In “The History of Sound,” Ben Shattuck’s beautiful and moving debut collection, half of the stories take place in time periods from the late 17th century through the early 20th. The other half are fairly current. That’s no accident or coincidence.
Each historical fiction is paired with a contemporary one – often in subtle ways, sometimes quite directly/ Shattuck’s stories reveal how much our lives are linked to the past and how little we understand those connections.
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Shattuck, who is married to the actress and writer Jenny Slate, has an all-star cast for his audiobook, including Nick Offerman (reading, fittingly, a logger’s journal), Paul Mescal, Ed Helms, Chris Cooper and Slate. The title story is slated to be a movie next year starring Mescal and Josh O’Connor.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. How did you end up with paired stories?
I wrote a story, “Edwin Chase of Nantucket,” in which a young man understands his mother in a new way after her first love comes to stay for a night with his young wife. He leaves behind a painting, and that to me became like Chekov’s gun, I couldn’t just let that go – it needed to show up somewhere else. So I wrote another story in a different time period set on Nantucket. They’re obliquely, but not directly, related but the painting shows up and the themes are somewhat the same.
With short stories there’s always that feeling that a story continues no matter when you stop it, so the plots of a long time ago could still be felt today.
Q. Some abrupt or elliptical endings to short stories can feel unsatisfying, like the author gave us a slice of life and then pulled it away before you were finished. Pairing your stories makes the experience more complete and satisfying. Were you conscious of that while writing?
The joy of a short story is that you feel like you’re dipping into somebody’s life, but it can also feel inconclusive and I often find short stories infuriating. Even though Jim Shepard’s and Andrea Barrett’s story collections are entirely responsible for me writing to begin with, if I see a short story collection and a novel in a bookstore I always pass by the short story collection.
In my story “August in the Forest,” this writer finds this mystery of these loggers who all died but can’t find the truth. The next story is one of the logger’s journals. It was just so satisfying to present the reader with the truth. Sometimes I forget that it’s all made up and I can just do that and it gives a rush of delight.
The historical fiction here is just a gentle reminder of the lasting impression that some people from a long time ago had on lives; it continues even after they’re gone. It makes a more realistic world because characters don’t just exist in tight little dramas. They exist in entire worlds that are affected by their presence.
Q. One character ponders what it means to be writing history today. What about historical fiction?
The reason I wrote paired stories is because that was a relationship that we all have with history when you engage with it; there’s the people in the present and then there’s the subject in the past that you’re resurrecting. I started to identify this as a duet, recognizing that sometimes that harmony is about the misunderstanding between the past and the present.
And rather than historical fiction – where you just have a character take you through, say, the passage on the Mayflower, learning about how cold and terrible it was – I’m more interested in why somebody would be writing about a Mayflower passage in our present day. And the duet can change. We put the Civil into textbooks, then we change our understanding and change it again,
I should say also that the characters, the dramas, the dilemmas of my historical fiction, are really just the relationships around me that I toss back a couple hundred years and see how they fizzle under candlelight.
Q. There’s more humor in the contemporary stories. Do you take historical fiction more seriously?
I do treat people in the past with a little more reverence. I live in my great-grandfather’s house and I own the general store in town. I grew up in a way that was almost anachronistic. Baling hay was the biggest summer neighborhood event.
Also, to write comedy you have to beat up the character a little bit. And comedy can be really distracting; if you hit the wrong note. The past has a beautiful crystalline quality to it, frozen in time, like a geode or some geologic feature. It’s a precious gem that I have a little reverence for even if the gem isn’t beautiful,
Q. Beyond the pairings, the stories are linked by the presence of art – music, poetry, paintings – and the impact of nature.
I grew up on the floor of my dad’s studio where he was painting. I’d do homework there. Now I write in his old painting studio, which was also my great-grandfather’s old wood shop. I had an implicit understanding of how important art was in people’s lives by growing up in an artistic family.
Like magpies, we love collecting artifacts. Paintings, literature, sculpture, music are intentional artifact-making. We’re creating things that hopefully will create almost a magnetic pull; we’re implicitly trying to make a mark on time, creating something that lives on.
As for nature, this book is in the Transcendentalist tradition. My first book was “Six Walks,” where I followed the walks of Henry David Thoreau. In these stories, most characters have revelations and plots snap together in moments when nature itself is working on them.
Q. Are there other connections that emerged, even if you didn’t see them till the book was done?
You set out to write about characters and situations and relationships. But all of a sudden, themes emerge. I started noticing the dark matter, the negative space of a person’s life and how that has its own gravitational force that shapes a life as much as the positive space that fills a person’s life. We often think of our lives as affected by facts and our choices, but the misunderstandings or missed connections matter, too – it’s the date you didn’t go on because you got sick who could have become your spouse. It is just everywhere in the stories.
When you write about history, it’s easier to highlight how those misunderstandings can shatter a life but maybe one’s own life is a microcosm for the idea that history is in those misunderstandings and ghost lives too. And those ripples move in unexpected ways, both in the present and into the future.
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