Books of the Month

'Hey Yeah Right Get a Life' by Helen Simpson

You know those books where you think you've got their number early on, and smugly continue reading along, safe in the knowledge that you completely 'get' where they're coming from - only to find, at the end, that you feel quite differently about them? Well Hey Yeah Right Get a Life is one of them.

Helen Simpson's third collection of short stories seems to set out its stall fairly early. Here's a fairly straightforwardly themed bunch of stories about mothers - mostly 'at home' women struggling to cope with the lion's share of childcare, but with a few working women thrown in for good measure too. We see how having children takes over these women's lives and impacts on their sense of individuality. As for the writing, it's well-observed and very readable; there's plenty of knowing humour that'll appeal to mothers everywhere; and oh yes, they're interlinked, with some of the characters cropping up in different stories.

The trouble is, the collection as a whole gradually undermines the hopes and assumptions of its characters. The stay-at-home mothers bemoan the loss of their individuality and dream of high-flying jobs and being able to afford nannies. Dorrie, who appears in two stories, observes that 'this puzzle was to do with the loss of self that went with the process, or rather the awareness of her individuality as a troublesome excrescence, an obsoletism', and just wants to know if this state of affairs is temporary, or for good. But then, in a series of stories about women working in the demanding corporate worlds of banking and law, Simpson demonstrates that, of course, the grass only looks greener on the other side. Here are women working themselves to the bone, seeing their children for snatched half hours here and there, but telling themselves that they prefer it that way. So where's the middle ground? What's the happy medium? At the end of the book one's left with the rather hopeless feeling that mothers are damned if they do and damned if they don't. The only suggestion of a 'third way' are the (ignored) hints that if the fathers took on more of their share when it comes to looking after the kids, there'd be more chance of some sense of balance.

Probably my favourite stories in the collection were those which came at the subject from a slightly oblique angle. In 'Wurstigkeit' a successful female banker shares the secret of a clothes shop with a high-flying female QC. This is no ordinary shop though: it doesn't have a sign, doesn't give out its address, and you need a password to get in. The clothes are ridiculously expensive, but once you get the idea of them, they're strangely irresistible and seem to offer a kind of rebirth, an ultimate retail therapy. The reader is left to ponder on the significance of the shop's name, which we're told means 'a state of sausage-like behaviour'. And 'Millennium Blues', set amidst widespread worries about 'Y2K' IT meltdowns and general impending doom, gives in to the hysteria of mass disaster - but more, it seems, as a way of relieving the boredom of family life in the suburbs than for any more philosophical reason.

Simpson resists ending the collection - or, indeed, any of the individual stories - with a moment of parent - child harmony or understanding which would make all the hardship seem worthwhile. The children are frequently portrayed as cruel, irritating and thoughtless, and the adults little better. In the end then, there's no easy solution or hopeful sense that all these stresed couples will find a way to make their lives easier and rekindle their love lives. But through the writer's empathy, and her sharp (sometimes positively black) sense of humour, they do get to live a little.

Susan Tranter

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