrets and lyricism (overt or otherwise), the stories in The Secret Lives of People in Love are still love stories. Hand in hand with longing is loss: In “Not the Same Shoes,” a reflection that may be about the loneliness one feels with the person he loves, though I am not very sure: He forgot why he had left long before he realized that she could not be forgotten, that the boundary between their intimacy was impossible to cross. From “The World Laughs in Flowers,” which is about a love lost, and what it takes to trigger memories of it: Perhaps we are each allotted only a certain amount of love-enough only for an initial meeting—a serendipitous clumsiness. When it leaves to find others, the difficulty begins because we our humanness, our past, our very being.

Taken as a whole, it’s a beautiful, if dizzying collection. One from a generous writer — The book comes with bonus material: There are brief stories about his process, his voice, and even the origins of some of the stories. The poetics-voyeur in me was pleased. Van Booy comments on how he feels that The Secret Lives of People in Love is “the first book he ever wrote” (never mind that he has written three other books that now languish under his bed) owing much to the fact that it was in the process of writing these stories that he found his voice. And it’s a voice this reader is grateful for.

It might be the tritest thing a reviewer can say, but here goes: Read Simon Van Booy’s The Secrets Lives of People in Love, and, well, fall in love. That’s all there is to it.

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Image from HarperPerennial.

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