I’ve just finished reading Barbara Anderson’s latest offering: Collected Stories (VUP, $29.95). There are 31 short stories in this nicely hefty book, (with yet another beautiful, evocative cover by Sarah Maxey) and I read the lot straight through. Not in one sitting of course, but there was no dalliance with a novel on the side. I couldn’t, didn’t want to, get Barbara’s dry, wry voice out of my head.

Her style is highly addictive. And her short stories are in my opinion as good as la Mansfield which, as an adoring fan, I do not say lightly. In fact, Barbara sometimes makes Katherine’s prose and characterisation seem almost wordy in comparison with her own extremely pared-down sentences. I’m not saying literary minimalism is always a good thing (I’m also a fan of the Nabokovian half-page, 30-adjective paragraph) but needs must in this genre, and Barbara makes it a thing of beauty.

She generously allows you the flattering power to make your own observations of her characters. But she also occasionally has this little trick towards the end of a story, when the coup de grace is in sight, of baldly stating something rather than implying it. The effect of this I can only perhaps compare to having an unrequited crush on someone who suddenly, unexpectedly, returns your affections.

For example, in Tuataras, Charles Renshawe is an aging, nerdy zoologist whose quiet passion for his tuatara breeding programme is the defining part of his small, quiet life until his unmarried sister comes back from London, moves in to their parents’ house with him and unleashes an apparent mid-life crisis which he resents and is unable to deal with. His is a meticulously observed character, very dry and slightly depressing, until:

His fingers quivered as he opened the inner glass door of the incubator. He had timed it well. Before him the tuatara which last night had been a shell, a half head with eyes, climbed out from the remnants of its shell. With a backwards flick of its fragmentary left rear leg it tossed the shell aside. The movement reminded Charles of a stripper in a Soho dive thirty years ago as she kicked aside the irrelevant sloughed-off garments beneath her feet. Charles clutched the sides of the incubator. He felt weak with pleasure. Infinitely tender he picked the newly hatched tuatara up from the incubator and enrolled it among its associates in the compost.
…
He would do something. Show his concern, his love almost. He reached for the telephone and dialled his home number. –Rhona, he said into the quacking receiver. –Would you like to see the juvenile tuataras? The babies?

See? In a single paragraph Barbara implies Charles' misspent youth, implies that to him, his job is possibly better than sex, and that despite his disgust of anthropomorphism he thinks of the juveniles as his babies … but it was the wide-open admission in the line ‘He felt weak with pleasure’ that really killed me – I yelped and laughed and drummed my heels when I read it, and felt I could throw my arms around a horrified Charles. She seems effortlessly to be able to take you to the dark side of the daily human grind and then illuminate it with a small act or a single sentence. It’s very … uplifting.

Barbara Anderson is going to be eighty in 2006. How inspirational it is that with a background in science and teaching, she only began writing in her early sixties after a stint with, surprise, surprise – Prof Bill Manhire. And she’s now one of the best in this country, and out of it too – she’s one of our top literary exports, very popular in the UK particularly. Think it’s about time she got seriously Recognised, myself. Come on Arts Foundation, come on Creative NZ, Prime Minister – what are you all thinking? The woman has been compared to Flaubert! Hand over the goddam cigar!

And here we are with the holidays coming up. Perfect: read, look at the view, think about the story and life generally, sip the G&T, read again... aahhh.