“Time seems to stop.”
The Matisse Stories is a collection of three short stories by A.S. Byatt. Each tale is told from the viewpoint of a female protagonist assigned an unwelcome role in life by circumstance.
In the first story Medusa’s Ankles Susannah, a middle-aged linguist visits her longtime hairdresser, Lucien. Lucien has become so accustomed to Susannah, that he confides in her about his torrid love affair, and his failing marriage. Aging Susannah “came to trust him with her disintegration”, but finds the changes in Lucien’s life–and in his salon–both painful and threatening. In this story, Byatt captures the bizarre relationship between a woman and her hairdresser–regular appointments that foster the notion that it’s acceptable to confide and gossip, and indulge in the periodic and superficial updates that pass for caring, interested social discourse.
In the second story Art Work, Debbie, a young married woman who has sacrificed her desires to be an artist, maintains a careful juggling act at home. As a design editor for a magazine, she supports her husband, Robin and their children. Robin works at home producing paintings that fail to sell, and he indulges his art career while he wages a war of silent modes of aggression against the invaluable, loyal housekeeper, the colourful Mrs. Brown. Robin is a failure as an artist and while he obsesses on the purity of colours, his paintings are basically just representations of representations. For example, he paints a glass Wedgwood apple, and a reproduction sauceboat. A startling revelation occurs in the household that causes Debbie to reevaluate her notion of original, inspired art.
In the third and final story, The Chinese Lobster Dr. Himmelblau, the elderly Dean of Women Students meets Professor Peregrine Hiss in a Chinese restaurant. A deranged, self-destructive female student has accused Hiss of sexual harassment. Hiss is prepared to fail the student due to the nature of her dissertation–The Female Body and Matisse. While the story at first seems to evolve around the theme of sexual harassment, Dr. Himmelblau’s lunch appointment reveals a far deeper issue.
Byatt writes with a light touch that complements the stories and allows rather dark subject matter to be read with great sympathy for the human condition. It is somewhat unusual for a short story collection to only include three stories, and the tales are so perfect, that I regret there are no more.
